ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the ways that inheritance systems may support gay support web constellations. Based on long-term observations of the intimate relations of four Helsinki ‘off-the-centre’ gay men, it investigates how dominant legal and cultural commitments to kinship relate to gay redesigns of care bonds in a diminishing welfare state. The shifting ‘kin relations’ of the four main gay male protagonists – ‘Gay Back Alley Tolstoys’ – mirror some of the shifting contexts of (queer) knowledge, connecting and ‘being’ that the chapter seeks to elucidate. Drawing on Strathern’s work on relationality, wholes and parts, the chapter discusses how urban gay ties in margins rely on tensions between constant everyday re-imaginations between legal, social, political and cultural categorisations. In this, kin diagrams are mobilised as a queer device for the critique of producing, practising and providing knowledge of such care relations that are otherwise not easily recognised or articulated in theory or society. In this way, gay lives are approached from the perspective of social practices and cultural identifications rather than only from sex.
