Polyamory DIY: Queering the Family at Love Hub Festival
20 September 2026
On Sunday 20 September we joined The Love Hub, part of Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Fest and organised by The Love Tank, to run Polyamory DIY: Queering the Family at St Margaret's House in London: a practical workshop on chosen kinship, mapping our networks and writing alternative genealogies.
Facilitated by Angel Perez and Sion Jones, and framed by the words of Donna Haraway and Michel Foucault, the session moved through three parts:
1. Defining chosen family
In small groups, participants named what makes someone family: proximity and time, care and commitment, recognition and belonging, shared history and stories, responsibility and showing up, rituals and practices. Each group drafted its own definition of chosen family, then the whole room came together to shape one shared definition on the flipchart. As the session notes said, it does not have to be perfect: love holds contradiction.
2. Mapping our chosen family
The second exercise grew the branches of the tree. Everyone mapped the network they are connected to (sentient beings included: dogs, cats and pets counted), marked what kind of love flows through each branch, and imagined not only what is, but what each relation could become.
3. Honouring our queer genealogy
Finally, the trunk and the roots. This last exercise was about identifying the queer references in your own past: a writer you admire, an uncle who somehow never married and who, looking back, might have been queer, a fictional character or even a celebrity. It could be someone from your family or someone you never met. What matters is that they connect to your queerness, to your non-conforming identity: these are the figures who became points of reference for your own way of existing, for your own way of making family in a non-conventional way. Participants drew their alternative family trees with those roots in place, honouring the stories, spoken or unspoken, that made them possible.
Everyone left with practices to try at home: starting a photo album of your family, drafting a friendship contract to share with a friend as an alternative language of commitment, and proposing to your best friends, as many as you like.
Thank you to The Love Tank for having us, and to photographers Jawadat and Kelly Akofa for capturing the day so beautifully.