Man is not imprisoned by habit. Great changes in him can be wrought by crisis—once that crisis can be recognized, and understood.
—NORMAN COUSINS
IMAGINE HOW IT MUST FEEL TO BE A PARENT AND SUSPECT there is something horribly wrong with your child, something that is your fault that will rob you both of all your hopes and dreams. Because what you suspected was so awful, you tried desperately not to think of it and to talk yourself out of believing it—but it seemed to stay with you, always there in the back of your mind, like an ever present shadow.
Then imagine finding out that what you dreaded was actually true. Suddenly, your son or daughter is not who you think. You are feeling guilty that you ruined your child, sorrowful over the loss of a normal life, and afraid for her future. You try to shield your child from these feelings. You want to be supportive, but, still, this discovery and your feelings about it have overwhelmed you.
Now, imagine you are a young person who has just come out to your parents. You are relieved they finally know and grateful they did not throw you out of the house like other parents you’ve heard about. They are still your parents and, thank God, they still love you. Nevertheless, you feel ill at ease. You know they are distressed—you’re not sure as to all the reasons why and you’re not sure you want to know. You also feel overexposed—as if you had been stripped bare and are now being forced to walk around naked. It is far from easy to get used to the idea that someone so important now knows what has been your shameful secret for so long. To keep the peace as well as try and shield yourself—at least a little bit—you attempt to back off, keeping your distance.
In the precoming-out subphase the young respondents were the ones who were highly anxious and depressed. However, during the family discovery stage, which lasted anywhere from one to six months after the child came out, it was as if this emotional burden was suddenly removed from the child and thrust onto the parent. For the families in this study, the initial shock of learning that their child was gay was an event that at least temporarily, overwhelmed parents’ coping abilities. Over half described symptoms of depression, which included insomnia, extreme sadness, hopelessness, and anxiety, in the one to twelve months following the child’s coming out, while their daughters and sons experienced some combination of relief and discomfort.
Parents’ attempts to cope with and protect their children from their guilt and loss combined with their children’s wish to avoid overt conflict worked in tandem to create a temporary family distancing that typified parent-child relationships during the family discovery period.
Unfortunately the idea that bad parenting makes a child gay has persisted in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. So it is sadly logical that parents who reported the most emotional distress during the family discovery phase were those who felt to blame for their child’s homosexuality. In this sample of families, many mothers of sons worried that perhaps their children were gay because they loved them too much, and this idea is in keeping with traditional views of the genesis of homosexuality. In addition to feeling guilt, parents who struggled with self-blame were coping with an anticipatory courtesy stigma (Corrigan and Miller 2004)—they worried they would be blamed for their child’s homosexuality and would become targets of social disapproval themselves.
Susan and her son Mitch, both of whom have been quoted previously, recalled having a very close relationship as he grew up. Susan experienced profound guilt, sorrow, hopelessness, and a sense of inferiority upon learning her son was gay.
I remember I would talk to friends and they would say something about their children and I would think, “I am just not as good as you. I messed up as a parent. I did this to my son.” And again, I didn’t do anything to him. What is is. But I was feeling pretty responsible . . . and my whole thing is that when I tell people they are going to say, “That is because he was your whole world for two years. That was all you cared about. Taking him out in his little stroller and dressing him up in his little short pants and his little knee socks.” I was a little hopeless . . . I felt that I made lots of mistakes and I wasn’t sure what they were. I thought crazy things like . . . I stayed home for twelve years raising my kids and I thought I mothered them too much. But that is crazy. But I thought, “It is all my fault. I did that to him.” He was an only child till Jackie came along, which wasn’t very long, it was only like twenty-six months, but all I did was play with him, I read to him, I changed his diaper four hundred times a day . . . I changed his outfit five to six times a day . . . I took him for walks. He was just like my little buddy. I was twenty-eight when I had him, so I was more than ready to have a child, and he was just my whole entire world. So, when I found out I thought, “I did it. I did all that to him.” Crazy but that’s what I was feeling.
