LIKE A RUNAWAY TRAIN, ONCE THE YOUNG MEN AND WOMEN in this study realized they were gay, something was set in motion that they felt they could not stop. Sooner or later they knew they would have to let others know, and this prospect was terrifying. Many of the youth already got a taste of what can happen when peers suspect someone is “different.” What would the world do to them once it was known for sure?
Most important, what would their parents do? The young gay and lesbian respondents were more than familiar with stories of sons and daughters who were thrown out of their homes, and fear of this possibility loomed large. But, in their minds, fully realizing they were gay or lesbian meant they would eventually have to tell their parents, and as that time grew closer the youth became increasingly distraught.
The precoming-out subphase of the family trajectory occurred in the one to three months before the child came out to her parents. During this predawn period, the young respondents felt intensely burdened by the stress of hiding, the isolation, actual and anticipated peer harassment, difficulties in relationships with romantic or sexual partners, and worries for the future. For many, it felt as if the pressure was building and their lives were ready to explode.
Of the sixty-five youth interviewed, forty recalled feeling highly anxious and depressed during this period, fourteen to the point where they considered suicide. For these young gays and lesbians, hiding was no longer working as a coping mechanism. When asked what things were like the month before she came out, this twenty-five-year-old biracial woman, who worked in retail and lived in a tough urban neighborhood, confessed:
I was sad because I was lonely, I didn’t have anybody and I wanted to hang out with someone, be affectionate and all that stuff. Sometimes, I felt worthless because I was scared that if anybody found out that they would hurt me or make fun of me. Yes, I didn’t want anybody to find out. I was pretty sure how they would react.
Toshi, a sixteen-year-old Japanese American gay boy, described the enormous strain of hiding himself right before he came out:
Well, because when you are in the closet . . . you have to watch every single thing you do . . . every single word you say. Like you have to watch everything to make sure you don’t give anything away. And that can be very stressful. There are people [whose] parents break down and cry, but they still tell them because that’s how much you feel that you have to tell them. Because it really hurts . . . I mean like . . . you are talking to your parents, you are thinking, “They don’t even know me.”
Mitch, the nineteen-year-old young man quoted in the previous chapter, enjoyed a particularly close relationship with his mother Susan. He recalled what it felt like during the month before his parents found out he was gay. “I didn’t know how to deal with everything. I was dealing with that, and also there was a guy I had gotten hooked up with through my friend. And he was spreading rumors about me, which upset me, and then the fact that I had to deal with coming out and realizing it myself and accepting it—it was just really hard.” Janie’s mother was quoted previously in chapter 1 describing how her daughter wouldn’t wear a dress, even as a very small child. Two months before she told her mother she was a lesbian, Janie, who was a junior in high school at the time, was grieving the breakup of a romantic relationship, which worsened her sense of isolation: “The whole end of the relationship with my girlfriend . . . I don’t know . . . it really hurt. I was kind of lost . . . I didn’t know where to go from there. I was feeling like I would have to keep lying for the rest of my life because even though I am going out with girls, people don’t know this and I just didn’t want to cover it up anymore.”
So what was happening in the families of these respondents during the precoming-out subphase? Some parents, like those of the previously quoted respondents, were largely unaware of their children’s struggles immediately before they came out. They did not notice the acute distress that their children were experiencing. A reason for this might have been that their sons and daughters, long accustomed to keeping their feelings hidden, continued to do so up until the time they came out. It is worth noting that most parents who did not notice their child’s distress also did not suspect their child was lesbian or gay before they knew for sure. As previously stated, in many families there was a growing distance between children and their parents, and this may have acted as a filter through which parents could not see their children’s distress.
However, this was not the case for all families. As recalled by Kenneth, a twenty-three-year-old aspiring actor:
I think it just had been bottling up for so long that I definitely had real extreme spells of depression and sadness and I had a lot of emotional roller-coaster episodes during the month before [coming out to parents]. I mean, you know, it was tough . . . for the reason that there was this guy that I really had some feelings for, and he wasn’t gay—and I couldn’t share that, so I guess I was lonely.
Kenneth’s mother Cynthia knew her son was upset during the month immediately before he came out to her, but she had no idea his distress was related to his homosexuality. Interestingly, Cynthia claimed she strongly suspected her son was gay ever since he was a toddler so that, when she eventually learned for sure, she was not surprised. She recalled that he had begun psychotherapy at this time, but she believed the reason for his distress was that his father, a man who fought depression and alcoholism his entire adult life, had committed suicide the previous year.
The following twenty-year-old lesbian recalled how lonely and desperate she felt having to handle her peers’ persecution all by herself:
I thought I was all alone. And then I had to hide it. It was sad having to hide it and keep it in. . . . I remember walking through the halls at school and feeling like I wish I could just fall into the ground so that people couldn’t see me. I remember every time I heard people whisper I would assume it was about me and I hated walking into classrooms because I would have to walk in front of everyone and then I just thought that every time they would see me certain things would just pop into their heads. I just wanted them to know me for Jennifer. I didn’t want them to know me as “Jennifer, she’s gay.”
Under that pressure, Jennifer fantasized about suicide during the month before her mother found out she was gay: “I constantly thought about it, but never made a plan to do it. No plan but constantly thought it would be so much better if I did. I didn’t want to feel it anymore. I didn’t want to feel sick anymore. And I used to cut myself. I used to cut my arms and stuff.”
Her mother, Martha, who worked in a Laundromat, remembered the months prior to when she learned her daughter was gay as a particularly frustrating time. She knew Jennifer was disturbed by something, but she didn’t know what, and she felt understandably helpless. Martha had suspected her daughter might be a lesbian for quite a while before she learned for sure, but had no idea that this was what was causing her distress. She recalled: “In her fights she was having with herself . . . she would lash out. She lashed out more at me than anything. It seemed like my husband would always come to the rescue. It was me that she treated rotten.”
Mike, the student teacher who was quoted in the last chapter, was eighteen and a college freshman when he came out to his parents. After years of struggling with his sexual orientation, culminating with the rupture of a friendship with a male crush, he was in so much pain that he attempted to take his own life. He recalled the pain he felt in the weeks before he came out, which was fueled by his unrequited infatuation:
I had to work through my senior year [in high school] because I really needed some money, so I worked at ShopRite. And I met some sixteen year old who was kind of everything that I wasn’t at the time. He was very confident, like borderline cocky. Ahh, fiercely attractive and just flat-out cool. And I thought I was in love with him, but I think it was more that he was everything I would have liked to be at the time . . . everything that I valued at the time. But it felt like love, and so that hurt . . . it never came to anything. He ended up quitting around Thanks giving that year, and I was really devastated about it. And to me that was kind of the final straw.
