If the family were a fruit, it would be an orange, a circle of sections, held together but separable—each segment distinct.
—LETTY COTTIN POGREBIN
FOR SOME GIRLS, IT MIGHT BEGIN WITH A CRUSH ON AN older sister’s best friend or a strange physical sensation that occurs while watching Xena, the Warrior Princess on television. For a boy, it might be a fantasy to take a bath with a buddy or a strong urge to run his hand across his gym teacher’s bearded cheek. At first, these children might not pay much attention to these early stirrings—when they first appear boys and girls are usually too young to know what they mean. However, at some point as they get older they come to realize to their horror that there is something wrong with these feelings—horribly wrong. These urges threatened to pull them away from everything and everyone they know, leaving them as lost and alone as an unmoored boat, bobbing and drifting on a cold, dark, dangerous sea.
Children with these feelings often want nothing more than to be like everyone else, to be accepted and well-liked by their peers. However, they soon realize that if they were found out they would be ridiculed as outcasts. They could lose everything: their friends, the respect of the teachers and classmates at school—and—perhaps the most frightening prospect of all, they could lose the love of their parents.
Now imagine you are a parent of one of these children. You noticed that your tomboy daughter does not seem to be developing interests in boys like her older sister did at her age and also seems to have a particularly intense friendship with the girl next door. Your sensitive son prefers to help his mom around the house rather than play ball outside with the other boys. Like a gentle summer breeze, the thought occurs to you. “Does this mean . . . could it mean . . . ?” but, before you could finish it, the notion, like that breeze, is gone. You push away any nagging worry the thought leaves behind and try to forget it.
During adolescence, a particularly difficult time for many families, children are testing their wings, sometimes pushing against ideas and values with which they were raised in an effort to develop their own identities. However, it is a mistake to view child development in isolation. Sociologists and family therapists have recognized family stages of development, which are evolving, reciprocal relationship patterns during each phase of the child’s growing maturity (Carter and McGoldrick 1999; Hill and Rodgers 1964). In families with teenagers, parent-child relationships must become more flexible than ever before in order to accommodate the adolescent’s growing needs for independence and exploration outside the family (Garcia-Preto 1999).
A major challenge for families at this time is for parents and children to establish and maintain relationships that allow children the freedom to develop their own identities but also keep them safe—no easy task. Children must figure out who they are while remaining connected to parents on whom they still must rely for physical and emotional support. Parents cope with a maelstrom of feelings during this phase. Certainly, they are anxious, knowing that their children will be spending more time away from the family, exposed to dangers such as drugs and alcohol, out of reach of supervising adults. Parents may project their fears onto their children who in turn react by either internalizing these anxieties or fighting their parents to avoid doing so. No wonder this is a difficult time for many families—and we haven’t even talked about sex yet.
The first stirrings of sexual feelings bring a confusing mix of awkwardness, anxiety, and pleasure. For most adolescents, when hormones begin to surge, the opposite sex once regarded neutrally, or even with scorn, becomes a fascinating source of fantasy, mystery, angst, and frustration as teenagers recognize their emerging sexual attractions and attempt to relate to each other. Observing parents may react with a combination of bemused pleasure, as they reminisce about their own puppy loves and pangs of regret that their “babies” are growing up too fast. As parents witness their children’s sexual maturation, they may dream of the day when their sons and daughters will marry and have children of their own continuing the family into the next generation. However, the emergence of their children’s sexuality may also inspire fears of teen pregnancy or HIV infection, leading parents to become excessively restrictive. In response, children may become fearful and avoidant or angry and combative, arguing “You worry too much!” “You never give me enough freedom!” “You treat me like a baby!”
Nevertheless, today’s families face the difficult task of coping with their children’s sexuality in a world that sanctions and celebrates these attractions. Whatever their romantic or sexual problems, heterosexual men and women and their families can find available guidance and potential solutions in art, the media, psychology, etc. Because they live in a society that endorses heterosexuality, parents and children can easily find resources to help them understand, adjust, and even celebrate these growing urges and attractions. There are opportunities within families, schools, and communities to openly discuss with young people the risks of heterosexual sex, such as pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, and how they can be avoided. Furthermore, heterosexual youth can look forward to love and legally and socially sanctioned marriage—ways to satisfy their longing for sexual fulfillment without risk or taboo.
However, about one in ten children do not have the luxury of living in a world that embraces their burgeoning sexual maturity. As recalled by Joelle,1 a young African American college student who felt a strong sense of alienation when she began to realize she was attracted to other girls: “I’d say like third grade, it would be like, I don’t feel like the rest of these kids. And for long periods of time, I’d just be sitting in class not doing work and just be like, ‘God, I feel so different.’” And this young student teacher, Mike, who, once he realized he was gay, attempted to commit suicide: “When I was twelve, I used to watch porn and I focused more on the penis and not the female . . . it was just something that I just thought about and no one knew but me. . . . [I realized this] very young, I guess, about ten or eleven. I know it felt fine to me on the inside, but I was very, very scared of anyone finding out.”
Many of the prevailing models of lesbian and gay identity development describe coming out as primarily an individual experience starting with a troubling emerging awareness that one is somehow different from her peers (Cass 1979; Coleman 1982; Troiden 1989). Troiden uses the term sensitization to describe this first stage of gay and lesbian identity development, and, as the sixty-five adolescents and young adults in this study recalled their early lives, this term resonated. However, as I interviewed the gay and lesbian young people and their parents, I found there was a family stage process that was related but also different from the family development stages identified by Carter and McGoldrick and others. To borrow from Troiden, the first of these stages is what I am calling the family sensitization phase. Like Troiden’s sensitization phase, the period for family sensitization occurs anywhere from the time when children realize something is different, often without knowing why—to the three months or so before they come out to their parents. However, what makes this a family phase is the interaction between the children’s awareness of stigma, their emotional distancing from their mothers and fathers, and their parents’ suspicions.
As these previous quotes suggest, facing the fear of shame, ostracism, and rejection is a central theme in the lives of the adolescents and young adults who were interviewed for this book. Once parents eventually knew that their children were lesbian or gay, they also feared the harsh judgment of those who would blame them for their children’s homosexuality. However shame and stigma are not the whole story. The recollections of these families also demonstrate the persistence and potential healing power of family connections that endure despite personal guilt, anxiety, and societal condemnation.
All stories have a beginning. For the families discussed in this book, their stories of coping and adjustment began long before children understood what their attractions meant and certainly well before parents knew about them. Most of the young respondents in this sample described the realization that they had same-sex attractions as a slow dawning coupled with a nagging realization that something was wrong—very wrong, with the way they felt. They understood that if their peers or their parents discovered their sexual feelings, they risked becoming objects of rejection and abuse.
Stigma has been defined as a personal quality or condition that is considered deviant and diminishes the bearer’s worth and status (Dovidio, Major, and Crocker 2000; Goffman 1963; Link and Phelan 2001). Goffman described stigma not as a personal attribute but as a function of relationships; a stigma exists because the individual with the deviant characteristic is considered tainted by others and is therefore marginalized and discredited. Despite slowly growing improvement in the public’s attitudes toward homosexuality (Avery et al. 2007; Brown and Henriquez 2008), in a Gallup poll close to half of the sample believed that homosexuality should not be “considered an acceptable alternative lifestyle” and 40 percent thought homosexual relations between two consenting adults should be illegal (Gallup Organization 2006). Thus, there still very much exists what Herek, Chopp, and Strohl (2007) call a homosexual stigma, defined as “society’s shared belief system through which homosexuality is denigrated, discredited, and constructed as invalid relative to heterosexuality” (171).
Children are taught that love and marriage between a man and a woman is the romantic ideal to which everyone is expected to aspire. Those growing up with same-sex attractions learn what is considered normal long before they discover, to their horror, that they themselves are abnormal. Shame, stigma’s evil handmaiden, is defined by Nichols (1995b) as the feeling of being looked down upon by others: of feeling worthless, weak, and dirty. As gays and lesbians begin to recognize their same-sex attractions, they are already aware that such feelings are shameful and must be denied, hidden, and repressed—at great cost to their own self-esteem.
Schulze and Angermeyer (2003) have identified interpersonal interaction as one of the primary domains where stigma manifests, and many of the young people in this study first learned that their homosexuality was wrong at the hands of their peers. Their classmates saw their cross-gendered or otherwise atypical behavior as justification for cruelty. Both of the following respondents recalled being physically assaulted by peers who believed them to be gay or lesbian long before they recognized their own same-sex attractions.
Once I hit middle school I think really other kids figured out before I did. I used to get picked on for being gay all the time and I didn’t know what it meant. . . . I wasn’t the most masculine kid (twenty-one-year-old gay man).
I got beat up a lot. I didn’t have many friends, they were kind of put off. A lot of the guys would pick on me. . . . They would call me dyke and beat me up (twenty-year-old lesbian).
Schulze and Angermeyer (2003) also identify a structural dimension of stigma, namely, how discrimination is embedded in institutional policies and practices. Youth who were verbally and physically harassed by peers recalled how school employees who witnessed their abuse did nothing to stop it. The confusion and shame experienced by these youth was compounded by the indifference of adults who could have protected them but didn’t. One eighteen-year-old gay man, recalling abuse he experienced in high school, remembered feeling helpless and abandoned: “Yeah, no one else saw it. Which is pretty ironic considering there is a teacher at every doorway—every five feet—but no one ever heard it. No one ever saw it. So then I didn’t know what to do. I was completely clueless. I had no idea what to do.” Jay, a twenty-five-year-old gay male, recalled:
Well see the thing of it was I got colitis the summer after my sixth-grade year, which was my worst year in school ever. The kids beat me up with no mercy and my teacher did nothing about it, absolutely nothing. And he is the vice principal now! I am convinced, because of the stress of that year I developed colitis the summer following sixth grade and I was very sick. By the fall the doctors figured out what it was, gave me medicine and I was fine . . . but halfway through eighth grade the bullies started up again and this time it was girls, two white trash girls that were just angry and just hated me. . . . But it [also] seemed like every boy was just trying to get me—kick me in the hallway, push me over, push my books on the floor—crap like that. And I developed colitis again in the spring of that year.
The devastating emotional impact of peer abuse was compounded by the respondents’ helplessness and isolation. One way oppressed people protect themselves from the shame that can result from stigma is to form groups with others like themselves so they can learn effective coping methods such as externalization, which is when people place the blame for their stigma on its source where it belongs. (e.g., “It’s not us who are sick, it’s them!”) (Corrigan and Watson 2002; Frable, Wortmen, and Joseph 1997). However, for the most part, a resource such as a supportive group of gay peers was not available to the young men and women in this study. As stated by a sixteen-year-old young man: “As far as I knew I was the only person [who was gay].” And recalled by this twenty-three-year-old lesbian: “When I started thinking that I was gay, it was just really odd. There were no out gay people where I live, no out gay people on either side of my family. I know because I am the only one. But I didn’t know anybody.”
