During Pitru Paksha, I find myself continuing to think about ancestry. This time a bit differently.
The obvious answer is that ancestors are the people from whom we descend. They are our bloodlines, our family trees, the people whose names might appear in old documents or whose faces we recognize in photographs. Ancestors are those who came before us and, in some sense, also made our arrival possible. But I have never found blood to be a sufficient definition of inheritance.
There are people I have never met who have nevertheless taught me how to think, how to write, how to survive in society, how to understand intimacy, how to make a life in a world that was not necessarily built with me in mind.
Some of these people are writers. Some are teachers. Some are scholars. Some are artists. Some are people whose work I encountered at exactly the right moment. I think of them as ancestors.
My ancestors include Mina P. Shaughnessy, Jeremy Ayers, Peter Elbow, José Esteban Muñoz, James Baldwin, E. Lynn Harris, and Jessica Flatequal. This is not a conventional family tree. There is no bloodline here. There is, instead, a line of transmission.
Shaughnessy taught generations of writers to take student writing seriously, especially writing that institutions had already decided was deficient. Peter Elbow made space for uncertainty, experimentation, voice, and the messy processes by which writers actually come to know what they think. Muñoz gave language to queer possibility, to the ways we might locate traces of futures in the past and present. Baldwin showed what it can mean to write from inside contradiction without resolving it for the comfort of the reader.
E. Lynn Harris gave me another kind of inheritance. A possibility of seeing Black gay life rendered with complexity, tenderness, desire, and ordinary mess. These names matter to me because their work has survived them and, in different ways, continues to shape what seems possible.
And then there are the people whose work or presence reaches me through less obvious channels. Jessica Flatequal is one of those people. When I moved to the United States to study, I was still figuring out what it meant to be myself here. Jessica was among the first people to tell me, in a way that I could actually hear and believe, that it was okay to be myself as a gay person. That might sound like a small thing. It was not coming from a context where being gay was a punishable offense until less than a decade ago. Sometimes ancestry is a sentence someone gives you when you do not yet have the words yourself. With Jessica's support, I attended my first Pride in 2019. I remember that because it marked something more than an event on a calendar. It was an arrival. I had moved across countries, but there were still parts of myself I had not fully learned how to inhabit. Someone telling me that I could simply be myself helped make that inhabitation possible.
I now live in Georgia, and my memories with Jessica have stayed with me here too. I do not think it is going away, ever. I have also learned that place matters to ancestry, too. We quite often inherit landscapes as much as names. We build lives in particular towns, institutions, classrooms, neighborhoods, and communities. Sometimes the people who help us become ourselves become part of the place in which we eventually learn to belong. Jeremy Ayers is part of that geography for me when I think of Athens.
I did not know Jeremy, and I did not come to know him through a personal relationship. I came to know him because I began asking other people questions about Athens’ queer history as part of my work on Traces and Triumph. The more I listened, the more Jeremy's name and story emerged. And somewhere in that process, I began to realize that he might be one of my ancestors not because I inherited his blood, or because he ever knew me, but because I was inheriting a history he helped make.
There is something moving about discovering an ancestor after the fact. You begin to recognize traces of a life that was already here before you arrived. Through conversations, memories, stories, and fragments of an archive, a person who was once a stranger can become part of your understanding of the place you now call home. That discovery is part of what draws me to the Athens Queer History Project, where I am working to document and preserve some of these local histories. The project has taught me so far that queer history is often held in fragments, such as photographs, stories, objects, buildings, friendships, memories, and the traces people leave behind.
These traces matter because they allow us to see that queer life did not begin when we started looking for it. People were here. They loved here. They made communities here. They survived here. They created forms of belonging here.
And sometimes, by looking for the history of a place, we discover our own ancestors. This is why I have become interested in the archive as something we make, not merely something we inherit.
One of the pleasures of thinking about ancestry is that it can exceed the neat categories we are handed. My ancestors do not all look like me. They do not all share my nationality, sexuality, race, discipline, or generation. Some may not have imagined someone like me as their reader at all. And yet something travels. A sentence travels. A method travels. A question travels. A permission travels.
Perhaps this is what ancestry is: not simply the fact of having come from someone, but the experience of carrying something forward. This also changes how I think about Pitru Paksha. The ritual attention to ancestors can be understood not only as looking backward toward the dead, but as asking what obligations accompany inheritance. If we have received something, what do we do with it? We can preserve it. We can critique it. We can transform it. We can pass it on. An archive, then, is not a mausoleum. It is a working collection.
The ancestors I choose are not necessarily saints. I do not need to agree with everything an intellectual ancestor believed. In fact, real inheritance probably requires disagreement. To inherit someone is not to become their disciple forever. It is to enter into relation with what they left behind and decide what remains useful.
An ancestor is someone whose work has altered the possibilities of your own work. So, during this season of remembering those who came before, I am thinking about the people whose blood I share and also the people whose sentences I carry.
I am thinking about the teachers who made writing feel possible, the writers who made queer life visible, the scholars who gave language to futures that had not yet arrived, and the people who taught me, directly or indirectly, that another way of being in an institution could exist.
Some ancestors leave us names.
Others leave us methods.
Others leave us courage.
And some leave us permission.
Permission to write.
Permission to teach.
Permission to desire.
Permission to belong.
Permission, simply, to be ourselves.
Who is in your archive?
Who taught you how to think?
Whose work do you carry?
And who, perhaps without ever knowing you existed, became one of your ancestors?