His parents, Fred and Ann, were aware that something was very wrong during the months before he came out, but did not know what. His mother was previously quoted as having a fleeting notion her son might be gay when he was younger, which she described in the last chapter as a bird briefly landing on a tree branch before flying away. However, she in no way attributed his distress to this possibility. She recalled her strong sense that her son was withdrawing from the family:
We kind of had an idea that something was going on with him, for, I don’t know how long, maybe a few months. . . . He was so active in high school and so social and then when he went to college he cut himself off from everybody he had gone to high school with and it seemed like he totally lost touch with them. He didn’t want to deal with them anymore. He started saying things like, “Saturday night, it sucks, there’s nothing to do. This is such a dull town, roll up the sidewalks.” And I said, “Go to college, go down to the school and do something.” We are eight miles away from the school. So, I couldn’t quite figure out what was wrong. And he seemed to be withdrawing into his room a lot . . . I also noticed that emotionally he seemed to be pulling away from us. We are a huggy, kissy family. I saw him hug his grandmother one day, and he put his arms around her and kind of touched her back, but his arms never touched her. And I remember looking at it and saying, “It looks like he is afraid to touch his grandmother . . .” And we asked him several times if everything was OK, and he said, “Yeah, it is just the adjustment, you know, in high school it was a small school and we knew everybody. It is a big adjustment in college.”
Fred, his father, also noticed his son’s sudden unhappiness: “He wasn’t happy. So, ah, there he is, he starts college, and he seems to be struggling, he is not happy and it is obvious to us that there is a problem and every time we try to confront him about it he doesn’t want to talk about it. He is thinking about dropping out. We are trying to talk him out of it.”
There is something extremely sad about the disconnection in these families during the precoming-out subphase. Many parents knew something was upsetting their children, but did not know what, which left them feeling frustrated and helpless. Young people struggled with loneliness, shame, crushes, and feeling different—some, like Jennifer and Mike, to the extent that they felt suicidal. However, without knowing the source of their pain, nobody, not even their parents, could help them
Although there is consistent evidence that youth with same sex attractions are more likely to think about or attempt suicide (D’Augelli et al. 2005; Russell and Joyner 2001), questions have been raised as to whether gay and lesbian youth who attempt suicide do so because of their sexual orientation (Savin-Williams 2001b, 2005). Savin-Williams (2001a) warns against what he calls the “clinicalization of sexual minority youth” (237), which is the tendency for gay rights activists and mental health and school professionals to promote the idea that all or most young gays and lesbians experience the kind of profound angst that leads to feelings of suicide. He recalls the story of a young gay respondent who wondered if he was really gay because he had not been suicidal. Savin-Williams wisely cautions mental health workers to be mindful of their expectations. Most LGBT youth in research samples have never been suicidal, despite the stigma and loneliness they face, which underscores the considerable strengths and resiliency of many of these young people.
However, findings in this study along with those of others suggest that the relative suicide risk among gay and lesbian youth might be higher, and education and mental health professionals should be on the lookout for the signs and symptoms. Fifteen of the young respondents discussed feeling suicidal at various times in their lives and twelve of them reported feeling suicidal the month before they came out to their parents. Three of the young respondents had made serious suicidal attempts, and two did so immediately before they came out.
Those who felt suicidal spoke of loneliness, isolation, anxiety, depression, and anger, which, in turn, left them wishing they were dead. Most of the young gays and lesbians who felt suicidal attributed their feelings to their sexual orientation, however there were two who believed that their feelings were part of a larger sense of alienation.
Ellie, the daughter of Bob the stockbroker quoted in the last chapter, recalled being addicted to drugs and wanting to end her own life before she came out:
I think there was a combination of feeling like I didn’t fit into the environment I was existing within. Not just for being queer but just who I am. I went to a stuck-up private school and I was the kid who wanted to be outside with my skateboard smoking cigarettes. It didn’t fit. But the drugs were a symptom of the problem, not the problem, although, they certainly made more problems.
The other respondent was a young woman who was having difficulty understanding and accepting her own sexual feelings, but right before she came out she felt suicidal because her parents were in the throes of a difficult divorce.
This study does not conclusively establish a causal link between being lesbian or gay and suicidal risk. However, these findings suggest that clinicians need to carefully assess their young lesbian and gay clients and be especially watchful for suicide ideation, particularly if their clients are feeling distressed and burdened by the secret of their sexual orientation.
Some of these young people wanted to disclose their sexual orientation to their mothers and fathers because they believed that their parents could provide the support they needed to cope with the challenges of being gay. This finding was unexpected because, traditionally, the main sources of support for gays and lesbians have been friends rather than family (Blumstein and Schwartz 1983; Kimmel and Sang 1995; Kurdek 1988, 2004; Kurdek and Schmitt 1987; Tully 1989; Weston 1991). Gays and lesbians, historically, formed “families of choice” through networks of friends that made up for families who rejected them or from whom they distanced to avoid rejection. These chosen “families” provided the emotional, financial, and emergency support gays and lesbians needed.
However, times are changing. There have been slow but steady improvements in public attitudes towards lesbians and gays in the fifteen to twenty years that have passed since much of the family-of-choice research was undertaken. There are now more openly gay public figures, like Ellen DeGeneres, Rosie O’Donnell, and Elton John in entertainment and Congressman Barney Frank in government. Several situation comedies on television, including the popular Will and Grace, have featured openly gay characters. Furthermore, there is a growing presence of LGBT youth groups in high schools (Floyd and Bakeman 2006), something unheard of up until a short time ago. In the past fifteen years twenty states passed legislation prohibiting employment discrimination based on sexual orientation, with thirty-one passing laws that call for additional penalties for bias or hate crimes against lesbians and gays (Human Rights Coalition 2008). Furthermore, the ongoing debate about same-sex marriage has helped make gay issues a part of the national conversation.
While there is still a long way to go in terms of public attitudes, these changes reflect a society in which gay and lesbian people and their concerns are more public than ever before. This has probably led to young people realizing and disclosing their sexual orientations at younger and younger ages, often in their mid to late teens when they are still financially and emotionally dependent on their parents (Stone Fish and Harvey 2005; Wilber, Ryan, and Marksamer 2006). If young gays and lesbians are living at home with their parents and beginning to recognize and act on their sexual orientation, no doubt their homosexuality is more difficult to hide.
Most young people who realize and disclose their sexual orientation while still in high school do not have access to the range of social institutions, like gay bars, clubs, and gay urban neighborhoods, they would need to establish the familylike friendship networks described in the older studies. The average age of the young respondents when they came out to their parents was seventeen, and many were younger. Even though a number of the high schools the respondents attended had LGBT support groups, many others did not. In addition, many kids whose schools hosted support groups were too embarrassed or ashamed to attend and participate. They worried others would see them walk into the group meetings or that fellow attendees would tell the other students about them. So, unlike older gays who came out as adults in earlier decades, these young people had less opportunity to find and maintain social networks of lesbian and gay people. Thus it is understandable that they wanted to turn to their traditional source of support—their parents.
The wish for parental help was especially apparent among those who had enjoyed historically close relationships with their parents, like the following nineteen-year-old African American man:
RESPONDENT: I couldn’t tell my mom about this cute guy I had met. . . . And I couldn’t tell her about the clubs I was going to. I couldn’t be me around my parents.
INTERVIEWER: That really mattered to you, why do you think it mattered?