Such isolation and mistreatment (or fear of mistreatment) takes a toll on a gay or lesbian person’s physical and mental health, as reported by Jay who developed colitis and who also became school phobic as a result of the abuse he experienced. As lesbian and gay adolescents and young adults attempt to reconcile their sexual orientation with their status as stigmatized persons, they may develop a denigrated self-image that bodes poorly for their mental health and ability to maintain long-term intimate relationships (Corrigan and Watson 2002; Gallo 1994; Greenan and Tunnell 2003; Meyer 2003; Meyer and Dean 1998). Among samples of gay males and lesbians, reported incidents of discrimination and violence have been associated with psychiatric problems including suicidal thoughts and attempts (D’Augelli 2002; D’Augelli, Pilkington, and Hershberger 2002; Huebner 2002; Meyer 2003; Vives 2002), and the destructive effects of being stigmatized were found among the young respondents interviewed for this study, whereby most recalled experiencing symptoms of depression and anxiety before coming out.
Experts in the area of stigma describe the way in which people develop self-protective behavior once they become aware of their potential to be stigmatized (Herek, Chopp, and Strohl 2007; Scambler 1989). The young people in this sample learned painfully and powerfully that their burgeoning homosexuality was shameful and punishable by social exclusion and violence, so they attempted to hide their attractions in an effort to protect themselves from ostracism and rejection.
For those who haven’t experienced it, it is difficult to imagine how humiliating, lonely, and horrible it is to be terrorized on a daily basis and be afraid to tell anyone. Parents of children who were harassed by peers during family sensitization were sometimes (but not always) aware that their children were having problems with other kids in school. However, they were never aware that their sons and daughters attracted the ire of their peers because they appeared gay or lesbian.
Jay’s mother Adele knew that he was experiencing peer problems but was unaware that he was victimized because he was perceived to be gay. Another gay male recalled being the target of frequent verbal and physical assaults in junior high school for what his peers perceived were his effeminate behaviors. However, his father and mother only knew that he was experiencing trouble with other kids in school—they did not know why. Two young lesbians had similar stories. What all four youth had in common was that they were so afraid that their parents would think they were gay that they could not bring themselves to tell their mothers and fathers why they were being hassled. As recalled by one of the lesbians who had been harassed in school before she even realized she might be lesbian: “I would never, never have told my parents the kids were calling me a lesbian, because it was so embarrassing and also then they would begin to suspect that I was [lesbian].”
The family is the usual place children turn to when they need help and a safe haven from the turmoil of the outside world. Nevertheless, in this study, all by themselves, these children had to face frightening feelings of confusion and shame about their sexual orientations—and some had to do so while enduring their schoolmates’ cruel treatment. For most children, parents are a source of comfort, support, and protection during tough times. However, this much-needed safe haven was unavailable to these children during the family sensitization phase because they felt they needed to hide themselves—or else risk parental rejection.
Even though they feel isolated, young lesbians and gays do not realize their emerging sexual orientation in isolation. The reports of both the parent and child respondents suggest a family process in which there are distinctive changes in the family interactions and relationships as the child slowly realizes and eventually discloses his sexual orientation. Family sensitization, the first stage of this process, accounts for what occurs in families at the time children begin to recognize feeling different and attracted to members of the same sex.
Parents and children reported that maternal relationships, especially between mothers and sons, were particularly close up to and sometimes beyond the time the children began to realize they were gay or lesbian. However, in some families there existed what Ponse (1976) has called a counterfeit secrecy in which both parents and children suspected the children might be gay or lesbian but implicitly agreed not to acknowledge it. For some families, the children’s burgeoning realization that they were gay and needed to hide it, along with the parent’s growing suspicions, rendered parent-child relationships distant and, in some instances, conflicted.
Though it seems like a cloying cliché to say so, it is hard to imagine anything quite as soothing for a distressed child as a mother’s love, particularly for many of the children in this study who were being harassed by peers or who felt like potential outcasts. Among the sixty-five youth respondents, fifty-one described having historically strong relationships with their mothers characterized by closeness, consistency, and warmth. For example, this young woman, who while being interviewed was preparing to dress as a man for a drag performance at her college, talked about what it was like for her growing up: “I never really felt like I fit in. I always felt something was wrong. I never had boyfriends.” However, in speaking about her relationship with her mother, she related: “My mom and I have a very close relationship. We’ve always been really close. And . . . she was always there when I needed her, even before I came out.” Her mother recalled: “She is my kid. . . . I think we’ve been very close forever. . . . She has always talked to me, told me what is going on in her life. She always told me what she and her friends were doing . . . if they smoked pot or whatever. She was open.”
M. C. was a scapegoat in high school and college because of his effeminate behavior. He talked of the closeness he shared with his mother growing up:
My mother and I can best be described as [having] a friendship as well as a family relationship. We got along very well. We shared a lot of the same interests. We would play Scrabble together and we would talk politics together. We would watch political shows together, like Hardball, and we still do. We liked going on vacations. We shared some of the same tastes in food—some disagreements here and there, but we joked around. She was very caring and still is a very caring . . . mother. I would say it was almost like a friendship between us. I know we are not equals and could never be as a mother and son. But, as much as possible, we were able to talk to each other as almost equals.
His mother, Charlotte, a legal secretary, recalled, “[M. C.] and I have been especially close . . . an extremely close bond.”
Chauncey, a twenty-year-old gay male, and his mother Marie were born in Haiti and have lived in New York City for the past fifteen years. Chauncey had significant problems with neighborhood bullies, which are described in chapter 4. However, he also recalled his close relationship with his mother: “I wasn’t interested in football or going out and playing, that’s true. I was more interested in being with my mother and just being secluded in the home. I was definitely never interested in sports, and I just basically was staying with my mother, you know, just being secluded in the house.” This young man’s mother agreed with her son’s recollections, remembering that she and Chauncey were very close when he was growing up—much closer than she and her older son.
Like Marie, mothers tended to agree that they enjoyed a special closeness with their sons before they came out, although, unlike their sons, they did not look back and attribute this closeness to their boys’ emerging homosexuality. This was in contrast to the reports of the young men who believed that their burgeoning homosexuality made them more empathic and sensitive and thus better able to communicate with their mothers. The following twenty-four-year-old African American college student described why he felt closer to his mother as he grew up:
I think personally it [being gay] made me a more emotional person, more sensitive, more in touch with both the male and female sides of myself, but allowing me to even acknowledge that other side made me closer to my mother. I was OK with braiding her hair, OK with sewing, OK with cooking—not trying to be very macho. Yes, definitely, it made me closer to her.
Unfortunately, this respondent’s mother was deceased at the time of the interview, so her opinions could not be captured. However, this next mother from a white working-class family recalled: “Jack is definitely my closest [of three sons]. You know, we just always had a special bond. I could just relate to him better than the other two.” Like the other boys, when Jack, a senior in high school, was asked how his emerging sexual orientation played a role in his relationship with his parents, he replied:
Well, my relationship with my mother has always been the strongest and the best relationship probably with anyone in my family, so it was always wonderful. I could tell her anything and felt comfortable doing that. I always felt like, from a very young age, she respected me very much for who I was and that there was something a little different between me and my brothers and she loved me for that. And so, in turn, I think I gave her a certain amount of respect that my brothers may not have been able to. I felt as though my brothers treated her in a way similar to the way my father treated her, and sometimes I think they forget that she’s not just a mother but a human being with feelings and stuff like that. And I think that the way that my mother handled experiences that I had growing up . . . I was able to realize that and appreciate it and in turn treat her with a certain amount of the same empathy and compassion that she had with me.
Perhaps it is not surprising that mothers and children described their relationships as close. Mothers typically have an advantage whereby they usually interact more with their children than do fathers (Kimmel 2004). However, being gay might be a factor that makes mothers and sons even closer. In his study of gay and lesbian youth, Savin-Williams (2001a) found that most of his respondents reported feeling close to their mothers before coming out, and some of the boys entertained the idea that this closeness caused their homosexuality. This idea corresponds to prevailing stereotypical notions that male homosexuality is caused by family dynamics in which “sissy” boys and their mothers cling to each other—a myth that had implications for the respondent mothers’ later reactions once they suspected and then knew for sure their sons were gay.
However, the young gay males in this study believed the causal relationship worked in the opposite direction: that their burgeoning sexual orientation made them closer to their mothers. These boys recalled sharing interests in common with their mothers, such as fashion and cooking, and were also sensitive to their feelings. Perhaps these mother-son connections were fueled by the boys’ need for extra security because they felt like pariahs outside their homes. Whatever its cause, this feeling of commonality and connection to mothers could potentially be considered a unique aspect of the parent-child relationship in some gay families.
However, even though respondents who reported that their sexuality made them closer to their mothers were mostly gay males, Joelle, the African American young woman who was previously quoted as feeling alienated from her peers, reported recollections that indicate it is possible for a lesbian to believe her sexuality contributed to a special closeness with her mother: “At the moment it didn’t seem like it did. It just seemed like normal. But, looking back, I think it did because of wanting a sense of security in terms of having a female relationship in my life—emotional security, which she offered me.”
Nevertheless, despite this history of warm closeness, some of these sons (and daughters) recalled a change in their maternal relationships as they got older. Kenneth, a twenty-three-year-old aspiring actor recalled: “We had a great relationship. We were always friends when I was growing up. And in high school I got a little bit distant, I was going through your typical teenage stuff. I was really busy in school and always doing my own thing, but we had a really good relationship.” His mother, Cynthia remembered the changes:
It changed when, I can’t remember the exact time, I think he was around fifteen, tenth grade. It was right after we moved to Colorado and he changed schools. Things started changing. He started becoming more quiet—stayed in his room more. He became extremely aware of his weight . . . So he just became more to himself. I would go up to his room and ask if there was something wrong. He didn’t want to talk to me. And my husband told me that boys are like that when they become teenagers—he is probably going through puberty so you need to just leave him alone. Boys don’t hang out with their moms when they get to be a certain age.
Like Cynthia’s husband, most parents in this study generally assumed that this growing distance was caused by the children’s burgeoning independence and need to separate themselves from their mothers to find their own identity. However, almost invariably, the children in this study saw this distance as attributable to their growing realization that they were gay. This dynamic will be further explored in later sections of this chapter.
It’s a sad fact that men’s relationships with their children tend to be more distant than those with their mothers (Kimmel 2004), and in this sample there were few exceptions to this phenomenon. Fathers tend to live on the outside edge of the emotional lives of their families and, as a result, family members, family therapists, and family researchers often find them difficult to engage. In this sample only seventeen fathers agreed to be interviewed compared to sixty-two of the mothers.
Fathers in these families were preoccupied and tired from work, distant and a bit intimidating, or simply not present in the lives of their children. Of the sixty-five sons and daughters in this sample, eighteen had no contact with their fathers. Five of these young respondents reported that their fathers were dead, yet the other thirteen never experienced a relationship with their fathers—or they had one when they were very young but now no longer had contact with them. For the forty-seven young respondents who reported relationships with their fathers, the majority (forty) described them as distant particularly in comparison to their maternal relationships. The small number of fathers who agreed to be interviewed could be attributed to this remoteness.
