When I tell straight people about my family, I often say, “We’re two couples raising three children together.” If you squint just right, our family bears a passing resemblance to a blended family, except we all live together and no one had to break up for it to form.

We live openly as a four-parent family and have supportive relatives, friends, teachers, and child care providers. We are unfailingly kind, polite, and grateful to them—always grateful. It is genuine: we feel thankful when people are nice to us and don’t treat us like freaks. When someone refers to Nic or Mars as my partners, I correct them. “I only have one partner, Riley,” I say. “Nic and Mars are my co-parents.”

I emphasize this distinction because I don’t want people to think we are all fucking each other. The idea makes me uncomfortable, not just because it’s an inaccurate way of characterizing our relationships but because it feels like too much queer sex to associate with our family.

Queer sex—particularly the kind that happens outside of monogamous relationships, especially if it involves BDSM—is a risky activity to associate with children. I rewrote that sentence three times before I allowed myself to say “children.” I kept wanting to qualify it—“parenting and children,” “care of children”—but the truth is, those are all ways of putting something between queer sex and children. By telling our family’s story in ways that emphasize how normal we are, I’m playing into rhetorics of respectability that harm us and others.