RESPONDENT: Because they are my family, they played a big part in my life and in what was going on. I wanted them to be a part of everything that was going on, so it would be easy for me to talk to them.
The following African American young woman and her mother had a somewhat distant relationship before she came out, mostly due to the mother’s history of drug addiction. Nevertheless, she still longed for her mother’s comfort as she dealt with the trials and tribulations of coping with girlfriend problems: “I was having problems in the relationship, and [they were] just really, really bothering me, and I felt like I couldn’t talk to nobody else. It’s just like she could give me some encouragement, some words of wisdom; you know, maybe something that she could say to help me not feel like that at the time.” What is interesting and also a bit sad is that her mother always yearned for a closer relationship but felt especially distant from her daughter during the time immediately prior to her coming out.
Other gay youth were agitated and anxious in anticipation of telling their parents and did not view them as potential sources of support. Despite the progress in societal attitudes, they knew their parents would have a hard time with their sexual orientation. Mom might watch the Ellen DeGeneres Show on television, but that did not mean she would be happy if her daughter was a lesbian or her son was gay. Nevertheless, a month or so before they disclosed their sexual orientation to their parents, these children felt they would inevitably have to do so because they could not deal with the pressure of hiding something so important from the people closest to them. However, they dreaded their reactions. This twenty-four-year-old Latino man, a gay activist, described:
I just didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know if my parents were going to disown me or there would be a lot of yelling and stuff like that. I also wondered about how other people would see me once they knew what was going on . . . and how I would see myself, because things were changing for me already. I didn’t know if I would like the person I was turning into. So I got depressed a lot.
Perhaps the feelings of these respondents are best summed up by the following twenty-year-old woman: “I was just afraid of just losing everything, just being on my own.” And this eighteen-year-old Latino gay male: “Well, because it’s like every child obviously questions, ‘Is my mother going to still love me?’”
Families in the precoming-out subphase were typified by nervous, lonely youth and concerned but bewildered parents. As stated previously, late adolescence is a time when boundaries around the family system grow more flexible so children can develop independent ideas and relationships outside the family. In a reciprocal fashion, youth become increasingly autonomous and are assisted and supported by parents to do so. However, because they are not yet adults, they still need parental support. Adolescents and young adults may still look to parents to be sounding boards, confidants, and sources of advice. Parents are called upon to support their children’s growing independence by allowing them more freedom, including more time away from the family, but are also expected to provide structure for and limits to their children’s behavior.
What the findings of this study seem to suggest is that, like their heterosexual counterparts (and perhaps even more so), gay youth feel they need their parents’ help and support through this tricky developmental phase—and this issue gets played out in the coming-out process. Even though we now take the presence of lesbians and gays for granted in our society, it is not the same as understanding and accepting a close friend, employee, or family member. It could be argued that to realize and admit one is gay in a society that still stigmatizes homosexuality takes a great deal of emotional strength, self-confidence, and an ability to think independently. However, the parent-child connection remains critical, and the anticipated risk of disrupting it is what makes this subphase of family adjustment so fraught with anxiety.
There are two ways therapists might encounter family members trying to cope with the challenges of the precoming-out subphase. Youth might seek out a mental health practitioner or school counselor for individual assistance. Parents who are disturbed by sudden changes in their children’s behaviors and family relationships might also pursue professional help. In both cases the practitioner should take a cautious approach.
Immediately before the children came out to their parents, most of them were experiencing symptoms of anxiety and depression consequential to recognizing their sexual orientation and realizing they would eventually need to tell their parents. They anticipated that their parents would have a difficult time adjusting to this news, and some worried that they would be ejected from their homes. These combined worries and pressures contributed to their ongoing feelings of loneliness, isolation, depression, and anxiety.
It is possible that a gay adolescent in the precoming-out subphase who is considering coming out to her parents might approach a psychologist, social worker, counselor, teacher in a college, high school, or even a middle school seeking relief, support, and advice. She might choose to disclose her sexual orientation to the counselor, who will be called upon to be supportive and assist the youth in coping with sexual concerns, romantic attractions, and issues related to stigma, such as harassment from heterosexual peers. Under these circumstances, a professional helper might be the first adult to whom the young person has come out, so it is essential that he, first and foremost, communicate nonjudgmental acceptance of the client and her sexuality. Counselors need to validate the youth’s feelings regarding actual or anticipated experiences of stigma, prejudice, and discrimination.
But what about the counselor or teacher’s feelings? As stated before, therapists, teachers, and other human service professionals are products of a society that still does not fully understand or accept homosexuality. Some may feel that homosexuality is wrong, sinful, or believe gays and lesbians are destined for unhappy lives. Others may have a mature and comfortable understanding that normal sexuality takes many forms. They may accept that gays and lesbians are not sick and believe they can be happy—however, they still may harbor conscious or unconscious misgivings and prejudices.
When confronted with a real live gay child in their charge, therapists’ unresolved feelings may come to the fore. For example, they might find themselves pushing uncertain clients to disclose to others without recognizing or addressing their ambivalence. Alternatively, the counselors’ own fears and prejudices might lead them to discourage their clients from exploring their homosexuality or identifying as gay, telling them, instead, “You are too young to know what you are” or “How do you know unless you have sex with someone of the opposite sex?”
As I state at the end of chapter 1, helpers can’t be blamed for having negative emotional reactions to homosexuality. However, professionals are expected to find ways to identify and examine these feelings as well as minimize or eradicate them so they do not interfere with their work with these vulnerable clients. At the end of the previous chapter, I described actions that therapists and professionals can take to try to identify and ameliorate their prejudices, and these methods can prove beneficial for therapists working with gay clients and their families in every stage of the adjustment process.
Although there is no available research that identifies the best therapeutic practices for this population, there is a growing body of clinical literature suggesting the utility of various individual psychotherapy models (e.g., Appleby and Anastas 1998; Davies and Neal 2000; Van Wormer, Wells, and Boes 2000). I have described elsewhere how the use of cognitive behavioral therapy might be beneficial for clients coping with the psychological effects of stigma (LaSala 2006). Whatever model therapists choose, they need to understand that lesbians and gays absorb societal prejudices, as we all do. For example, a young lesbian client might reveal to her therapist that she thinks her sexual orientation is sick or perverted or that, because she is a lesbian, she is destined for a lonely, unhappy life. Naturally, such thinking would lead a young gay woman to feel depressed and anxious.
The therapist or counselor’s role is to help lesbian and gay clients see that such thoughts are inaccurate internalizations of societal messages, also showing them how to replace such negative self-talk with realistic ideas. For example, the practitioner could help the client understand that homosexuality is not a mental illness and that there are many gay and lesbian people who live happy, productive lives. As stated in the last chapter, people protect themselves emotionally from the damage of stigma by externalizing the cause of their mistreatment—”They have the problem not us, they are narrow minded bigots.” One way to do this is for gays and lesbians to adopt values that protect against stigma, such as those articulated in queer theory in which society’s restrictive norms governing sexuality and gender are rejected (Jagose 1996; Warner 1999). Whatever type of individual psychotherapy the clinician utilizes, the goals of treatment should include helping clients replace negative internalizations with more realistic ideas about lesbian and gay people and assisting them to find ways to cope and shield themselves psychologically from the ravages of stigma.