Distant father-child relationships are not unique to families of gay and lesbian children. Despite changing sex roles, as evidenced by the number of mothers working outside of the home and the increasing willingness of men to take on household and child rearing duties, children are still closer to their mothers than their fathers. Mothers still spend more time with their children than fathers (Craig 2006) and continue to bear the responsibility of communicating with their children, particularly when the topic is sex (Kirkman, Rosenthal, and Feldman 2002).
One reason for this might be that men’s family roles tend to be more instrumental (discipline, providing income, moral/ethical development, assisting with career development) compared to the more expressive functions that are the domain of the mother (caregiving, companionship, facilitating emotional, social and spiritual development; Finley and Schwartz 2006). Despite a cultural shift in which these functions are expected to be shared, traditionally distinct, complementary parental roles are still socially scripted and reinforced, inevitably leading to family relationships in which fathers and their children expect less interaction and more emotional distance (Rosen 1999).
Paternal distance was definitely found in the families in this study. As this father described:
I like to give the kids a lot of space. They don’t need to be around me all the time; I don’t need to be around them all the time. I have kind of like a “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude. I tell my wife; “You don’t have to tell me every little detail of everything that they’re involved in. I want to know big, important stuff, but I don’t need to know every little thing that’s going on.”
And this next father:
Well to a certain extent I kind of feel I have abdicated a lot of responsibility to my wife . . . it was partly an issue of not wanting to conflict with her, but having a real sense along the way of [how] I wouldn’t be doing it her way more or less. And at the same time, in a retrospective look, I think her sensibilities were much more on target than mine.
In discussing his relationship with his father, this son recalled:
Well, we were never that close, but there were never really big things that went wrong between us. I always loved him and I felt we could relate on certain things. . . . And I don’t know, it was probably your typical father-son relationship. He wasn’t very warm, wasn’t much for emotions or hugging or stuff like that.
Even though the parent-child relationships in this study seemed to match what we would expect in most American families, the gay sons believed that their homosexuality was the reason they had a lack of shared interests with their fathers and, in their minds that was the cause for this distance. As recalled by this young man:
INTERVIEWER: Were you close when you were younger?
RESPONDENT: Not really, just a father and son. We know we love each other and that kind of thing, but, it’s not like we have to tell each other everything.
INTERVIEWER: Did you do things together, you and Dad?
RESPONDENT: No not really because my dad was always into stuff that I really wasn’t into, like he could tell that I really never was into fixing the car. . . . We never really did anything since I was little, like baseball and stuff like that.
M.C., who was quoted previously as playing Scrabble and watching political shows with his mother, recalled the distance between him and his father:
Things were more distant with my dad. I would say we just didn’t share the same interests, whereas my mother nurtured me with my piano music, which is something I did get to enjoy. I guess he was the one who got me into soccer, which I stunk at, and that kind of stuff. He likes to fish, and I never enjoyed it. We never did much together in that regard. He didn’t have that same desire to go out and experience new things, and we just didn’t really share many things of interest. I wouldn’t say it’s been hostile, just more distant. We had a different perspective politically as well.
For the most part, fathers and children agreed that the father-child relationship was not as close as the mother-child counterpart. This young lesbian, remembered: “We never really talked about anything important ever, so anything that went on was never between my father and I. It was always between my mother and my father, and then my mother would tell me what my father said.” And her father agreed: “She’s definitely closer to her mother.”
Sometimes, as in the following case, fathers remembered their relationships with their children more positively than their sons and daughters did. Bob, a corporate attorney, recalled a better relationship than his daughter Ellie did, at least when she was younger, even though he remembered it deteriorating as she grew into adolescence:
It was what I perceived at the time as being a normal relationship. I found her as a youth to be very lovable and cuddle-able and sweet as she went through the usual growth stages. I found as she reached her young teenage years we started to grow apart and there was more rebelliousness and unwillingness to conform to parental norms.
However, Ellie, a psychology graduate student, recalled:
My mom was a stay-at-home mom, so I had a lot of access to her . . . a lot of time with her. And she was an extremely attentive person so she was also sort of fulfilling my needs. I forgot my lunch at school and she would come with a picnic basket full of stuff. She was very attentive in that way. My dad has always, until two years ago, worked twelve-hour days. He is a very hard worker so he would come home, he would eat, and fall asleep. So having an intense conversation with my dad had to be scheduled, which was difficult as a child but as an adolescent it made it easy for me to disengage from him. I never had to deal with a confrontation with him because he never had time. I am sure he would have made time if I would have asked for it but it just wasn’t on his mind.
Although, based on these interviews it is difficult to know with any certainty the causes of these discrepancies, it is possible that fathers who perceive their relationships with their children as less distant than their children do might be reluctant to admit to an outsider that these relationships were less than optimal. A second factor might also be at play whereby the children and the fathers may have different standards as to what makes a good paternal relationship. As stated previously, divergent parental roles are believed to be socially scripted and reinforced, inevitably leading to family relationships in which fathers and children expect less interaction and more distance (Rosen 1999).
Just like some of the boys and their mothers, some of the girls in this sample remembered good relationships with their fathers based on common “masculine” interests they shared, at least until adolescence. Tara, whose father was a chemist, was a college student majoring in chemistry at the time of her interview. She recalled:
When I was really younger, I was a lot closer with my father. . . . When I was little, I guess I was like daddy’s little girl and I would always go to my father. Like I really like to fix things and stuff, so if he was fixing something around the house, I would always go help him. Or something outside like I’m always the one who does yard work. I like mowing the lawn for some reason. But I would always do that, so we would bond over that.
Her father, Luke, recalled sharing common interests, even though there were changes in their relationship as she approached adolescence:
She was always athletic, and we participated in her athletic activities. She’s always been a good student, so we’ve stayed abreast of her academics, encouraged her, interacted with her in that degree. She’s always been a little combative, so that’s always put some strain, and she became a little more combative as she got older. So that would maybe be the biggest difference as she grew into adolescence.
Thus common interests seem to support closeness between daughters and fathers and, in particular, mothers and sons. As would perhaps be expected in any American family, these relationships became somewhat strained during adolescence. Fathers, like mothers, viewed these changes from a developmental perspective: the family relationships were changing because the kids were becoming adolescents. However, as we will see, the youth recalled putting distance between themselves and their mothers and fathers not necessarily as a way to develop autonomy but rather to hide their homosexual feelings.
Further, the relative closeness in the mother-child relationship accounts for the common family dynamic of children communicating mostly with their mothers and then for mothers to either relay information to fathers or leave them out of the loop completely. This dynamic has implications for later in the coming out process.
It is safe to say that all therapists have encountered the unmentioned “elephant in the room” when working with families. As a matter of fact, when our clients come to us, it is our job to point it out—often to the consternation of family members. Beginning therapists might be surprised that there is something important happening in the family and no one is discussing it. However, as we get more seasoned, we come to realize that families become accustomed to living with certain secrets—if they live with them long enough, they forget they exist.
In forty-five of the sixty-five families, parents recalled that they suspected their children were gay or lesbian before finding out for sure, and, with rare exception, the children in these families knew that their parents suspected. Nevertheless, in the great majority of these families, the children’s sexual orientation was not directly acknowledged or openly discussed during family sensitization. Without any direct discussion, parents and children appeared to have made a silent pact to keep this issue a secret.
REASONS FOR PARENTAL SUSPICION. During the family sensitization phase, one of the primary reasons parents suspected their daughters were lesbian was that they did not show the usual early adolescent interest in boys. One forty-year-old divorced mother recalled: “The fact that she didn’t date and didn’t talk about boys made me suspicious. . . . Boys didn’t call.” When asked if she thought her parents suspected, this mother’s twenty-four-year-old daughter knew her lack of interest in boys during adolescence gave a meaningful indicator. “I think they both did. I never dated men. I never showed the least bit of interest.”
Parents noticed that, instead of showing an interest in boys, their daughters developed particularly close relationships with other females—closer than what they considered to be normal—and this made them suspicious. Nancy, the African American school administrator who was the mother of Joelle, was suspicious: not only was her daughter not dating boys, she seemed to have an intense relationship with another girl.
Junior year of high school she had a friend, because I talked to my husband about this, and I knew that her intensity of feeling and reaction to this person was beyond the scope of a normal high school girlfriend type of situation. So my clue was the intensity and the obsession and the passion. All the drama surrounding the relationship with this person said to me that something else was going on here.
Looking back, Joelle knew that her close friendship was sending out signals that led her mother to suspect. When asked if she thought her mother suspected before she came out, she replied: “Definitely. Because of the whole incidence of how I discovered it through realizing my attractions towards a friend and the way that I would talk about that friend. It just became so obvious over time that I was [gay]—to everyone.”
For many parents of lesbians, their daughters’ tendency not to groom themselves to attract male attention was an additional factor that led them to suspect. The expectation that teenage girls, even previous tomboys, are going to dress and act in ways to inspire the romantic and sexual interest of boys is perhaps so engrained in our culture that a girl who fails to do so calls attention to herself and raises the suspicion of parents. This father, a successful building contractor, recalled that his daughter did not seem to be trying to attract boys:
Over the last four years . . . it started subtly, when she wasn’t getting dates with boys and things like this, coming to the new school, getting a little success in the track team, but still never really wanting to look nice or dress nice. I am sensitive to these things, because nobody likes to look better than me. I could see she wasn’t even trying. . . . She wasn’t grooming herself to be attractive to anybody, frankly. But she had a little success with the track thing, and I kind of forgot about it a little bit. But, like I said, the last four years, it became pretty obvious to me. She doesn’t date boys.
His daughter was clear:
My father definitely suspected. After I came out to them, it was actually really funny. My mother cried and did the typical thing. My father was like, well, “So what? Like I didn’t know.” Later he said he had suspected for a while, but he wasn’t going to bring it up. And when I was a sophomore in high school, he asked me if one of my friends were a lesbian. He has actually picked out a couple of my friends and asked me if they are, which was interesting.
Mac, a retired fireman who was gay himself, suspected his young daughter Jillian was a lesbian because of her seemingly careless grooming as well as her intense relationship with another girl:
I guess maybe a lot of kids do it today, but this is one thing we do fight about a lot; she’s in sweat suits all the time. She hung out with this girl. . . . Before I knew for sure I thought that this girl was a girlfriend. There was also what turned out to be a $1,000 phone bill, because this girl was in Florida.
This next mother, a widowed legal secretary, suspected her daughter Janie might be gay because of her preference for masculine clothes:
She never wanted to wear dresses . . . from infancy. From infancy we couldn’t put a dress on her, we had to fight with her to get a dress on. And then her brother gave her a leather jacket. . . . She would rather wear that. She wanted to wear my husband’s shoes all the time . . . anything that had to do with boys.