Cynthia, a widow who had been quoted in the last chapter as knowing her son was gay before he told her, still felt sad and lonely and had problems sleeping right after she found out: “The fact [is] that I am the mother and I was told growing up that men become gay because their mothers are too mothering. I even heard that later after this all happened, and it was like, OK, how can you love your child too much?”
Mothers of lesbians feared that they had turned their daughters off to males by dating or marrying men who set poor examples. This mother, a nurse and midwife, grappled with feelings of anxiety and hopelessness when her daughter first came out: “Maybe it was my fault. What did I do wrong to cause this? Was it because of my husband, the fact that he wasn’t a stable father, the fact that we had a bad marriage, alcoholism in the household? I was very sad.” One African American mother who struggled with crying spells and anxiety-related stomach problems in the weeks after her daughter came out initially felt she was to blame for her daughter’s homosexuality because of her own bad experiences with men: “Like my second husband, which is my son’s father, he was very abusive, and she witnessed that. All of those things came into play. I thought, ‘Oh God, She is looking at all the things that happened to me with men and now she doesn’t want to be with men! That is why!’”
Several of the fathers initially thought they might have had something to do with their offspring’s homosexuality, although their reasons tended to be vague. “I did feel guilty, although I didn’t exactly know why. I was seeing a therapist. She was very quick to throw cold water on my guilt.” Joe, a previously quoted father, always believed that he inadvertently gave off a “gay vibe” because gay men had approached him sexually several times during his life, and when he first learned about his son Tony he initially believed that this somehow influenced his son to be gay. As discussed previously, he also initially attributed Tony’s homosexuality to his own desire for a daughter when this son was born. When Tony came out, Joe went to therapy to get help with his guilt.
Earlier studies of parents of gays and lesbians also identified guilt as a typical emotional reaction (Griffin, Wirth, and Wirth 1986; Herdt and Koff 2000; Robinson, Walters, and Skeen 1989). As stated earlier, parents have an almost automatic, innate tendency to blame themselves if their children become ill or troubled—mothers are prone to guilt even if their children seem to be fine.
However, it is curious that almost none of the youth in these families were aware that their parents blamed themselves. They might have known their parents were suffering, but they were unaware as to why. Somehow, the issue of parental guilt did not cross the parent-child boundary in these families. The same was true for parental mourning, which will be covered in the next section.
Of the seventy-six parents interviewed, there were a small handful who identified as lesbian, gay, or bisexual. It is noteworthy that none of these parents reported feelings of guilt when they learned their own children were gay. This is perhaps because, being gay themselves, they were better informed and therefore knew that homosexuality was not caused by poor parenting.
From the moment a daughter or son is born, parents begin to dream about the child’s future. Fueled by an initial flush of great pride and joy, some of these dreams are forgivably grandiose: “Maybe she will become president . . . find a cure for cancer—maybe both!” There are smaller dreams too, about future weddings, grandchildren—a “normal” happy family life with all the white picket fence trimmings—and it is the perceived loss of these aspirations that is particularly distressing for parents during the family discovery stage. The heterosexual family myth (Herdt and Koff 2000), that all kids will grow up to be heterosexual and will therefore get married and have children when they grow up, is abruptly dispelled, leaving parents shocked and confused.
For some parents the grief over these perceived losses was deep and profound. In keeping with the Hill (1971) framework, these parents perceived or defined their children’s coming out to mean that their sons and daughters, as they knew them, were gone, along with the dreams they had for them.
Mike is the young man previously described who attempted suicide in the presence of a priest in church. Immediately afterward, while her son was in the hospital, his mother Ann was certainly concerned and did everything she could to aid his recovery—yet she couldn’t shake her sense of loss: “I cried a little bit, but for selfish stuff or things that were conditioned for mothers. All of a sudden the wedding, the daughter-in-law—I don’t have any daughters. So I am going to miss out on that. But, you know, they were my disappointments; he didn’t disappoint me.”