“SHOULD I TELL MY PARENTS?” In addition to pursuing symptom relief, young people might also seek guidance as to whether or not to tell their parents they are gay. Therapists and counselors might be tempted to believe that when parents are apprised of their clients’ sexual orientation symptom relief inevitably follows. An unknowing practitioner might also underestimate client fear as well as potential parental disapproval and therefore encourage the client to come out before anyone in the family is prepared to deal with the possible fallout.
It is important to remember that despite recent signs of (slowly) growing societal acceptance, parents still react negatively when they first learn of their children’s sexual orientation, and many gay and lesbian youth are still ejected from their homes by parents who cannot accept them (Wilber, Ryan, and Marksamer 2006). The not in my backyard (NIMBY) phenomenon might be evident, whereby parents may believe gays and lesbians deserve the same rights as anyone else, but would not easily accept gay members of their own families.
Professionals hoping to assist young people who are contemplating coming out to their parents face a difficult dilemma. On the one hand, if they prematurely encourage these vulnerable youth to come out, their clients might face potentially painful consequences such as parental rejection before they are ready. On the other hand, counselors who strongly discourage their clients from telling their parents, because they want to protect them from parental rejection, might inadvertently impart the message that their clients’ sexual orientations are shameful and therefore must be kept hidden. This could perpetuate and even attenuate their feelings of anxiety, depression, and stigmatization.
Because of the possibility of parents’ negative reactions and the likelihood of parental rejection, the counselor or therapist needs to proceed slowly and cautiously when working with a young man or woman who wishes to come out. Based on these (and other) findings, it is recommended she carefully explore the young person’s options and help him prepare to face the likely consequences of any planned actions. For example, if the young gay male is contemplating coming out, is he prepared to deal with the most negative outcome?
As we have seen in the last chapter, youth might mistakenly overestimate their parents’ suspicion that they are gay. Despite their belief that they have been giving off clear signals, once they come out, young lesbians and gays might be surprised to find that they have caught their parents completely off guard. How will they deal with negative parental reactions? What if the client is ejected from the home? Does she have a place to go? What if parents with-draw financial support for college—are alternative sources of aid available? Even if parents do not fully reject their children by ejecting them from their homes and cutting off financial support, it is likely they will be disappointed and disapproving, as we shall see. Does the young person have a network to rely on for physical and emotional support in case parents are rejecting, disapproving, or simply unavailable?
Counselors and other helpers need to help the young people anticipate these reactions, assess their available resources, and develop workable contingency plans and coping strategies. Before they come out, young gays and lesbians should have plans for an alternative place to live, at least temporarily, just in case, and they should also know where to get financial assistance in the event that their parents cut off financial support. They should also identify those they can rely on for emotional support as they weather the potentially stormy period immediately following disclosure to their parents.
A point that cannot be overemphasized is that counselors, as they explore these issues, need to be clear they are not discouraging children from being who they are. Young people who have been struggling to come to terms with their sexuality can be very sensitive to any communication that indicates their sexual orientation is sick or somehow wrong—particularly from the first adults to whom they disclose, which may be a therapist or school counselor. In fact, the clinician will want to make a point of praising and reinforcing their clients’ efforts to come to terms with their sexuality to the extent of wanting to share such information with their parents.
However, it is helpful to balance such messages with practical advice about how the young gay men and women can cope with and even shield themselves from the disapproval of friends, family, and society. Throughout their lives, lesbians and gays must find ways to manage stigma and cope with disapproval. They must also continually assess their environments for safety and potential acceptance as they decide to whom to come out. It is perhaps never too soon for young lesbians and gays to begin to develop these important survival skills.
Like parents in the family sensitization phase, parents at the precoming-out subphase might seek therapy for the child’s difficult behavior or mental health symptoms. The parents may notice sudden changes in the child’s behavior or mood, more dramatic and acute than they might see during the family sensitization phase. However, as during this last phase, parents might be ignorant as to its cause. They know something is wrong; they just don’t know what. Of course, as in the family sensitization phase, it is virtually impossible to help the family cope with a problem whose scope and source is unknown.
However, it is also possible that the therapist who is seeing the family or the young person alone might know about the youth’s sexual orientation when the parents do not. Of course, no ethically sensitive therapist would repeat what he is told in private, and this practice is particularly important in this situation. Nevertheless, the therapist who knows about the child’s sexual orientation and has a good clinical relationship with the parents has several helpful advantages. First of all, the clinician might be sufficiently familiar with the family to have some idea how parents might react if they knew their son or daughter was gay. The practitioner can use this knowledge to decide whether the family is ready to know. Second, with a therapeutic relationship in place the parents will have a ready resource to turn to once they learn that their child is gay. The therapist can monitor the family reactions and be ready to assist parents if the family goes into an emotional crisis.
If parents suspect their child is gay, they might ask the therapist if she knows. In this circumstance it may be tempting for the therapist to encourage the parents to confront the child and ask. However, once again, caution is strongly advised. It is always a good first step to get a sense of the parents’ feelings and ideas about their child’s sexuality. What do they know about homosexuality? How would they handle the news that their daughter or son was lesbian or gay? The therapist should be able to predict with reasonable certainty how parents will react before encouraging them to move forward, because, as we shall see in the following section and in the next chapter, learning that one’s son or daughter is gay or lesbian can be a devastating shock for parents, even if they have suspected it for some time.
Eventually, the pressure of having to single-handedly manage the challenges inherent in recognizing one is gay becomes too much—the balloon of secrecy is ready to burst and the time for waiting and hiding is over.
For many of the youth, their powerful feelings of distress, described in the first section of this chapter, propelled them to come out to their parents. Again, considering the average age of the young gays and lesbians in this sample when they came out (seventeen, ranging from fourteen to twenty-one), it is understandable that they were overwhelmed with the challenges inherent in realizing a gay identity. They also felt isolated handling such a big burden without their parents’ help or support. As Joelle, the previously quoted nineteen year old, recalled:
I was really struggling internally to kind of come to grips with what was going on and how I felt about everything and how that defined me and what I should do about it . . . and how to seek support because I felt very alone . . . I didn’t know how to talk about it openly . . . I was really depressed because I felt very isolated. I wasn’t quite sure that I wasn’t the only one and I didn’t have anyone to talk to. Kind of just the depression where you believe that you will always be alone and no one is going to love you so you feel a little hopeless in general . . . I was struggling so much that I just thought I would die if I had no one to share it with . . . if I didn’t get any kind of reaction to know whether this was OK or not . . . I just couldn’t handle it anymore inside of myself. I was just really going through a tough time. So, she [Mom] was the first person I said anything to about it.