Despite this last example, for the most part, such masculine behavior was not a primary reason for the parents of this study to suspect that their daughters were lesbians. This might be because a girl’s tomboy behavior or interest in masculine clothing before puberty is socially acceptable and is usually transitory—not necessarily an indication of future lesbianism (Carr 2007).
However, for boys, cross-gendered mannerisms or “sissy” behavior is considered a more serious aberration, presumably because masculine gender roles are more rigid, and girlish behavior in boys is seen as a rejection of normal masculinity (Kimmel 2004). Furthermore, boys’ sissy behavior is not seen as temporary but as an engrained, permanent (and undesirable) personality characteristic. This may explain why cross-gendered behavior was the primary sign that led parents to suspect their sons were gay during the family sensitization phase.
As remembered by Eula, an African American social service worker and widowed mother who lived with her eighteen-year-old son, Andrew, in a neighborhood known for its high crime rate:
He had somewhat effeminate moves . . . and a lack of interest in the “manly” type things. Andrew loved to sing and dance and perform. And in watching him . . . he had some effeminate tendencies when he would move around and so forth. And that was pretty much it. My husband and I started watching from then on. And it’s like, “OK, we see where this is going,” and it started to worry me. And I am like, OK, now I am going to have to go through this with him of not wanting to be an overprotective mother, but to a degree having to watch a little more who he is around and so forth to protect him from gay bashing and things like that. Because, even though it is open more and accepted more than when I was kid, you have got some crazy people out there, which is why I took him out of the local public high school. I told him that I did not feel it was conducive to his physical or emotional health . . . I was thinking: “Uh oh, I am going to really have to protect this kid.”
Andrew, a pharmacy assistant, recalled: “My mother always knew. She was just waiting for me to tell her. She tells me that all the time. . . . She was just waiting for me . . . for the right time when I felt comfortable to tell her.”
Like Eula, many parents who suspected their sons were gay understood how their cross-gendered behaviors, interests, and mannerisms might make them objects of discrimination and even violence, as stated by the following African American mother. “I was upset at first. Because I was like, ‘Not my child! Why my child? How my child?’ and then I sat down and I prayed about it. I talked about it. It was something like, ‘Oh my God, is Jarrell gay?’ But I didn’t feel disgusted. I just felt like, ‘Wow, this is a hard life.’ That is really it.” Fears for their children’s well-being, which emerged as a concern for parents once they suspected their sons or daughters were gay, later surfaces as an ongoing worry once they knew for sure.
SUSPICION NOT DISCUSSED. Like virtually all the youth of suspecting parents, the son of this previously quoted mother knew his parents suspected he was gay before he came out. However, what is also apparent is that, almost without exception, the youth’s burgeoning sexual orientation was never discussed. There was one family in which the daughter recalled her mother asking her several times if she was gay: “Yes. She asked me a couple of times. I was sixteen—she kept asking me. I would just deny it.”
Almost all models of individual lesbian/gay identity development describe how lesbians and gay men will not disclose their sexual orientation to others until they are at least somewhat comfortable with it themselves (Cass 1979; Troiden 1989). What the findings herein suggest is that there is a period when parents and children both suspect but are not ready or able to discuss it. If parents confront their sons and daughters and try to make this subject a topic of family discussion before their children have come to terms with their homosexuality themselves, they will simply deny it. Trying to push this issue during family sensitization is like taking a cake out of the oven before it is fully baked—it’s just not ready.
PARENTAL GUILT. Nancy, the African American mother whose daughter Joelle was first quoted in this chapter, talked about how she and her husband wondered if they were at fault when they first suspected their daughter was a lesbian. It is worth noting that Joelle suffered from learning and emotional problems during her adolescence.
I just kind of felt—like she doesn’t have enough problems. Now she is going to choose an even harder path in life. My husband and I have had conversations where we go, “OK, is it something that we did?” And not in a belligerent way . . . We will even joke with each other about it, and he will go, “If you haven’t been so whatever . . .” And I will go, “No, it’s your fault.” And we will go, “OK, nature, nurture. Nobody else in the family is gay.” But it is weird because my husband is an adopted child, so who knows anything about his family’s background?
This mother of an eighteen-year-old gay youth recalled:
You know what? Bud has always had like a little bit of . . . feminine tendencies. He used to wear long T-shirts and pretend they were dresses and put makeup on and walk around the house like that. And, you know, he would—even earlier on, maybe when he was thirteen, he would see guys on TV and say, “Oh, he’s cute.” I felt like “What did I do wrong?”
Generally, it is not uncommon for parents to blame themselves when something goes wrong with their kids (Ferriter and Huband 2003). Mothers in particular often feel guilty about their parenting—even when there is nothing wrong with their children (Jackson and Mannix 2004). No doubt, the tendency for parents to feel guilty when they suspect a child is gay is aggravated by the general idea that parents are to blame for their children’s homosexuality. So it must be particularly distressing for parents to see their children develop into people whose behavior attracts ridicule, discrimination, and violence—and think it’s their fault!
Goffman (1963) defines courtesy stigma as the negative impact felt by those who are connected or related to the stigmatized individual, and in this sample, some parents began to experience this type of stigma when they initially suspected their children were gay. Based on their research of parents of the mentally ill, Corrigan and Miller (2004) distinguished two types of courtesy stigma; vicarious stigma, or the suffering parents feel empathically because their loved one is suffering, and public stigma, which is the stigma family members experience directly—they are tainted because they are thought to be to blame for their child’s illness.
Although homosexuality is not a mental illness, it is similarly stigmatized and, like families of the mentally ill, parents of lesbians and gays share in their stigma. Courtesy stigma is found throughout the stories of these families and begins to rear its head during the family sensitization phase. Parents who suspect their child is gay and worry about his safety and well-being are experiencing an anticipatory vicarious stigma. Furthermore, when they feel to blame for their child’s homosexuality, they fear public stigma in the form of the harsh judgment of others.
Although most of the parents who mentioned self-blame were mothers, some fathers also experienced guilt when they suspected their children were gay. This father, the previously quoted building contractor, felt shame when he suspected his daughter was a lesbian:
RESPONDENT: I was suspecting, but, I thought no, maybe I’m wrong. That type of thing . . . Yeah. I’m reading the signs wrong. Because of how I was raised . . . what a man was supposed to be. Not my daughter, I’m a virile Italian man, supposedly, and my offspring is not supposed to be a lesbian.
INTERVIEWER: So, that’s a reflection on your manhood?
RESPONDENT: Maybe. Yeah. Again, I never went that deep into it. But, I’m sure that has a lot to do with it.
Joe, a recovering alcoholic, talked about how when he suspected, he felt guilty because he initially hoped for a daughter when his son Tony was born. Although that wish faded soon after his son’s birth, when he suspected his son was gay it seemed as if the fates were meting out a cruel punishment for his old wish:
[I suspected] when he was a little boy. And I talked to my cousin afterwards. She is a psychiatric social worker. And she told me the same thing; she said; “I wondered about that myself” Apparently he talked to her about wishing he was a girl. And you know, I felt very badly about that at the time, because when he was born, I think I said to someone; “I just wish in a way Tony had been a girl.” because I thought I might have gotten along better with a little girl than a little boy, just because of my own relationship with my own father. . . . My first wife really got on my case about that. She said, “You really shouldn’t talk about that around him.” I said; “You are right, I shouldn’t.” So, I stopped. I was a little concerned. I don’t know whether that clearly ever had any impression on him or not. So I sort of began to wonder if I had implanted that in his mind. . . . Who knows, but I don’t think it did. The point is he did tell my first cousin he wished he was a girl.
The idea in our society that parents are to blame if their children are gay has been fueled by the influence of the helping professions, particularly psychiatry. Up until the 1970s psychiatrists asserted that homosexuality, which they considered a form of mental illness, was caused by pathological parenting, namely an overly close mother-child relationship and a distant father. Some studies biased by this premise implicated dysfunctional family relationships in its etiology (Bieber et al. 1962; Loney 1973; Thompson et al. 1973; West 1959). Despite ample findings disproving such notions (Hooker 1957; Shavelson et al. 1980; Siegelman 1974, 1981a, b), this idea persists and painfully surfaces for parents when they suspect their child is gay or lesbian.
INKLINGS AND DENIAL. Some parents, rather than fully suspecting, experienced fleeting notions that their children might be gay, which they tried to ignore. Similar to the young respondents quoted earlier in this chapter who denied or pushed aside their premonitions, parents in five families recalled hunches that their children might be gay before they knew for sure, but found ways to quickly vanquish such notions. Ann, a fifty-year-old homemaker and mother of Mike, the previously quoted student teacher, recalled: “I didn’t suspect. But . . . one day I was out for a walk and, I don’t know why, but I was thinking about the kids in general and it was kind of like the thought that he might be gay was almost like a bird coming and landing on a branch and then flying away. And, as fast as the bird came, I thought, no, that can’t be it.”
Mike’s father, Fred, denied suspecting that his son was gay. However, Mike, like many of the youth whose parents repressed their suspicions, thought his parents must have suspected, largely due his obvious fascination with men and their anatomy: “Well, let’s see. There were the penis-puppets-in-the-nursery-school thing. We were making puppets, a little arts and crafts thing, and I made mine with a big old dong, just because I felt like it. And then they kicked me out.” A fifty-three-year-old mother of a nineteen-year-old gay son denied suspecting her son was gay, even though she recalled some indications:
I did not really suspect. . . . If I look back, you know in retrospect I see signs, but I always tell this at PFLAG [support group for parents of lesbian and gay children]. I say that I hate stereotypes, so when people will say, “Oh the kid is into theater or he doesn’t like sports, he must be gay” I get annoyed. It was annoying when people would say that, not about him, but about anybody in general, because I know a lot of people who have those characteristics who aren’t gay. So I think my husband had more of a suspicion than I did. But only when it was close to the time, like within the year that he told us, did I start to suspect a little bit, but kind of on a very subconscious level.
Nevertheless, like Mike, this woman’s son was sure his mother as well as his father knew well before he came out to them.
Looking back, this next mother, Janet, who was a psychiatrist, could remember overlooking signs of her son Robert’s homosexuality, but denied she ever suspected before he came out to her:
I absolutely should have, but I did not. He is kind of effeminate. I think he was maybe less so younger, but he got more so over the years. But he had interests that were gay like theater . . . musical theater. He never liked sports. His friends were girls. And I also had a gay stepson. I suspected Robert was gay, but really only because as a teenager he would go out with girls who sort of liked him, but he never liked any of them. So I sort of figured something was up. But I really did not suspect that Robert was gay.
Robert agreed that his mother did not suspect. Coincidentally, the subject did come up between them when he was younger, but not in a way that facilitated honest exchange:
She and I were always close . . . and she never thought I was going to turn out gay, I don’t think. She didn’t suspect. . . . The reason it has been hard for her is because she was very close to two gay men when she was younger and they both died of AIDS . . . and I remember when I was maybe ten or something her friend had just died of AIDS and she said, “Please don’t be gay,” which probably wasn’t the best thing to say. And I said, “I am not gay, Mom. I am not gay.” But that was really the only time sexual orientation ever came up before [coming out].
