Aunt Janie, The Root Of Our Family Tree
One woman living her life without shame changed my life and a lot of others.
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I’ve written this story once before and the website it was on went poof. Then I wrote it again and that website went poof. So I’m writing this story one more goddamn time and since it’s an email newsletter, even if Substack goes poof tomorrow, the email will always exist so screw you, internet!1
I want you to meet my Aunt Janie, one of my father’s seven sisters. Yes, you read that correctly. Seven sisters, nine brothers (including my father). Big ol’ Puerto Rican family.
Aunt Janie is in her mid to late 60s and quite gay. I’ve known that since I was single digits all the way back in the 1970s. This was unusual since most of the LGBT community was very much in the closet in the 70s, moreso in the Latino community.
Now, I didn’t know that as a 6 or 7-year-old. I just knew my Aunt Janie liked girls and her girlfriend was Cassandra. I loved my aunt Janie and I loved Cassandra. They were family and since no one else cared they were gay, neither did I. The Rosarios are a hot mess but not that kind of hot mess. There were some issues but no one ever let them spill out in the open so we kids never saw. You don’t see it, you don’t emulate it.
Even throughout the 80s, when I was a shallow teen making ugly jokes (as teens do), they lacked the rancor of actual bigotry because why would I ever hate or be afraid of gay people? My aunt was gay and I loved her.
Just as a quick aside, this is the specific reason Republicans want to ban all conversations about LGBTQ families and people in schools and drive these kids back into the closet. It’s hard to hate people you’re friends with. But if they have to hide who they are, it’s so much easier. It’s really quite despicable. But that’s the GOP in a nutshell, isn’t it?
Anyway, time passed as time does and I grew up and went out into the world. There, I met Maria while working at EBGames. This is a story I told a few weeks ago.
The quick recap is that Maria was also gay and we became really good friends after I had made it clear to the other managers that no one would be giving her a hard time about this. This eventually led to her asking me to be a sperm donor so she could have a baby. That is not a euphemism. We did not have sex. I literally donated sperm. Get your mind out of the gutter!
That request, in turn, led to me and Debbie deciding to have kids of our own and get married. Something I had not previously considered for a variety of reasons.
So where does Aunt Janie come into this? It should be fairly obvious, no? The entire reason Maria and I got so close is because I called every manager in the district to make sure no one gave her shit for being a lesbian.
We weren’t particularly close at that point. We were friendly but not friends. And yet, there I was, sticking my neck out for her for something that had absolutely nothing to do with me. No one had ever done that for her before.
That was because of Aunt Janie. As a teen, I wouldn’t have said anything. In my early 20s? Not as loudly as I should. Late 20s-early 30s, though? I was more than comfortable with putting a hand up and saying, “Nope! We’re not doing that.” It took me a while to figure out who I was but once I had, I stopped giving a flying fuck about what other people think about me. It’s extremely freeing to not care if people get offended by what I say.
I didn’t have to tolerate bigotry and intolerance. So I didn’t. And I’ve known my entire life that being gay is no different than being tall or being Asian or whatever. It’s just a thing that is so why should anyone care?
So Aunt Janie quietly living her life led directly to me having a family that would not otherwise exist. Debbie gave birth to Jordan and Anastasia. Maria gave birth to Kyle.
Jordan is now 16, Anastasia is 14, and Kyle will be 11 in August. They don’t look a thing like each other but they all have the Rosario nose. It’s quite impressive, really.
I’ve told this before to Aunt Janie, who does not have kids of her own, but as far as I’m concerned, she is their grandmother as much as my mother and Debbie’s mother and stepmother. They would not exist without her.2
Now, that is not the end of the story. The ripples continued.
Debbie and I moved down to Virginia almost 11 years ago. A few years later, we met Claudia and Lila and adopted/kidnapped them. We’ve been acting as an extended family unit since then which is a whole different story I will tell another time.3
The short version is that Claudia was struggling and had no support structure in place. We became that support when she needed it the most. We gave her and Lila the stability they needed to survive a difficult situation. Later, as Lila struggled with her own teen issues, we’ve done what we can to help.
There’s no magic wand to make things all better but when we think about what it would have been like if we hadn’t been here? It’s not a pleasant alternate reality to contemplate.
But we wouldn’t have been here if we hadn’t had a family. And we wouldn’t have had one if Maria hadn’t asked. And she wouldn’t have asked if I hadn’t gone to bat for her. And that wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for Aunt Janie. Cause and effect is rarely so easy to trace in one’s life throughout so many events but there it is.
That’s not even touching on my work on the PTA which has now set up three different ongoing events in an underserved community that previously had nothing at all. Most months, the school holds Family Movie Night, an inexpensive night out in an immigrant-heavy community with not a lot of money.4
Every Halloween, the kids can go to “Trunk-or-Treat.” The area we lived in was all apartment complexes and it was impossible to trick-or-treat there. Now they can experience the awesomeness of Halloween and several hundred kids show up. The last thing is “Touch-a-Truck” where police cars, fire trucks, busses, and construction vehicles are parked for the kids to explore and sit in and talk to the people who work with them. Little kids love this.
These are all things Deb, Claudia, and I made happen on the PTA and now it’s continuing years after we left. Five or ten years from now, no one will even know we were ever involved and who cares? As long as the kids get to keep doing this stuff, they’ll grow up with those memories and you can’t put a price on that. We did that and that only happened because of Aunt Janie.
Just by being who she is, she’s touched hundreds of lives. Who knows what Jordan, Anastasia, Kyle, and Lila will go on to do and how many lives they’ll go on to touch?
So thank you, Aunt Janie. You made my entire existence possible and brought the four loves of my life to me. Our family exists because of you and they will always know who you are.
Little did Justin realize that the Great Internet Crash of 2025 was just around the corner and all emails would be deleted forever, thus the internet would have the last laugh as civilization collapsed…
When Cassandra was dying of cancer all those years ago, I wrote her a letter to tell her that if I ever had a daughter, her middle name would be Cassandra. And it is.
It’s diabetes-inducingly sweet.
Taking a family of 4 to the theater with drinks and snacks can cost almost $100. At Family Movie Night, it’ll run you $20.
I loved this, just fucking loved it.
Thank you for sharing this amazing story of what sympathy and kindness can grow! I have sometimes wondered how I could have been so lucky to have the friends I have. A series of things happened for us to meet and that’s how life works. People never forget kindness.