Her mother remembers her daughter being upset when she told her, however she stated that Joelle came out to her as bisexual: “I guess when she . . . we were driving in the car, coming north on Route 27, and it was in the middle of one of her scenes, meaning the crying and the screaming, and she was upset about something, but she just kind of like turned to me and said, ‘What would you say if you found out I am bisexual?’ or something like that.” The strategy of coming out first as bisexual and later as gay or lesbian, employed by Joelle and other respondents, is discussed in chapter 7.
Chauncey, the twenty-year-old Haitian man quoted in the previous chapter, experienced a great deal of peer harassment, but also enjoyed a close relationship with his mother, Marie. He came out to her a year prior to their interviews in a state of emotional upset: “At that time, all that grief and all that living a lie just accumulated, and I just felt heavy, you know, I just wanted to release and be myself.” Marie remembered how distressed her son was when he came out. He told me, “Mommy, I cannot hide myself no more because sometimes, for a long time, since I was a teenager I’ve known I was gay. But I was pretending because I didn’t know how you would react.”
This twenty-two-year-old African American woman came out less than a year before the time of her interview:
I was having problems in the relationship, and it was just really, really bothering me, and I felt like I couldn’t talk to nobody else, so I talked to her . . . like four months ago . . . She just said, “I know, stinker.” She said, “I knew already.” But she said, “That’s your life, and, if that’s how you choose to live it, I accept whatever you do. You’re grown.”
Her mother also recalled: “She was going through some kind of problems with the relationship, or whatever. And she was hurt, and I guess she felt like she needed somebody to talk to. I guess, you know, she finally decided to come and talk to me.”
As stated earlier, feeling anxious about hiding this important part of themselves was a primary reason many chose to come out to their parents. However, not all the young respondents came out in a desperate attempt to reduce their overwhelming distress. Some were calm and mostly adjusted to their sexual orientation along with the challenges it presented—they simply did not want to continue to hide their sexuality from their parents. These respondents believed that as they developed a lesbian or gay identity coming out was an important rite of passage. What is apparent in these coming-out stories are the young people’s efforts to balance their growing autonomy with their desire to stay connected to parents while at the same time trying to figure how to manage the parental distress they anticipated the disclosure would bring.
As recalled by this twenty-four-year-old woman:
Well, I felt like I had been hiding it from her [Mom] for a good nine months, almost a year at that point. I didn’t want to keep doing that. She had been someone I had always talked to about things . . . but I had never had something before that I felt I couldn’t tell her. . . . This was something I felt that she should know, but I hadn’t told her.
Tony (twenty-four), who was previously quoted, was apprehensive about telling his parents, but by no means did he feel compelled to do so because he felt distraught:
And I told them because, despite all the complex give and take with my dad and everything, I’ve always been very close to my parents. And I didn’t want to have this as something hidden from them. I wanted them to be a part of it. I wanted to be able to bring my boyfriend home. It was clearly something I was going to be trying. I didn’t want them to not know about it.
This twenty-one-year-old lesbian who was a college student and worked as a bartender recalled:
When I was away at college, you know, I was becoming more open about it and I still hadn’t told everybody in my life, but I was telling more and more friends. And I had two close girlfriends there. They were straight, but we hung out with a lot of gay guys. And we were always talking about stuff and we’d go to meetings, and it was, I think it was National Coming Out Day . . . and I just decided I wanted to tell her. I was just getting upset that she didn’t know because we were so close. So I called her from school and told her.
This next twenty-three-year-old man recalled:
[It was] that August when I first went to college, the orientation for freshman, that’s when I made the affirmation that I’m gay and I just told myself I’m not going back to faking it or, you know, putting up an act to myself . . . I am gay and that’s it, and to me when I actually said it out loud, that affirmed it. And I told myself, “OK, now the hard part is telling her,” because I know how she felt about it and how I was raised to think about that, so that was the hardest thing. So it took me three months, you know, to just get the courage and tell her.
Daughters were more likely than sons to come out to their parents because they were in a relationship, or about to begin one, and they wanted to share that information with their parents. As remembered by this twenty-three-year-old young woman: “So that happened because I had met someone who I had really strong feelings for at the time, and I really wanted to share that with my mom—I didn’t want to make it a secret. I had a huge crush and wanted to share that.” Also this twenty-one-year-old lesbian:
I was always talking about the girl I worked with. And I felt like, since my mom always knows so much about me, I felt like I was hiding a part of myself from her. So we were actually on our way down to vacation. My mom and I were in one car and my dad was in his car following us, because we had luggage and my dog. So I told her first, and she told him. I was always talking about the girl and I just wanted to be open. I was seventeen then, after my junior year, the summer before senior year. I just felt like we have such a close relationship that I would just be open with her. It just kind of came up, I was talking about the girl. And I was like, “You know how I am always talking about her and all this stuff? Well, I have a crush on her.”
Being in a new relationship and wanting to share it was particularly salient for lesbians, however, one young man also gave this as a reason to come out:
I told her because my boyfriend at the time and my roommate at the time, who was also gay, were coming for Thanksgiving . . . I wanted her to know. I wanted her to meet him as my boyfriend, because she had met him before as a friend. It was important to me since I was moving to California with him . . . So I went with my mom to spend the day with her in Atlantic City and I told her on the way back.
Sometimes friends or knowledgeable relatives encouraged the young lesbian and gay respondents to tell their parents. This twenty-two year old became romantically involved with a young woman and wanted to come out. A relative gave her the push she needed:
And my sister-in-law Julie would call me and say, “Listen. Your mom’s getting real close to knowing. You should tell her, you know, unless you want her to find out some other way.” So one day my mom and I had a fight, and during the argument, at the end, she was, “Well I just don’t understand you!” and blah, blah. And I am like, “Yes, well, I’m a lesbian. Yes I am gay . . . and, another thing, stop bothering Julie. If you have a problem with it, well, too bad.”
Soon after she told her mother, she felt quite strongly that her father, who had long been divorced from her mother, needed to know:
I went to lunch with him. I couldn’t figure out how to tell him. We were sitting at lunch, and I was sweating a little bit and I am like, “How the fuck am I going to tell him?” . . . It’s not even so much about his reaction . . . I was like, I am not going to come out and be like, “So how is work? Good. I’m good. I’m gay.” Like there was just no break in the conversation to even have me bring it up. So he was like, “So how are things with your mother?” and that sparked an idea in my head, and I said, “Well, she is kind of giving me a hard time about somebody I’m dating.” And he was, “Well, what is the problem?” And I said, “I was dating this guy, but now I’m dating this new person that she kind of has a problem with.” And he was like, “What is the guy’s name?” And I said “Jen.” And he didn’t miss a beat. He was like, “All right, well, she’s your mother and you have got to do your thing with her.”
What is interesting is that, according to her father, she first told him she was bisexual. Several of the gay and lesbian youth respondents, including Joelle, reported initially telling their parents that they were bisexual as a way to try to break parents in slowly to the news they were gay. They then later informed their parents they were gay or lesbian. This did not seem to work as it was intended: the parents would get upset when they found out their children were bisexual, then once again when they found out they were gay for sure. Several of the youth in this study did self-identify as bisexual, and this topic is further discussed in chapter 7.