As stated by this mother of a twenty-one-year-old son who did not suspect:
No [I did not suspect]. But, you know, the funny part is—this is years ago—I was with my friend. We both had boys born the same year. And they both played with dolls, and we used to tease each other and say, “Can you imagine, they like dolls, what if they grow up to be gay?” I tell you the truth, we joked about it then, because he used to take the dolls and hide them. He would take his baby sister’s dolls. We would find them, and I would say, “What are you doing with this doll?” I jested about it at the time. But, you know, years later I knew he was home a lot, he didn’t go out. He would be on the phone . . . he would be like a busybody—like a girl would be more than a guy. But I never suspected.
Her son recalled:
I think they were in denial. I think when she looks back, she suspected. She makes jokes all the time about how she suspected. At the time when I was twelve, do I think my mom thought I was gay? No. But when I now discuss it, she will always say: “There were so many signs. I was just in such denial.” My first album I ever bought was Cindy Lauper, Girls Just Want to Have Fun. And I used to play it on my record player all the time and dance around. That was my favorite song. So she always jokes that she should have known. No, I don’t think she knew when I was twelve that I was gay. But now, looking back, I think she is very aware that there were signs the whole time—that she was in denial.
What these interviews suggest is that like their children who try to push aside same-sex attractions, parents also try to ignore the signs that their sons or daughters are gay. During family sensitization, suspecting parents might not want to confront their children, or even acknowledge the signs, because they are unwilling or unable to face that their child is gay. They understandably want to avoid the fear, worry, loss, and self-blame this reality would bring. So they might suspect but are hoping it’s not true. Both parents and children are involved in a mutual dance of denial, which helps them avoid facing a difficult reality before either is ready.
Despite this unspoken agreement not to recognize or discuss the child’s burgeoning sexual orientation—as earlier described, some parents and children, particularly mothers and sons, recalled their relationships as historically close, and some (though not all as will be described later) reported parent-child closeness right up until the time the children came out. On the surface, it seems contradictory that parents and children can believe that they are close when such an important issue is not recognized or discussed. However, a closer look suggests why this might indeed be possible. First of all, in our culture children and parents are expected to avoid directly discussing each others’ sexual feelings, even in families that are considered close. Thus, the sexual orientation of a child can remain hidden behind this wall of silence, even if family members share themselves freely in other areas of their lives.
Secondly, it should be remembered that gay and lesbian people, particularly those who are in the closet, have learned to hide their sexuality in response to hostility such as that faced by some the respondents. Gays and lesbians seal their sexuality and related feelings in a metaphorical locked drawer, keeping this component of their lives separate from other parts of their identity.
Parents may be doing the same thing. When children enter the world, parents project their fondest hopes and wishes onto them. They fantasize about a future which they happily assume will include weddings (to someone of the opposite sex) and grandchildren. Parents, afraid to face the idea that their child might be gay or lesbian are perhaps, like their children, denying or suppressing their own suspicions to avoid experiencing distressing feelings that will damage their relationships with their children.
Family therapists might assume that this mutual avoidance creates disengagement in the family, in which people feel isolated and unsupported. Family relationships in which children hide parts of themselves are thought to be tenuous and unhealthy (Tharinger and Wells 2000). Shernoff asserts that “when people grow up in a family system where they cannot be or acknowledge who they truly are, they are placed in a system of dysfunction” (2008:178).
However, parent-child closeness might be a more complicated phenomenon than these ideas reflect, and the findings from this study suggest a more nuanced view might be in order. Perhaps it is a mistake to dichotomize parent-child relationships as close or distant, good or bad, while ignoring the likelihood that family closeness may be situation specific—mothers and sons might feel close when they discuss fashion or feelings but feel more distant when the topic is sexuality or related issues such as homosexuality, cross-gendered behavior, or peer problems at school.
Franklin, a twenty-one-year-old man of Guyanese descent talked about how hard he worked to get along with both his mother and father but how his attempts to hide his homosexuality led to distancing from his dad, Norman. However, contrary to what one would suspect, in some ways he felt his paternal relationship got stronger once he realized he was gay:
As I said, I think being somewhat aware of my own sexual orientation made me aware of myself gender-wise, both male and female. I was able to identify with both sides. So with my dad, I was a boy, a guy. With my mom, I was a guy that was sensitive. But with my dad, I think maybe it did strengthen our bond, but at the same time in some way I think that was the only place where I had a sort of wall towards him. Because when I was younger I heard my father, my brothers and his friends make a lot of comments about gay people and what it means to be a man. So I assumed automatically that if they saw me doing things that weren’t manly that they would make fun of me. So I would kind of shy away from them in those ways. With everything else there were no boundaries, but with that, anything that bordered on not being typical of a male, I would avoid.
If we are to believe the families in this study, it is possible for parents and children to feel a sense of closeness even though this important part of the child is not discussed. The avoidance of this difficult topic before the family is ready to deal with it could help parents and children maintain helpful, nurturing connections until the time is right for the child to come out. As a matter of fact, some of the closeness these youth described during the family sensitization period proved to be beneficial to the coming out process.
PARENTS WHO DIDN’T SUSPECT. Although most of the parents in this study suspected their children were gay or lesbian, and some had passing inklings that they ignored or pushed aside, twenty-five parents claimed they had no idea before their children came out to them. Nevertheless, seven of the children of these twenty-five parents found this simply impossible to believe. According to them, their parents must have known, suggesting a tendency for some of the youth to either overestimate their parent’s early awareness or underestimate their tendency for denial. This twenty-five-year-old biracial girl was sure her mother suspected: “She would just watch me and watch who I liked and see the posters I would put up. She would say, ‘Don’t you like this guy such and such?’ and I would be like, ‘No, not really. I really like this girl.’ So I think she knew.” However, her mother reported that she was taken completely by surprise when she learned her daughter was a lesbian.
Sometimes children of unsuspecting parents assumed their parents always knew based on what they perceived to be their own cross-gendered mannerisms. One twenty-two-year-old girl stated, “Yes. I was always a tomboy, so everybody thought that I was gay.” Despite this, the girl’s parents both denied ever suspecting their daughter was a lesbian before she came out, perhaps because, as stated earlier, tomboy behavior is not considered abnormal or a harbinger of future lesbianism. Mitch, a college freshman, whose parents discovered his sexual orientation one year prior to the interview, was previously quoted as enjoying a close relationship with his mother while growing up. He believed his parents must have known because of what he thought were obvious signs: “To be completely honest, I definitely fall under the stereotype of a homosexual male. So, yes, if she read anything or knew anything about homosexuality, I think she could piece it together.” However, his mother claimed she had no idea.
These young people had difficulty believing their parents did not suspect. Some were quite certain that parents had an intuitive sense, which they chose to ignore: “Parents always know whether or not they want to admit it. I think they always know” (twenty-four-year-old lesbian).
Parents of both these last two quoted children denied knowing or even suspecting before they found out for sure. In two additional families the youth insisted their parents told them they suspected they were gay before they came out, but the parents stated they were completely surprised. Although this is a small minority of parents, it does lend further credence to the notion that parents and youth can have very different impressions of a parent’s suspicion as well as what communication on this topic has actually occurred.
Sometimes, cultural taboos played a role in parents not wanting to recognize their children’s sexual orientation. Norman, the previously quoted father of Franklin, who was from Guyana, talked about the tendency to push any suspicions away based on his culture’s disapproval of homosexuality.
INTERVIEWER: Did you suspect your son was gay before you knew for sure?
NORMAN: No, I did not. That came as a complete surprise and I must say I come out of a homophobic culture in the Caribbean, homosexuals have no protected rights in the Caribbean, and it is a whole cultural put down. So when that sprung up on me that he was gay, I guess maybe I had my head in the sand and didn’t want to see it, so I didn’t accept it consciously. I didn’t see that at all. Even though talking to other folks in the extended family later on, they said: “We knew that.” I mean even his brothers were talking about it, but I didn’t [suspect before he told me].
Still, Franklin believed his father must have suspected:
He’s pretty smart. I think he knew a lot more about me than I knew about me. Meaning I think he could tell, I think he knows so many things about me, because I just tell him. And he is able to read between the lines. So I think he probably did suspect before I said anything, but he didn’t necessarily come to a concrete conclusion.
Chauncey and his mother Marie, both from Haiti, were quoted earlier in this chapter as enjoying a close relationship. Chauncey explains why his mother might not have been able to acknowledge something was “different” about her son.
Every mother knows. She [my mother] was very religious and very traditional. She had the sort of attitude that if something didn’t make sense, religiously or according to her own thinking, then she would just reject it—it didn’t exist. So when I did tell her, she was like, “I don’t believe you.” She knew—she had to know. But she pushed it out of her mind.
Besides these cultural factors, there are other possible reasons youth might believe their parents suspected (or recalled their parents telling them they suspected) when their parents denied this. First of all, in this study parents might have been embarrassed to admit they were overlooking the signs or repressing the idea that their daughter or son might be lesbian or gay. Good parents are supposed to know what is going on with their children, particularly if they are struggling with something of such great magnitude. It might be embarrassing for these parents to admit to a stranger, and especially to the interviewers, that they were ignoring this important piece of information about their children. It should be noted that the interviewers were a gay man, a lesbian, and a mother of a lesbian, and parents might have feared the judgment of such clearly gay-positive people.
Second, as stated earlier, parents might be trying to deny or repress this information, much as their children do when they are in the early stages of coming to terms with their sexuality. Fear for their children’s well-being, cultural taboos, and a wish to avoid thinking about a child’s sexual feelings might be some of the reasons many parents do not recognize their children’s homosexuality or try to push aside any suspicions. Perhaps parents who either suspected, reported fleeting inklings, or who had denied suspecting were hoping against hope it wasn’t true—and that, if they didn’t think about it, it would go away.
Third, it is also possible that parents did not even recognize their child being gay or lesbian within the realm of possibility—it was just not on the radar. So they did not look for or recognize any indicators. As stated succinctly by Frank, a butcher who was the father of a lesbian: “I don’t think a father would want to look for it. You want me to be honest, right?”
This next parent’s response suggests that a father’s focus on protecting his daughter from aggressive males, which is an expected role for the father of a daughter, can get in the way of recognizing that his daughter might be lesbian. When asked if he ever suspected his daughter was gay before she came out to him, Bob, the previously quoted overworked stockbroker replied: “No . . . I think fathers try to avoid focusing [on] sex for their daughters except to pound the shit out of any guy who shows up at the door with his tongue hanging out.”