The following mother tearfully recalled a similar sense of loss that persisted even though her daughter had come out to her two years before the interview:
Yeah. I wept like the first week [after I found out]. I just would find myself weeping. Just because of all the things that weren’t going to be. I felt like my daughter had died. It sounds terrible, but not that I wanted to give up on her, but like all of a sudden I realized—I’m going to start crying—I had these very definitive dreams for her that now wouldn’t come true.
Although gay and lesbian parents did not blame themselves when they found out their sons or daughters were lesbian or gay, they also felt a sense of loss. As stated by Mac, a retired firefighter who was gay himself, “I recall the moment she was born, just saying, “Oh, my God, I’ll have somebody to walk down the aisle.” You know, and, now, where does that play in? Will there ever be a moment to walk her down the aisle?” Similar to what was found for parents struggling with self-blame, the youth were largely unaware that parents were coping with a sense of mourning. Although the daughter of the last mother quoted was ignorant as to the exact reasons for her mother’s suffering, she was aware of its depth and magnitude. She observed:
I think she [mother] was shocked, she was scared. She was like, “Oh, God, this is the mother of all things.” She didn’t know what to do. Like even now when she talks to me about stuff, she doesn’t know what to tell me because she’s not lesbian and she doesn’t know the experience of a lesbian . . . and I understand that . . . She was like, “When did you know, how do you know, how are you sure, do you really know? This is just a phase—well, it’s normal for, like, girls or people or teenagers to be attracted to the same sex, but it’s just a phase.” And that really hurt, because it’s not. Like, why can’t this be OK?
This father of a gay man recalled his initial feeling when he first found out his son was gay six years ago:
There was a loss. There’s a loss of a dream, of an idea that you have for that child. So it’s like when people are hoping for a boy and they get a girl. It’s not that they don’t love the child, or the child is born with Down’s or something, you know? There’s a loss in your head. There was the loss of his heterosexuality or just the fact that we would have to deal with this. And we realized that this was something we’re going to have to deal with for the rest of our lives. You know, this is not something we can change or fix. . . . I just felt like, what I thought was my normal kid, you know, the easy one, the one who was going to just have the normal life, was not going to have a normal life.
However, his son was not aware of the cause or depth of his sorrow:
I didn’t really know what his reaction was. I went in and gave him a hug, and that was pretty much it. He didn’t really say anything. . . . The next day after I came out, he finally decided to talk to me, and it was a positive reaction actually. And he said that everything was going to be OK . . . And I remember him saying, “It must feel like the world was lifted off your shoulders,” and I said, “Yes, it does.”
Some parents perceive that their children are rejecting them by choosing a gay lifestyle. They fear that as their sons and daughters enter the gay community, they will be excluded and abandoned. This worry has been found elsewhere among parents of lesbians and gays (Herdt and Koff 2000; Weinberg 1972) and was also discovered in this study. Janet, the previously quoted psychiatrist with a gay son, began treatment for depression after she discovered he was gay. She reported what initially concerned her most:
I realize that this is really what I was left with . . . some feeling of being excluded from his world. And I still have trouble when I see him . . . with a group of gay men: I feel uncomfortable and like they are in this world that I am not a part of and I feel rejected in some way. And I think the feeling has to do with feeling excluded and rejected. Somehow my son has rejected women . . . me and my kind of sexuality or something like that. So there is that issue.
Once again, her son Robert was unaware of his mother’s fears and concerns.
The children’s lack of awareness of their parents’ guilt suggests that parents might be protectively shielding their children from the full extent of their reactions. It would make sense that parents would want to do this because their guilt was at least partly driven by their belief that their children were damaged. So these parents might have known that if their children were aware they felt guilty, they would also know that their parents believed they were somehow ruined, hurting their feelings.
Parents might have shielded their children from their feelings of loss for similar reasons. The parents in this study may have been acutely aware that, if their children knew they were mourning a normal life for them, they would also be imparting the message to their children that they were abnormal. Such shielding is one component of the overall thickening of family subsystem boundaries that occurred during the family discovery stage.