Two of the youth had attempted to commit suicide immediately before they came out to their parents. For these respondents, their anxiety and stress over being gay and feeling the need to come out was too much to bear. Mike, the twenty-five year old who described the end of a friendship with a male crush earlier in this chapter, offers a compelling example of how the confusion and shame that comes with realizing one is gay could lead to thoughts of self-destruction:
RESPONDENT: I think I was going to do it on Valentine’s Day originally because I was still a teenager and I had that little sense of drama going. I thought it would be a big “fuck you” protest to the whole heterosexual establishment. I got a knife at ShopRite first and then I went to church because I had long since lost my Catholic beliefs, and I had some type of very passive-aggressive behavior, but I was in lingering fear of hell happening—that was a very big part of it too. My religion teacher at school convinced us all that sex was going to get us into hell and we had to control ourselves and all that.
So I went to a priest because I wanted absolution before I did it, and I basically just confessed all this stuff. I was in complete turmoil. I think he was trying to comfort me . . . but he really wasn’t in the position to help me out, and I just held the knife to my wrists and cut . . .
INTERVIEWER: What did you confess to him?
RESPONDENT: Oh God. I probably just confessed everything, I felt like a horrible person and like I was trying to change for the longest time and it just didn’t work and . . . I don’t know, I just felt like a pile of shit, basically. And I confessed to ever having offended God and being angry at God. So, I held it down to my wrists . . . I just kind of opened up. They were seeing, underneath the skin, the veins and a little blood and stuff. It was really weird. And he [the priest] kind of freaked, obviously. And he got a towel to hold on it and told me to put pressure on it. And I just kind of sat there and did what I was told. And then they drove me to the hospital . . . they stitched the wound and my parents came in and I just kind of lost it.
I had left a suicide note at home. Just basically saying I just didn’t want to live . . . I told them why. I told them I had nothing left to lose at this point. I don’t know, maybe I felt like I could only come out if there was so much else happening at the time that it seemed inconsequential. Maybe somewhere subconsciously that is really what I had in mind. Like I said, if I really wanted to die I could have died, but I didn’t really want to. I wanted my life to change.
After an explosive family argument during which his brother called him a faggot, Jay took an overdose of pills and was hospitalized on an inpatient psychiatry unit. While in the hospital, he told his mother, Adele, who had previously suspected, “It’s true; I am gay.”
For the parents of these young people who had severe psychiatric symptoms, worry for their children’s well-being overshadowed their disappointment over their children’s homosexuality. Mike’s mother Ann recalled yelling at her son in the hospital, “You were going to kill yourself over THAT? That’s all?” Her main concern was that her son would recover both physically and emotionally, but she was also secretly mourning that she would not have grandchildren. Currently, Ann is a member of PFLAG, a support group for parents of lesbians and gays, and is a regular speaker at high schools throughout New Jersey. When audience members ask her how her son came out to her, she tells them he wrote a note. She never talks about her son’s suicide attempt, as she does not want, in any way, to impart the idea that suicidal behavior before coming out to one’s parents is a good strategy.
A striking finding in this study is that, in a large proportion of these families, children did not come out directly to their fathers but rather mothers told fathers. Of the forty-seven children who had an ongoing relationship with their fathers, forty-one reported that their fathers knew of their sexuality, but only twenty-six had told them directly. In the rest of these families (fifteen), the children’s mothers told their fathers. Randy, aged nineteen and a college student in a small city in New Jersey, remembered: “He found out a couple of days after—he said my mom had to tell him—that she couldn’t keep it a secret and everything.” When asked why he was reluctant to tell his father himself, he described his fear: “Because my dad is the nicest guy in the world, but when he wants to be strong and powerful, he can be.” His mother described her son’s reluctance to come out to his father:
I said, “I know, I said I’ve suspected for quite some time,” and then I said to him that he should tell his father, and he said, “Mom, I can’t tell him,” and he didn’t want his brothers to know, and at that point I respected his wishes. I said to him, “I won’t say anything, but you have to tell Daddy,” and he said, “I can’t, I can’t, Mom.” And I said well, “OK, I’ll talk to Daddy first, but you’re going to have to sit down and talk to Daddy.” So I did tell my husband without Randy there.
This next young woman, Wanda, aged twenty-four, recalled:
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 after I told her, she told me, “I mentioned this to your father, and he said, You’re absolutely crazy—there’s no way this could be going on.’”
Her father, Frank, a butcher, who was quoted in the last chapter, remembered: “My wife was in this mood because she wasn’t saying anything. Then she just started one night in bed—she started crying and whimpering and weeping, and I’m like, ‘Now what, now what?’”
One possible explanation of this not uncommon phenomenon was that the gay and lesbian respondents grew up feeling more distant from their fathers than their mothers. Because of this history of distance, youth were very unsure how their fathers would react, and being unsure made them anxious and afraid to come out to them. Furthermore, in some families, this distance was compounded by a history of father-child discord that left the young people even more reluctant to come out to their fathers.
In most of the families in which mothers told the fathers, there was little subsequent discussion between the youth and their fathers, leaving the youth anxious and unsure as to exactly how their fathers felt about their sexual orientation. Joelle recalled:
My father knows now. . . . I only became aware of that recently in that I never trusted him enough to tell him since age sixteen. At age probably like nineteen and a half I asked my mom whether he knew or not, and she just told me, “Yeah, I told him like a year and a half ago.” And he had just never said anything to me about it.
This daughter, whose parents were divorced but who lived with her mother, recalled how frightened she was to tell her father and begged her mother to keep her sexual orientation a secret:
I was really afraid of how he would react, I am not really sure why. I can’t give you a very good reason for it now. I think just largely because I hadn’t shared anything personal with him in years—if ever. He and I did fight sometimes, and it was horrible, because he is very passive aggressive, and I inherited that from him or learned that from him. So the two of us fighting is just terrible. So, when I told my mom, I made her promise not to tell him, which was very hard on her. She kept the secret for several months and finally said, “I feel that I have to tell him.” She told him, and he didn’t acknowledge to me at all that he now knew. I am sure he knew all along because my girlfriend was sleeping over. Recently, he asked, “So Nora is your girlfriend?” I said yes, and that was it.
Women are traditionally in charge of the emotional climate of the family and are also often the ones who manage communication between members (Kirkman, Rosenthal, and Feldman 2002); thus it makes sense that the main discussion on this issue took place between mothers and children. However, perhaps because of the distance between fathers and their children, the fathers’ reactions were an unknown for some of the youth. Not knowing might shield the children from facing paternal disapproval, which they feared, but also might make them more anxious.
Though most of the youth in this study disclosed their sexuality to their parents without any prompting, in a third of the families parents confronted their children upon encountering clear evidence they were gay. It seemed as if the signs were so strong that parents could no longer ignore them.