Finally, children might be overestimating either their parents’ powers of perception or the clarity of the signals they are sending out. Youth might have been comforting themselves with the notion that their parents were at least somewhat aware of their sexual orientation, so that when they told them their parents wouldn’t be surprised. The prospect of coming out to parents is terrifying, and if sons and daughters can convince themselves their parents already suspect, they can also persuade themselves that telling their parents is only a small step—they are only confirming what their parents already know. The reality is that even parents who admitted to suspecting their children were gay were shocked and devastated when they eventually found out for sure. Nevertheless, the frightening prospect of having to someday come out to their parents might have led the youth to wishfully overestimate their parents’ awareness. Unfortunately, this tendency could leave children unprepared for the shocked reaction they might receive when they come out to them.
If someone is hiding a shameful secret, one that if exposed could result in ostracism and rejection, he feels at least somewhat safe as long as nobody knows. Toward the end of the family sensitization stage, once they realized they were gay, the frightened and ashamed young respondents drew the shades around themselves to carefully hide their homosexuality. This put additional emotional space between their parents and themselves, which strained family relationships, including some of the historically close mother-child relationships. When asked if her relationship with her mother changed when she first started to wonder if she was a lesbian, one twenty-year-old African American college student and psychology major responded, “For a while—it was like we’ve always been very open and I felt that I had to put on this charade with her . . . this act for her.” This distancing did not go unnoticed by parents. As the mother of this young woman recalled: “When she got [to be] about eleven, twelve; she was standoffish, to herself. You know, she didn’t talk a whole lot. I think I was closer to her than she was to me. . . . She started getting rebellious I guess at about thirteen, and started to have fits and tantrums.”
However, like many of the parents in the study, though she was far from pleased by these changes, she did not believe they indicated something was wrong or abnormal. Instead, this mother attributed her daughter’s with drawal and irritability to her entry into adolescence. She recalled:
She got very quiet. She didn’t want to share with me. . . . She didn’t want to tell me what was going on. She didn’t want to be with the family or be involved with family activities. I thought, “This is the beginning of the end, the beginning of adolescence.” I am sorry it happened, but I know this sort of thing is supposed to happen, so I am not going to sweat it. I will just let it ride, because life is supposed to be like that. Partings have to happen and growing up has to happen.
Certainly in the absence of any additional information, it is reasonable that parents would consider adolescent withdrawal to be normal and expected. However, almost without exception, the young respondents attributed their own changes in relating behavior not to normal development but rather to their feelings about their sexual orientation. Their sexual and romantic attractions combined with their fears or actual experiences of being harassed by peers made them feel as if something was wrong with them, and they worried that parents and peers would ostracize and reject them if they knew they were gay. As this twenty-four-year-old woman, whose parents were divorced, recalled: “I would say it [feelings about being lesbian] influenced my relationship with everybody. I felt completely isolated, like no one had any idea. I felt that she [my mother] would understand me if I could bring myself to talk to her about it. But, because I didn’t talk to her about what was really going on, it was really hard for me to do that.” As for her relationship with her father: “I knew he wouldn’t approve. So I don’t know if it changed our relationship, but it made me feel that much farther away from him emotionally. Because it was a big deal to me and I didn’t think he would understand.”
As stated earlier, compared to their relationships with their mothers, the young respondents’ paternal relationships felt more distant even before they came out. However, the realization that they were gay or lesbian seemed to pull them even further away from their fathers. As revealed by this nineteen-year-old African American woman: “I withdrew from him when I went through puberty. . . . I withdrew from him even more because I wasn’t sure how his reaction would be because our relationship was already rocky and I didn’t know what would happen. So I didn’t share anything with him.” This fifteen-year-old lesbian’s parents divorced when she was six. She continued her relationship with her father through weekly visits; however, she always maintained a certain distance from him—even more so once she realized she was a lesbian: “I’ve always held back more information about myself from my dad than from my mom. So it was probably a more clamped feeling; as I was figuring it out, I had to watch more and more what I was saying.”
Some young respondents attempted to throw their parents off-track by doing or saying something that confirmed that they were straight. Sometimes this worked—sometimes not. The previously quoted psychology major recalled her high school years
Like if we see a video or something, I’d go; “Oh yeah, he’s cute. And the, “Oh yeah, he’s really cute.” But I’m really not feeling him. And it’s just like the whole time I’m thinking, she can see right through me, she’s seeing it, she’s seeing it. And so secretly I was like “I hope she does and then—no, no, no, you’re not ready for that!” So, for that year it was, it was really weird.
As she later discovered, her mother did not “see right through her” and did not suspect until her senior year, when she started spending time with gay friends.
For some besieged youth, not only was there no shelter from the storm at home, but the weather there was also quite stormy. Sometimes the growing tension felt by youth as they started to realize their sexual orientation led not only to distancing, but to overt conflict with parents, adding to the enormous strain they were under. Tara, the previously quoted chemistry major who was eighteen at the time of her interview, described how distressed she felt when she started to suspect in middle school that she was gay: “I definitely think that the confusion in my own head over, like, what was going on and me not understanding it . . . made my relationships really, really hard with my parents. Like they even told me they didn’t even want to be around me because I was just so bad.” Her mother, Dora, recalled how belligerent her daughter became during this time and how, unlike most of the parents in this study, she suspected their mother-daughter problems went beyond those typical for adolescence:
I would say up until she was about ten or eleven, we were close. She was really a sweet kid and very easy going and very nice. But she was like always with her friends too. She would disappear. Really, it was like the wind, we’d be eating dinner and then she would be done and be out the door. She had a lot of friends in the neighborhood, a lot of boys and girls. And then, when she got to be about eleven or twelve, she got to be a very, very difficult child, very hard to deal with. As a matter of fact, when she was in sixth or seventh grade—I forget which grade it was—I finally took her to a counselor. People were saying, “Well, you know, it’s just typical kid’s stuff.” I said “No, I’ve got two other daughters and I never went through difficult kid stuff.” But she would yell at us. She would just fight with us a lot. I want to say she was a decent student, but I guess sometimes she didn’t want to do well, so we used to fight about academics—I mean so bad that I would go in the room and say you have to do this and she’d start screaming at me and I’d walk out. And then my husband would have to go in. It was like we had to play tag team because she was just so awful. She really was—she was awful to deal with.
Her father Luke, quoted earlier as remembering his daughter becoming “more combative” during adolescence, would agree.
In some families, conflict erupted because the young respondents felt their parents were pushing them to be “straight” or to act in ways congruent with expectations for heterosexual men and women. “I was a big tomboy. She tried to get me to dress differently, and we would argue . . . And I actually asked her the other day. I looked at my [old] pictures. I said, ‘Did I pick out my own clothes?’ She said I would pick out my own clothes out of the closet, but she would buy my clothes for me” (twenty-four-year-old woman). In speaking of her father, she recalled, with bitterness, “If I had friends who were guys, he would say: ‘Oh, you should have him over for dinner’ or ‘Why don’t you go out?’” Perhaps because she was struggling to come to terms with her sexual feelings and was particularly sensitive, she saw this pushing as his attempts to make her straight, which made her resentful.
In these families the children’s and parents’ anxiety seemed to generate a reciprocal pattern of parental pressure and youth resistance. Children might have been projecting feelings about societal disapproval onto their parents, while parents were projecting their hopes and dreams onto their children along with the fear that these dreams would go unfulfilled. Many of the young respondents felt distressed, even angry that they would not be able to meet their parents’ (or society’s) expectations of heterosexuality and, as a result, became combative. In response, parents understandably reacted in anger or withdrawal themselves.
When asked if her growing realization that she was a lesbian affected her relationship with her parents, this nineteen year old recalled how she perceived that her mother expected her to date and pursue more feminine interests: “I think it kind of hurt our relationship because I think in a way I started to resent her—her always wanting certain things from me and having these expectations and telling me the way I should act. But that wasn’t her fault. She just didn’t really get that wasn’t what I wanted. It never occurred to her.” Her mother, who did not suspect her daughter was a lesbian until right before she came out, recalled this period as a time when her previously happy, good-natured daughter abruptly became sullen and irritable. However, this mother attributed these changes to the growing pains of adolescence:
I have thought about this a lot. When she was little, a small child, right up until, I would say, adolescence, she was the most cheerful, fun little girl. I mean she took dancing lessons, she laughed all the time. She was just beloved by everybody from an infant on. And in adolescence [things got] very hard. She just was not happy.
The husband of this last respondent was quoted previously as suspecting his daughter was a lesbian four years before she came out to him. He recalled the ongoing discord between his daughter and her mother and how it led to arguments between him and his wife:
Her mother would constantly ask, “Are you dating boys?” and it would almost, like, hurt me. Later we would have a fight. I would say, “How could you ask her if she is dating boys? You know she is not. Why make her uncomfortable?” But I couldn’t talk to her about it. Her mother never really even suspected anything. I kind of, over these last four years, really came to accept that it was probably something—I never really said the word gay, I never thought of her as gay. . . . But I knew something wasn’t right.
Like the mother previously quoted, the parents of children who felt pressured were mostly silent on the topic of whether they did things to push their sons and daughters to “be straight.” For the most part, only the child respondents reported that their parents pressured them to act differently. This mother, Charlotte who along with her son M.C. discussed how close they were, was the only one who recalled thinking she should say something to her son. However, she denied doing so. “Quite honestly, I think I probably felt like, ‘M.C., Stand up straight! Don’t you know you look girlish the way you’re standing?’ I’m sure I didn’t say anything to him. I’m absolutely certain I didn’t say anything to him. But, in my mind, I’m sure I was correcting him.” M.C., who later reported feeling pressure from his father to “act straight,” did not feel the same push from his mother.
As we have seen earlier in this chapter, suspicious parents are struggling with feelings of guilt, loss, and worry. They care deeply for their children, but see them potentially taking a path that will put them in harm’s way. Thus it is no wonder they would want to do anything they could to put their children on “the right track.”
However, for the most part, parents in these disengaged or conflicted families did not believe their suspicions and guilt that their child might be gay or lesbian affected their relationships with them during the family sensitization stage. This contrast with their children’s impressions suggests a couple of possible explanations. Parents might be disinclined to discuss or even admit that their own fears would impact their relationship with their children, particularly in the presence of strangers who are gay or who are clearly sympathetic to gay people and their causes. They might have thought that the interviewers would think poorly of them if they admitted to letting their negative feelings about their children’s suspected sexual orientations influence their relationships and so therefore did not report such behaviors.
Another potential explanation for the children feeling pressured has more to do with their own perceptions. There is simply no safe haven for these kids. As described previously, youth are becoming painfully aware of their sexual feelings and, at the same time, they are learning that these feelings are considered wrong and even shameful. They might even be projecting their feelings of alienation, social pressure, anger, and disappointment for not being “normal” onto those convenient and closest to them—their parents. Thus, the young people in this study might have been particularly sensitive and reactive to any signs that their parents want them to be different. It’s hard enough dealing with potential rejection from the outside world—dealing with it at home is just intolerable.