Another explanation for the young respondents’ lack of awareness emerged in the interviews and further suggests that family boundaries became stronger and less permeable through distancing during family discovery. Children might not have known about these reactions in their parents because they did not want to know them. Ignorance wasn’t exactly bliss, but it was perhaps easier to deal with parents’ feelings if they didn’t allow themselves to fully recognize them. Bear in mind, finding ways to emotionally distance from other people’s condemnation was a survival skill these children learned early in their lives as they became (or feared becoming) objects of their peers’ jeering condemnation. Thus it makes sense that they were deploying this very skill to protect themselves from fully acknowledging or understanding their parents’ most distressing feelings.
Furthermore, their relief may have further blinded them to what their parents were experiencing. Right before they came out to their mothers and fathers, young people worried that their parents would react violently and even reject them. So when their worst fears did not materialize, they might have been so overwhelmed with feelings of relief and gratitude that they did not see the full extent of their parents’ struggles. These young lesbians and gays expected the sky to fall, and, when it didn’t, they were too relieved to be concerned or even notice that there were still gray clouds overhead. Their parents didn’t throw them out and still seemed to love them, so why pay any attention to those clouds?
Close to a third of the youth respondents reported that the depression and anxiety they experienced before coming out was replaced with profound feelings of relief and appreciation. This twenty-five-year-old biracial girl described what she felt after she came out to her mother three years ago: “I was feeling lots of relief, like I could breathe . . . [I felt] happy, proud: I actually have a life now.” And this eighteen-year-old male who had come out two years earlier:
INTERVIEWER: How did you feel immediately after you came out to your parents?
RESPONDENT: Relief and some hope . . . hope that life would just keep getting better and there would be improvement . . . improvement of me being more comfortable and improvement as far as my parents . . . I would be able to bring people into my house, and I would be able to have a more open relationship in front of them.
It is worth noting that, after finding out their children were gay, the parents of each of these previously quoted respondents underwent significant emotional duress and described temporarily distancing from their children. Nevertheless, youth could feel relieved even if there was now some conflict or distance in the relationship because even though parents were struggling with the news, or did not really approve, they still didn’t reject their children. As stated by Tyler, this twenty-three-year-old African American gay male college student:
I felt like a weight was off my chest. I feel like in life the only person I have to answer to is my mother. I don’t have to answer to anyone else. As long as my mother sees me in a good light, I don’t have to care about how anyone else sees me, because my mother is my best friend in my whole world. As long as she says “I don’t care what you are doing, you are OK with me.” And as long as I have my mother’s approval, I don’t care about anybody else. She is going to give it to me, she loves me. She is my mom.
However, his mother reported that she experienced severe symptoms of anxiety and depression after she found out her son was gay. She was profoundly worried for his safety because they lived in a blighted neighborhood whose inhabitants were known to be intolerant of gays. For several months after coming out she and Tyler frequently argued about his safety. Nevertheless, as can be seen by the previous quote, this young man experienced a profound sense of relief upon coming out.
The mother of this next youth felt profoundly sad and lonely immediately after she found out her son was gay and experienced frequent crying jags and insomnia. She worried that her son’s homosexuality was her fault. Furthermore, she had sensed some distance in her relationship with her son both before and after he came out. Nevertheless, her son recalled:
I was always called names and stuff when I was young, I grew up in Texas . . . just a bunch of hicks. And so, because of that, I had a negative connotation of it [being gay], but I never really associated those things with me. But it was great to be able to discredit that by coming out to myself and my friends and mother . . . it wasn’t a bad thing. It just allowed me to feel that I was normal.
Marie, the mother from a Haitian family, described her anxiety and depression when her son initially came out to her. Her son Chauncey recalled feeling wounded by some hurtful remarks his mother made when he told her he was gay, and he subsequently distanced from her, which is described later in this chapter. Nonetheless, he still felt a sense of relief once he came out to his mother.
Definitely I needed that validation from her . . . it was easier, it was an easier transition because I didn’t know what I would have done—like I said, I was anticipating being thrown out, so I just knew that if that did happen I would have, like, you know, have to fend for myself. But it was definitely an easier transition for me. She did accept me.