For several of the boys, the parents found gay porn on the family computers, which led them to confront their sons. Allen’s wife Janet and son Robert were previously discussed in chapter 1. It should be noted that Allen, a civil engineer, had an older gay son from a previous marriage. He described his discovery:
I was on a business trip. I had my laptop and I was on the Internet and it became clear to me that somebody had been on my laptop because there was gay pornography . . . and, you know, I understood the fascination with pornography. That didn’t surprise me. Even that it was gay, that didn’t even really register to me. I mean, look, he has a gay brother [from this father’s previous marriage], he could be curious. I didn’t have any real reaction to it. But I told Janet, and she basically confronted him that night, and after he initially denied it he came back to her that same night and said, “Yes, I am gay.”
Janet recalled:
I learned because my husband was away on a business trip, and he had the laptop with him and he said that someone had been looking at gay pornography on the computer. And I knew that Nick [the father’s gay son from a previous marriage] hadn’t been around and I thought, “Well who could that be?” And I just felt my blood run cold. . . . Robert was here [at home at the time], so I went upstairs, he was watching television, and I said to him, “Robert, if you were gay would you tell me?” And he sort of started huffing and puffing and said, “Oh, now you want to know about my sexual orientation?” and then he closed the door and said, “Yes, Mommy, I’m gay.”
And Robert:
So he [Dad] had found evidence on his computer or whatever. He was on a business trip and he told my mother on the phone, and she literally came into a room in which I was dancing around to the opening of the musical Chicago, so this is just emphasizing how strange it was that they really, I don’t think, suspected . . . So I turned off the music, and she asked about it . . . and at first I was like . . . I mean it took maybe five minutes. What was I supposed to say? It was my sister’s? She was eleven. There was really no way out of it, so I said, “Mom, I am gay.” And that was quite a shock to both of us. The second I said that, I couldn’t believe I had said that.
Immediately afterward he confirmed the news with his father:
That was a tough day. I think I was worried . . . I knew that he wouldn’t react violently . . . I knew that neither of them would hurt me physically or that either of them would reject me or write me out of the will or whatever . . . but like . . . I guess I was sorry because I disappointed my mother. My dad already had one gay son. I didn’t feel like he needed another. I was sorry that I couldn’t be for them the kind of image that they had always seen me as when I grew up. That was the hardest part of coming out.
This next mother, Gloria, an actress and the mother of Noah, a twenty-two-year-old young man who was an aspiring actor as well, also found computer pornography before she confronted her son two years ago:
This is why I asked him. Because I was in his bedroom, the computer we had in the house at the time . . . I don’t remember what I was trying to do, but a friend of mine was here who is much more computer knowledgeable than I, and we put on the computer and there was a disk of male nudity. And my friend said, “This doesn’t mean anything. Kids go through all sorts of stages.” But I thought, “I don’t know.” Anyway, I was going up to see him, and I said to him, sitting over pizza, thinking that my friend was right, “You know I found this disk in your room . . .” And he said with a very big smile, “Mom, I am gay.” I said, “No, you are not gay. Some people think they are gay because there is a question of envy of people of the same sex and some people think they are gay because they are going through stages . . .” And he said, “No, Mom, I am gay.”
It seems as if the computer has replaced “under the mattress” as a place for a young male to stash his pornography. It might be tempting and reasonable to wonder if these young men simply did not know where the delete button was on their computers or how to erase their search histories or where to hide their DVDs. Or perhaps they were just a bit careless—not an unheard of characteristic among adolescents and young adults.
Parents of lesbians also found indisputable evidence. Martha found out Jennifer was a lesbian by discovering her diary when she was fourteen years old:
It was a terrible way. Rules in the house were anything left downstairs was fair game. This was how I got them to pick up their Barbies and things when they were little. So I would confiscate things. Or, if one of the other girls took it, it was, “Well, it is not my fault, you didn’t put it away.” Well, she left her journal out and I read it.
Even though Martha was one of the rare parents who was very accepting right from the start, her daughter felt devastated and overexposed and distanced from her mother afterward, which is described in the next chapter.
The badly hidden evidence could be attributable to teen carelessness; however, another explanation is possible. Although no respondents reported doing so on purpose, failing to secure a diary or leaving a trail of naked men for parents to follow may have been the means to let their parents know “accidentally on purpose.”
Consider the report of the son of the previously quoted mother who found the disk of male nudity:
She found the all-reliable Internet porn (laughing). Which I am sure I wasn’t trying too hard to cover up because I really wanted to come out to her and I am a total coward when it comes to coming out because I am not out to my father, as you may have noticed. So she asked about it, and I told her I was gay.
It is probable that young respondents think being discovered in this way takes the coming-out issue out of their hands. Being “caught” and confronted saves the young person the difficult task of having to plan when and how to tell his parents this potentially distressing information. In the end, for some respondents, admitting to something was easier than announcing it unprompted.
For other males, risky behavior led to parents worrying and then confronting their children. This next mother recalled becoming understandably terrified when she discovered that her teenage son Harry was leaving the house in the middle of the night to meet men. She stated:
In the middle of the night he was leaving the townhouse. I found that out one night when I was sleeping, and it was like a spirit woke me up. I swear, this voice wakes me up and said, “Get up! Get up now and go downstairs.” I got up and went downstairs and looked. The patio door was still open a crack, and I saw a car in the driveway. And we live next to St. Michael’s Church with a big parking lot. And [my son] got into this car, and they drove off. I was insane. I woke up my husband. I said, “Quick, you have to go get him, he just got into a strange car, it is the middle of the night!”
My husband went looking, and he couldn’t find him. And then he came home. I got in bed and I prayed the rosary and asked the Blessed Virgin to keep him safe and bring him home safely to me. And, when he came back, I was in bed, my husband was in bed—we were sitting there waiting for him. He came up the steps, he walked in the room, looked at the two of us . . . and he said, “I am gay.” And he turned around and he walked out. I remember just turning to my husband and I started crying, and I remember exactly what I said. I just said, “This is not going to be an easy life for him.” That was it. That was what my heart was breaking about, that it was not going to be an easy life for him. And he has not made it easy.
Harry, now twenty, did not remember his past behavior as dangerous:
I was just chatting with people [online]. It was cool and something I didn’t know about and I was having fun with it. I had made plans to meet someone. I think that night was when I was supposed to go out to meet someone, and she caught me trying to sneak out. And, of course, afterwards there was like a ton of questions. What were you doing, who were you with?
Eula, an African American mother living in an urban setting with her son Andrew (nineteen), discovered he was gay when she began to receive threatening phone calls from men in their neighborhood. Much to her shock and terror, she found out that her son was passing himself off as a pretty young woman and exchanging contact information with men on the street who thought they were getting the phone number of a beautiful girl. Once word got out that he was a male, these men became furious. Their threats pushed Eula to confront her son who then admitted he was gay.
Discovering a child is doing something dangerous or potentially risky is, arguably, the worst way a parent can learn a child is gay. Parents naturally worry about their children, even under the best of circumstances, so to see their children putting themselves in harm’s way is not only excruciating but can also interfere with their acceptance of their children’s sexual orientation, as we will see in subsequent chapters.