According to the children’s reports, parents’ suspicions and desires for their children to be different were clearly communicated, while, at other times, a simple statement from an unsuspecting parent might have been taken out of context. Sadly, during family sensitization gay issues were not open to the type of family discussion in which members could clear up any misunderstandings. Someday we will live in a world where children can talk with their parents about their same-sex attractions as soon as they recognize them, but that day has yet to arrive.
Fathers in many families are mysterious, distant, intimidating figures—even more so for boys with homosexual attractions. They are the family torchbearers of manliness, and, as males young and old know, homosexuality is considered the dreaded opposite of masculinity. According to Kimmel (2004), men demonstrate their masculinity by repudiating all that is feminine and demonstrating an ever-ready willingness to engage in sexual intercourse with women whenever the opportunity arises—in a nutshell, to prove they are not gay. To be gay is to be powerless, weak, unable to break free from Mommy, and these characteristics are incompatible with real manliness.
Kimmel asserts that homophobia plays a central role in men’s masculine self-concept and his contention initially seems rather extreme. However, go to places where men and boys congregate, like schoolyards, sports fields, fraternity houses, and locker rooms in this country and you will hear taunts such as “You’re a sissy!” “That’s so gay.” “Cocksucker!” or “Wow, you really got fucked in the ass on that one!” Sex between males is seen as an act of violence and domination rather than an expression of love, affection, or mutual pleasure, and this mocking, whether it is done playfully or with hostile intent, is meant to degrade a man by deriding his manliness. A boy growing into a gay man will get the message loud and clear that he is weak, dirty, and, perhaps worst of all, less than a man.
Thus it is no wonder that the boys were so reactive to and at times fearful of the responses of their fathers—the people in their lives who were expecting them to receive and carry the torch of masculinity. As this eighteen-year-old young man described:
My father has always been very physical. He liked competitive sports and he played football. He was always pushing me to be on the football team or to do this or that. The kind of things I had absolutely no interest in doing at all, and I don’t know how tied up that is in sexuality, but I certainly felt like I had something I needed to keep hidden from him.
M.C. reported feeling close to his mother, but, in contrast, he clearly resented what he perceived as his father’s pressuring efforts to push him toward heterosexuality:
I guess I reacted more hostilely inwardly towards him (my father). I began treating him more or less as an enemy, as one who I had to hide everything from. And [I was] quite resentful too, because I figured he would want me to find a girl. And there were occasions when he would say, “when you get married . . .” and that just blew my mind. It was, like, “Bastard, you are assuming I am going to get with a girl.” And on occasions when he would say, “I have this pornography, Marilyn Monroe, up in the attic if you need me to get it down . . .” That came up, and I thought, OK, this is getting sickening here, and I resented it and I became very distant.
Rico, a twenty-two-year-old Latino man who worked in a bookstore, described how his father’s derision, which was possibly fueled by suspicion, made him fearful:
My father used to fear me into ever owning up to it, by calling them [gay people] names and stuff. Just saying that he didn’t agree with it and thought it was wrong and all that stuff. . . . Yes, and he didn’t want me to become that . . . one time I had just dyed my hair. I was eighteen, nineteen. I dyed it red. And he said: “Don’t be a girl, you fag!” or something like that.
Rico, whose parents were long-divorced, perceived these admonitions as a threat, which is why, at the time of his interview, he had yet to come out to his father.
Jay was asked if his emerging sexual orientation played any role in his relationship with his father:
Yes. I think I was taking out my frustrations with all of the straight jocks at school . . . that he was this mister normal guy that had the normal family, the normal house and the normal job and normal, normal, normal. And I don’t know . . . he was an easy target, too, because he wasn’t always here and when he was here I could attack him.
For sons, paternal disapproval is a particularly bitter pill to swallow. Perhaps, deep down, they fear disappointing their fathers by not being the man they expected them to be. They realize if they are being chided in the outside world for not being real men that this will reflect poorly on their dads, who will be angry and disappointed once they come out.
Unfortunately, none of the fathers of the boys who reported feeling taunted or pressured by them consented to an interview, so we could not get their perspectives. However, like Jay, it is perhaps too tempting to make fathers an easy target, particularly in the absence of their voices. We must remember that fathers and sons live in the same world—one that teaches boys that homosexuality is incompatible with real masculinity and, by association, full male adulthood. Fathers too were raised to not only look down upon homosexuality, but to fear it in themselves. The fathers of these male respondents may have perceived that they failed at one of their most important tasks, passing masculinity onto their sons. Thus having a gay son might feel particularly shameful for a father, as he may believe it is an indictment of his own masculinity.
Moreover, it is perhaps humiliating for a father to have a son who engages in sex acts that are considered by many to be so disgusting and degrading that their very mention is used by men to insult each other. When a father in this study initially found out his son was gay, he repeated, over and over, “Do you know what two men do together? Is that what you want to do?” Add to this shame and disappointment men’s tendency to be stoic about problems to avoid appearing incompetent or weak (Cochran and Rabinowitz 2003; Mahalik, Good, and Englar-Carlson 2003) and one gets a sense why many fathers, like those of the boys previously quoted, did not want to discuss such a topic with a stranger—a gay stranger, no less.
Isay (1989) believes that gay males undergo a reverse Oedipal complex whereby, as young boys, they become subconsciously sexually attracted to their fathers (rather than their mothers). When the boy is a toddler, the father anxiously senses the subliminal sexual charge in their relationship and, because he is socialized to be repelled and afraid of homosexuality, he consequently disengages from the son. Oedipal issues aside, a developing gay boy may demonstrate some traditionally feminine gestures or interests that foreshadow an adult homosexual orientation, which may in turn make his father uncomfortable and want to distance.
Sadly, father-son disengagement or strain may have particularly destructive consequences for gay men. Because a boy’s relationship with his father is his first, most important relationship with a man, it is the primary arena where he learns not only how to interact in close contact with other men but also whether he is attractive and lovable in their eyes. If this primary relationship is rife with fear, distance, and hostility during childhood, as it is for many gay men, this will no doubt interfere with his ability to form and maintain intimate, committed relationships with male partners in his future adulthood.
During family sensitization, young women and men begin to recognize their sexual orientations in environments that are hostile, rejecting—even dangerous. In this study, many youth experienced antigay violence and rejection at the hands of peers before they themselves realized they were lesbian or gay. However, they had to handle their disturbing sexual feelings and victimization by themselves because they were so afraid that, if their families knew the source of their unhappiness or mistreatment, they would be rejected. These findings suggest the ways in which young people receive the message from their schools and families that their homosexuality is unacceptable and thus needs to be hidden. However, the pressure to hide their turmoil and victimization leaves children in frightening and painful isolation.
Most parents suspected their child was gay or lesbian before knowing for sure. However, in families in which parents reported they did not suspect, their children were certain that they did. This suggests that during family sensitization there might be a tendency among some youth to overestimate their parents’ awareness. Professionals need to keep this in mind as they assist young gays and lesbians who are trying to decide whether or not to come out to their parents.
As daughters and sons begin to fully realize their sexual orientation, they may pull away from their parents in an effort to hide themselves. Furthermore, youth might be projecting their resentment about societal disapproval onto their parents and therefore may be particularly sensitive or reactive in the face of real or perceived pressure from parents’ to “act straight.”
All parents have their own aspirations for their children, and suspecting their children might be lesbian or gay threatens their dreams. Parental fear during family sensitization may be communicated in subtle and not so subtle directives to the children to “act more heterosexual.” Children, already scared and reactive, may be particularly sensitive to any parental negativity, and in turn may become distant and resentful. Parents are, of course, unhappy with these changes in the family, and may respond by becoming irritated, but, without knowing how alienated and distressed their children are, they might attribute such changes in family relationships to the normal growing pains of adolescence. Thus family sensitization can be a confusing period—there can be distance and strain in the family, but parents are in the dark as to its exact cause and, therefore, cannot fully understand or resolve it.
The sociologist Reubin Hill (1971) proposed a model that defines a family crisis as an interaction between the distressing event, the family’s coping resources, and the interpretation the family makes of the event. Hill’s work was based on the experiences of soldiers leaving their families as they were called to service during World War II. In the families he studied, he identified a stage of family crisis during which families anticipated the departure of the husband/father before he was actually deployed. This period was marked by what Hill called anticipatory disturbance, which strained family relationships. Families in the sensitization stage are experiencing similar anticipatory anxiety, particularly in light of the distance and conflict that can emerge once children recognize they are gay. The simmering anxieties and tensions of this period eventually come to a boil, leading to the child’s coming out, as we shall see in the following chapter.
During family sensitization, families might seek therapy for their children’s behavioral or mental health difficulties without knowing that their sons and daughters are trying to come to terms with their same-sex attractions. However, because the children might not fully understand their sexual feelings, or because they fear other people’s reactions, it is unlikely they will discuss this topic with a therapist.
Before they came out, five young respondents were enrolled in individual treatment by their parents, who were concerned about sudden and unexpected deterioration in their children’s moods and behaviors at some point during their adolescence or preadolescence. These parents recognized that these changes were beyond what was developmentally expected, but did not know their children were struggling with same-same attractions—and, sadly, neither did their therapists. As an illustrative example, one young woman discussed how she was sent to therapy at age twelve because her parents and teachers noticed that she had been depressed.
INTERVIEWER: Let me ask you. Why do you think you didn’t tell the therapist you were feeling attracted to other girls and were worried you might be a lesbian?
RESPONDENT: Well, like in middle school I didn’t even know that I was a lesbian.
INTERVIEWER: But you knew you were attracted to girls.
RESPONDENT: Yeah, I knew something was different. But at that point in time I figured everyone was like that . . . I figured, because socially, culturally, in this society it’s OK for a girl to say, “Oh, that girl is pretty” or “She looks nice today.” You know? So I figured it was more along the lines of that. But one time I had asked my friend Nancy, I was like, “Hey Nancy—are you ever, like, actually attracted to girls?” And she’s like, “No.” And I’m like, “OK.” And I just stopped it. And I thought, “OK, so this is different.” And, yes, I was just going through all the turmoil with my parents, so I didn’t talk about it. And I just never felt comfortable. I wasn’t even comfortable with it myself.
INTERVIEWER: Even though a lot of your upset had to do with that, you’re telling me?
RESPONDENT: Yeah. Now, in retrospect, understanding it.
INTERVIEWER: So at that time you didn’t know that was connected to your problems?
RESPONDENT: Yeah. I didn’t even know it.
INTERVIEWER: What if your therapist asked you, at the time, “Do you find yourself attracted to girls?” Would you have told her?
RESPONDENT: Yeah. I think if she brought things up like that, then I’d be more inclined to talk about them. But I would never bring it up. Because she could judge me—she still has the opportunity to say, “Ooh, I’ll never talk to you again.” I definitely had a fear of rejection.
Another young lesbian recalled how she did not tell her therapist she was worried about her attractions to girls for fear that the therapist would then disclose this information to her parents. It is tragically sad that these children coped with their feelings by hiding them, leaving the source of their troubles out of their therapists’ reach and precluding them from getting the support they so desperately needed.