Several of the youth described how coming out to their parents even though their parents were having a difficult time, helped them somehow feel more positively about being gay. As described by this nineteen-year-old art student: “That was another part, the world must know now, because I’ve told my parents. Whether they like it or not, now that they are done, everyone else can know too. They are the hurdle, and now the rest of it I don’t care about it.” Or this young Latino man who worked in retail: “It made me more gay. Because it made me feel like, I don’t know, like it made me show it more on purpose just to get her used to it. At times I act feminine just so she can see me act feminine and she could get used to the fact that I am not going to change.” This young woman, a law student, said: “I was trying to deny that is what it was. So, once I actually came out to her, I realized that it wasn’t such a bad thing.” This sixteen-year-old daughter of the previously quoted midwife recalled her feelings immediately after coming out to her parents three years ago: “Yes, I mean coming out to your friends is totally different. But when you come out to your parents, it’s like, ‘Yeah, I am officially out now’ And I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m out. I don’t have to worry about this any more . . . I’m done. That’s it.’”
In each of these cases, parents had a hard time initially accepting their children’s sexual orientation, yet coming out still helped the youth feel more confident about their sexuality and gay identity. If parents were initially accepting, it was especially helpful. As in the report of Franklin, whose father Norman was previously quoted, “Yes, it made me more positive about it. Knowing that at least one person, I mean my father of all people, was accepting. So that definitely made it better.”
These positive feelings might have been attenuated by the young respondent’s original expectations that their parents would reject them, which for youth in this study was largely unfounded. These feelings of relief along with feeling better about being gay or lesbian might have gotten in the way of the youth noticing (or wanting to notice) some of the distressing parental emotions that coming out left in its wake—feelings that perhaps were too much to handle during this time when they felt relieved but still vulnerable.
Not seeing or wanting to see the extent of parental distress is further evidence of a strong, thick parent-child boundary that was typical during family discovery and may in fact have been functional. I will further explicate these dynamics later in the chapter.
Parents, cognizant of the difficulties gays and lesbians face, worried for the well-being of their children. Even though sons and daughters were mostly oblivious to their parents’ feelings of guilt and loss, the young respondents were indeed aware that their parents were worried for their safety.
Of course, HIV risk was a primary concern for parents of gay men. This African American mother of a gay son recalled her initial anxieties:
I mean there are gay people in my family. I have a lot of friends who are gay. I read a lot. I live in New York City. The hospital that I work at, most of the physicians are gay. Most of our patients are HIV positive. So it is something I am very aware of, and I worry about James with hate crimes and I worry about him being in the city at night. There are so many people who are closed minded. I am just worried about that. And now he is starting to get a little muscular, but he has always been very small. So I have been worried about him being out and getting hurt. And he is out late at night at a lot of clubs. So I worry about that a lot.
And Norman, who was quoted previously, worried for the health and safety of his son: “I was concerned about his health . . . He was very young, and I was concerned about adult sexual activity . . . his activities with older and more experienced adults . . . and him not understanding hygiene.” Like most of the young respondents, his son Franklin was aware of and understood his father’s worries for his physical safety.
He would always say, when he was talking to all of us, “You guys, I don’t care who you bring home or who you do whatever with, just make sure to use a condom, make sure you don’t do anything haphazard.” He would say, “Be careful!” I remember him saying, “Franklin, you can be naive about things, and just be careful, think about your own personal safety when you are having whatever experiences, whatever it is, if it is social or whatever. Be aware of your surroundings, be careful.” Things like that.
Parents were also afraid their sons would be physically assaulted due to their sexual orientation. This mother described:
Really, my main concern right from the beginning was will there be somebody out there that will try to hurt him because of this, and that was my husband’s biggest concern. That’s something we’ve always been so worried about. He’ll be out someplace and somebody will beat the hell out of him or something because of who he is . . . He’s going away to college, and, you know, and he’s not going far, but he’s going to live on campus, and I’m wondering, like, how do the colleges handle it?