As stated earlier, some parents of lesbians noticed that their daughters were involved in particularly close friendships with other girls. However, once the relationship became so strong it was impossible to ignore, parents confronted their daughters. This mother recalled: “There was a girl from high school who kept calling who I knew was a lesbian. And she kept calling and calling the house, and Tina was talking to her and talking to her, like laughing and giggling and that kind of behavior. And, I don’t know, all of sudden it just clicked, and I asked her.” Her daughter Tina remembered:
There’s this girl Anna, and she was really nice, she’s been friends with me, and this was, like, when I started, like, coming out to my closest friends and stuff and kind of testing the waters. And I would talk to her about it because she had been out. And it’s really hard, because I was in high school so I really couldn’t be out. And I would talk to her about it, and we got closer. And so she started calling my house—and I was thinking she was cool. And my mom and I were at the dermatologist, and she was like, “Who is this Anna girl who keeps calling? I’m like, “Oh, she’s just a girl from school.” and she’s like, “Wait, isn’t she the lesbian? And I’m like, “Yeah.” And in the dermatologist’s office my mother is like, “Is there something you want to tell me?” And I’m like, “No,” because I was not ready at all.
And then, like, I remember we were done at the office and she was, like, “Are you a lesbian?” And I’m like, “No, I’m bisexual.” And then she became a big mess and started yelling at me. And she’s like, “Well, how do you know?!”
As in many cases, this mother told the girl’s father after she found out.
It breaks a parent’s heart to see a child suffer—and, as previously described, during the precoming-out subphase many children are indeed suffering. Parents’ worries over their children’s emotional states led them to confront their children, pushing them to talk about what was troubling them. An African American mother, who at the time of her interview was a returning college student, remembered her daughter’s extreme distress when she was a senior in high school. One day she finally confronted her:
I got in the car. I was like, “Keshia, what’s wrong?” “Oh, Mommy, I have something to tell you, and I don’t know if I should.” I said, “Whatever it is, you can tell me; I don’t care whatever it is. If it’s upsetting you this much, you have to tell me. And after you tell me, whatever it is, we will figure out how to deal with it.” She said, “I’m gay.” I guess I wasn’t prepared for the “I’m gay.” And I felt like the whole outside spun around . . .
Her daughter recalled her mother confronting her, even though she was planning to tell her:
I don’t know why I felt like this is the time to tell her—it was just that if I don’t say something I’m going to explode. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. So she comes home from the library one day, and I just started crying, and she said, “Keshia, what’s wrong with you?” . . . and then, at that moment, when she said that, I didn’t want to tell her anymore, and I was like, “Nothing, nothing, I’m just going to go to work.” And she was like, “No, what’s wrong? Tell me!” So I was like, “Uh, Mom? I’m gay.” And she was hugging me at the time because I was crying so much, and she grabbed my shoulders and she pushed me back like this and she just looked at me . . . I don’t know if it was fear or shock or what, and she just looked at me and she hugged me again and she said; “No, no, no, it’s just a phase, you know? We just moved here and you’re going through all this different stuff. We’ll talk about it when you get home from work . . .” So that’s how she found out.
Charlotte, who described her close relationship with her twenty-five-year-old son M. C. in the previous chapter, recalled how she confronted him five years ago when he was still in college:
I was concerned because you know your child. You know they’re unhappy. I thought perhaps it was loneliness, not having made a lot of friends at college. So I was aware for quite some time he was unhappy—often morose. We’d speak to him on the phone, and he never really indicated he had a specific problem, but he was just not happy. Anyway, he came for a visit. He was playing the piano. And it was just like a weekend of down and morbid music. And I had been asking him throughout the weekend, “Is there something bothering you? Let’s talk about it.” And then he started like making leading remarks. I don’t remember what they were, but finally I remember I walked over to him. I said; “M. C., I want you to stop playing the piano. Something is troubling you. I can see you aren’t happy.” And he would make remarks, “Well, I’m miserable. I’m miserable.” I said, “You have to tell me what it is. If you’re in trouble, I’m here to help. I’m your mom. I love you. You’re not going to go to bed tonight, you’re not going to leave this house until you sit down and tell me what it is.”
I had such a fear that he had some deep trouble. I could see he was deeply depressed. . . . I sat down. He sat down. He sort of indicated I might not like what he was going to talk about. And I, of course, reassured him. I did not think, “My son is gay, and he’s going to tell me.” I did not have that thought. Only like a fear that something was troubling him deeply and maybe he was in trouble. I didn’t know. He tells me he’s gay. Or he has reason to believe he’s gay.
M. C. remembered his despair and his mother’s confrontation:
I was in one of my depressed moods, to say the least. I was thinking about the future and feeling depressed that I could never really be open about my life. And it was one of those moments. I actually almost went into tears and she kind of forced it out of me. She kept asking me what was wrong. And she asked me, “Is it drugs?” I said no. I don’t know if she asked me if I got a girl pregnant or not. If it was, I said no. “Is it grades?” She was pressing me on it . . . We were sitting down on the sofa, and she was like, “Tell me.” I am like, “No! No!” And she keeps on, “Tell me! Tell me!” and kept on insisting on it. She was adamant about it, though not in an angry kind of way—a concerned kind of way, almost herself going to go into tears. Then I told her. I don’t think I looked at her face when I told her.
The findings of this study suggest that for some young gays the burdens of coping with stigma and loneliness can be overwhelming. Like the respondents in the study, lesbian and gay youth might feel deep and painful anguish and alienation—sometimes to the extent that they become suicidal. This maelstrom of angst can push children to come out to their parents in the hope of getting some relief. When upset children do not come out, parents who anxiously notice their children’s suffering might confront them—knowing something is wrong, yet taken by surprise when they discover the source of their children’s pain.
Other children might come out not because they are in distress but because they are tired of hiding something so important from the people they love and they believe it is the right thing to do. Most models of family development describe how the family of the young adult must find ways to balance their support of the child’s blossoming autonomy with the need to maintain family connections. By coming out to their parents because they wanted more honesty in their relationships, lesbians and gays are offering their families an opportunity to find a new healthy balance based on honesty.
The distinctly different way mothers and fathers interact with their children was evident among the families in this study and especially conspicuous in the coming-out subphase of the discovery stage. It seems that the primary communication in the family about the child’s sexual orientation occurred predominantly between the mother and child. In fact, many young respondents never told their fathers directly that they were gay or lesbian nor discussed their sexuality with them after they came out to their mothers. Do fathers first choose to be peripheral in the lives of their children, and the family then organizes itself around this choice? Or do families keep fathers distant—or is there a combination of both phenomena? Though this research never fully answers this question, evidence for a systemic explanation of the nature of father-child, mother-child relationships becomes apparent in later stages of the family adjustment trajectory. As we will see, this information will have implications for clinically engaging fathers and keeping them involved with their families.
How parents react and family relationships change following the discovery that a child is gay is the focus of the next chapter. Changes in the family due to the youth coming out as well as what helped or hurt parental adjustment will be described along with relevant clinical implications.