Stone Fish and Harvey (2005) have written about the tightrope therapists must walk when they suspect a young client is wrestling with her sexual orientation but is unwilling to talk about it. On the one hand, it would be threatening to confront an adolescent or young adult who has same-sex attractions before she is ready to acknowledge them. On the other hand, if youth are struggling with their homosexual feelings and coming to terms with a gay identity, the therapist does not want to miss the opportunity to help them find safety and acceptance, which could go a long way in diminishing their distress.
The young woman quoted in this section described how she might have talked about her sexual attractions if the therapist raised this topic; however, she was deeply ashamed of her feelings at the time. Stone Fish and Harvey (2005) offer a list of sensitive, indirect questions for therapists who suspect that their young clients are questioning their sexual orientation but are ambivalent about discussing it. The beauty of these questions is that they leave the young gay clients in control of how much they acknowledge to the therapist, thus ensuring they can continue to hide their feelings if they are not ready to talk about them. For example:
What would you recommend a teenager do when she has a secret about herself and she wants people to get to know her but is afraid if she tells the secret, they won’t like her?
What do you do when you know that you are different, you want to talk to someone about it, and yet you also think that if you talk about it, you will be really hurt—that somebody won’t like you or accept you or something even worse?
Is it OK if a boy is attracted to other boys?
What do you think your parents would do if they found out someone was a lesbian? (Stone Fish and Harvey 2005:120-121).
It should be noted that it is never a good idea to push children to come out or even acknowledge same-sex attractions before they are ready. If clients fail to respond to these questions in a meaningful way, shutting down or becoming obviously anxious, angry, or defensive, therapists must retreat and understand that they are either mistaken or their client simply isn’t ready. Considering the effects of stigma, if youth are attracted to others of the same sex, it is no doubt a wise choice to keep such feelings hidden from others and even oneself in order to survive both physically and psychologically. Thus clinicians need to honor and respect such defenses by backing off when their young clients are not yet ready to discuss their attractions. In these circumstances therapists might have to simply “let go” and remind themselves that the great majority of gay people reconcile their feelings about their sexual orientation without the assistance of mental health professionals. Like some of the parents and children in this study, therapists and their young clients can still have helpful therapeutic relationships without directly addressing the gay issue.
“I AM IN LOVE WITH MY BEST FRIEND! WHAT SHOULD I DO?” It is also possible that school counselors or therapists might be approached by young clients who are willing, at least somewhat, to discuss their attractions but are frightened by them. Therapists, human service and educational professionals, of course, care deeply for the children in their charge and want to be helpful. It might be tempting for well-meaning professionals, to declare, “Yep, you’re gay” and then to push them forward in some way before they are ready. For example, professionals with good intentions might encourage their gay clients to tell others, to confess their love to their best friend in the name of honesty, and/or to connect them with support groups and services.
However, this type of premature encouragement might terrify young people who are not ready—who, despite their verbalized attractions, still fear that what their classmates are joking about or saying about them is true. Thus it is important to go slow. Start where the client is, the sage advice learned in graduate school, is perhaps no more relevant than when working with these young people. It is advised that the counselor explore the client’s fears and worries in as neutral manner as possible. Client’s need to know that it is not sick or strange to have same-sex attractions, but they also need their fears understood and validated. When children are first recognizing their same-sex attractions, the thought of acting on them in any way can be scary, and it is likely that doing so will result in peer harassment and rejection—especially during adolescence and early adulthood when peer pressure is so strong and peer acceptance so important.
Having same-sex attractions does not mean one is ready to identify as gay. In fact, one may never have to. For example, some progressive-thinking youth are eschewing labels and are unapologetically acting on their sexual and romantic feelings without adopting specific sexual identities (Savin-Williams 2005). Thus there is no rush, nor perhaps any need, for the young person who is coping with same-sex attractions to feel like he has to quickly (or ever) adopt a gay identity and all that entails.
Conversely, for a therapist worried that a child who declares she is lesbian is going to commit to a difficult, unalterable path, it might be just as tempting to push these client’s feelings aside with comments such as “It’s just a phase” or all “adolescents have these feelings,” which, by the way, they don’t. Again, the motto is to go slowly. It might be useful to help the young person identify the potential positive and negative outcomes of approaching a friend upon whom she has a crush, joining a lesbian/gay student group, telling parents, or taking any one step out of the closet.
For example, the therapist or counselor might say something like, “OK, I understand you want to tell Sarah you are in love with her. Let’s take our time and look at all of the pros and cons of doing this. What do you hope will be the outcome if you tell her? Knowing her, what would be her most likely reaction? What is the worst that can happen? Could you handle it?” It is of utmost importance that these young clients carefully consider all possibilities so they can make decisions in an informed manner.
Bullies and harassing peers are not the devil’s spawn, as tempting as it might be for those who witness their misdeeds to think so. Like parents, they are born and raised in a homophobic, heterosexist world and are thus products of their environment. Therefore, another way to assist youth who are struggling to come to terms with their sexual orientation is to intervene in their schools to address what was referred to previously as the structural dimension of stigma (Schulze and Angermeyer 2003). So doing, human service and education professionals can help make these places more conducive to their gay clients’ healthy development.
As a first step, an environmental assessment would be in order (Netting, Kettner, and McMurty 2004). Is the school a place that welcomes and accepts gay and lesbian students? Are there any openly lesbian or gay faculty? Does the school sponsor a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) support group? Is material on LGBT people incorporated into programs that educate students about diversity? During this research I noticed that kids who attended schools that had such resources reported considerably less harassment than youth who went to schools that did not. How is antigay bullying and harassment between peers addressed at the institutional level? Do school professionals intervene or simply ignore it?
Elsewhere I have written about the importance of intervening not only with the gay person but also within the stigmatizing environment (LaSala 2006). Mental health and education professionals who care about youth should advocate for this vulnerable group by appealing to school administrators for services such as support groups as well as tolerance and antiviolence education for the entire student body (Kosciw 2001).
Granted, in schools with politically and religiously conservative parents, teachers, and school boards, establishing such programming would be difficult. However, there are resources available developed by those who have previously blazed these paths. Human service professionals or anyone wanting to assist LGBT youth can contact national organizations such as the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN, www.glsen.org, 212-727-0315) and Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG, www.pflag.org, 202-467-8180) for information and technical support on how to establish such groups as well as how to advocate for LGBT students in even the most hostile school settings.
In this study there was one family in which particularly tolerant parents suspected that their child was gay before he told them. These parents found ways to indirectly communicate positive messages about gay people in their child’s presence and indicated they would be accepting if and when he was ready to come out. When the child was ready, he was certain his parents would be accepting, which made for a smooth, low-stress coming out process. In my clinical work I have been approached by a small number of parents who suspected that their children were lesbian or gay, worried for their psychological well-being, and therefore wanted to know how best to be supportive.
Again, the therapist and the parents in these circumstances must be careful not to push the child to come out before she is ready. However, the practitioner can help parents find ways to communicate positive messages about gay people, which can help ease a child’s anxiety. For example, in a positive manner, parents can discuss topical gay and lesbian issues, such as same-sex marriage and adoption rights, in the child’s presence. If possible, parents can cultivate friendships with gay and lesbian neighbors, acquaintances, and relatives. Such relationships would have the twofold benefit of demonstrating parental acceptance and helping family members get more information about gay and lesbian people.
Furthermore, therapists, whether they are gay or straight, can model for their client families the importance of tolerance and acceptance by making sure their offices are welcoming places. To this aim, therapists can place LGBT-affirming reading materials in their offices, such as the Advocate (http://www.advocate.com) and Out (http://www.out.com) as well as Curve (http://www.curvemag.com)—national magazines catering to LGBT persons. Rainbow stickers and flags, which are the official signs of LGBT tolerance, can be prominently displayed in therapists’ offices. The existence of such material could go a long way in communicating the therapist’s tolerance and acceptance, that her office is a safe place to discuss issues related to sexual orientation. Clients struggling with their sexual orientation will sit in the waiting room and understand that it is not only OK to be LGBT but that it is also OK to talk about it.
It is impossible for therapists to know everything about all groups different from their own. However, it is the responsibility of human service professionals to be proactive, lifelong students of the cultures of their clients. While many human service undergraduate and graduate curricula cover the special needs of racial and ethnic minorities, such programs are often woefully inadequate when it comes to addressing LGBT issues. Therefore, clinicians will need to seek out this information on their own. In addition to this book, there are excellent sources therapists will find helpful (Griffin, Wirth, and Wirth 1997, Herdt and Koff 2000; Savin-Williams 2001a; Stone Fish and Harvey 2005). Full citations of these works can be found at the end of this volume.
However, books or articles alone are not going to help a therapist who is having trouble understanding and coping with his own feelings of disapproval toward lesbians and gays. Let’s not forget that therapists, like the families they work with, are products of society, and, like their clients, it might be difficult for them to avoid being influenced by the oppressive messages heard about lesbians and gays in places of worship, in the media, and from public figures and politicians. For many years I taught a course called Diversity and Oppression. During one of my classes on LGBT people, I asked my mostly straight social work students how, if at all, they learned how two men or two women have sex. I was shocked to find that most of them discovered this information either by witnessing taunts in the schoolyard or reading graffiti in public bathrooms. Learning that such behavior is shameful, dirty, and depraved no doubt leads people to think the same about those who engage in it.
Nobody, including therapists, can be blamed for having initially negative reactions to homosexuality, however therapists who work with these clients are indeed responsible for recognizing and mitigating these feelings. When therapists are preparing to work with gay clients and their families, they must first look inward and examine how they really feel about LGBT people. They should be on the lookout for feelings of anxiety, pity, disgust, or rescue fantasies—even unexpected arousal. It is advisable that they take an inventory of their negative stereotypical thoughts, such as “all gay men are promiscuous” and “lesbians hate men.” They need to be mindful that positive stereotypes (lesbians are relationship oriented, gay men are artistic) could also obscure their ability to understand their individual clients and hear their concerns. When it comes to their feelings about LGBT people, or anyone who is stigmatized, human service and educational professionals need to be sure their own houses are in order before stepping outside to help others.
For therapists who discover feelings or biases that threaten to interfere with their ability to assist lesbian and gay clients, I have a recommendation that goes beyond reading books. If the clinician does not know any openly lesbian or gay people, it would be a good idea to get to know some—and as soon as possible. It is pretty clear that contact with gay people can reduce one’s antihomosexual bias (Brown and Henriquez 2008). Thus, mental health professionals would be advised to seek out openly gay and lesbian people socially as well as professionally to not only learn more about them but to get to know them as real human beings, both different and similar to themselves. Not all gays and lesbians want to educate naive heterosexuals. However, there are plenty of us willing to do so. Please find us. We can help you become as informed as possible to be maximally helpful to this vulnerable population.
______________
1. Respondent names and identifying information has been changed to protect their confidentiality.