Her son knew about his parents’ worries. When asked about their concerns when he first came out, he replied: “Oh, what would other people think? Like how they would react to me and how I would be treated by other people and things like that.”
If there was any evidence that the gay male youth were engaging in risky behavior, this understandably frightened parents. Marta, a Latina mother, became severely depressed and anxious upon learning her seventeen-year-old son Carlos was gay a year ago. Her brother molested him as a young child, and she blamed herself for failing to protect him. She recalled her reactions upon first learning Carlos was gay after coming home from work early one day and finding him in bed with another young man:
I saw him dead. Because of the AIDS thing, all that was coming out at the time, I saw myself preparing for a funeral. I didn’t see a future for my son, and that bothers me a lot. That is what I kept thinking—any day now. I didn’t see him having much more time to live. I was preparing for his death. It was hard for me to deal with that.
Carlos was well aware of his mother’s concerns, particularly in light of the fact that he had recently contracted a sexually transmitted disease (STD):
I think her worst fear was getting AIDS. I know because she actually told me that the other day. A few months ago, I caught an STD, chlamydia. And she was like, “Oh, so you haven’t been using protection!” I was like, “I have, but I’m only having sex with one person. He had chlamydia—he didn’t know. But we both got tested and everything, and now it is all fine. I’m not having sex with anybody else.” And she was like, “That is one of my worst fears, you have to be careful, think of this as a learning lesson.” I am like, “I know.”
This next mother was previously quoted discovering her son Harry was gay after she found him sneaking out in the middle of the night, when he was fifteen, to meet men. She described her (understandable) anxieties:
You know, back then, I must have suspected on some level because I wasn’t shocked. But one of my first thoughts, truthfully, was that I knew to the day I went to my grave that I was going to be worried about this guy. There was never gonna be a moment’s relaxation now. This changes so many things because it’s a world where he’ll forever be on the outside. And he’s someone that always had trouble being accepted by people who didn’t know. What would happen when they did know? I just felt like, “Oh, I’ll always be worried, every day of my life now.” Um, not because of me—I mean he’s no less any of the things we knew and loved about him; it’s just the intolerance because it’s such a concern.
Joe was previously quoted as feeling guilty when he first suspected his son Tony was gay because when he was born he wished for a daughter. Even though his son came out to him nine years ago, he recalled his initial sadness with tears in his eyes: “I am kind of an emotional person. I just guess I certainly knew he was going to have a harder go through life. As a parent I wanted to try to make things easier. As a parent, we always want to try to make things easier for our children. I thought, ‘Oh gosh, you are going to have such a hard time.’” Tony, like almost all the other respondents, was cognizant of his parents’ fears for his well-being when he first came out: “He was very worried about disease and about people hurting me physically. He still is. He still sends me newspaper clippings, like if there was an article in the Times recently about the sort of indifference in the gay community towards condoms. If there is anything in the paper about that, he’ll send that to me, just in case.” Mac, the retired gay fireman, talked about his concerns for his daughter, who came out to him five months before his interview:
You know the bashing that goes on at school, the evil looks you get from people. The people who are willing to condemn you without even knowing you. There’s still a lot of gay bashing that goes on. Especially right now. You know, gay bashing is the in thing again right now. And, you know, it makes me worry about her. I’ve created an environment here for her that she’s very comfortable in. And she and her girlfriend are very comfortable with each other. I’ve seen them walking around holding hands and stuff like that. And, you know, you have to think about the evil side of what could happen to them.
Like Mac, parents of daughters were no less worried, although their fears focused less on HIV risk and more on discrimination and issues of physical harm. This African American mother of a lesbian, who struggled with self-blame, also admitted:
There’s so much stigma attached to being a homosexual, I guess deep down inside, I do fear for her . . . I did tell her to be careful who she tells because I would hate to think that somebody would harm her because of it. I don’t care who Nicole tells. I don’t care who knows this about Nicole. Nicole is my daughter. She’s the only thing that matters. But I wouldn’t want somebody to harm her. And, because it’s an issue, I told her be careful. So, in a sense, I guess I was a little scared, too.
This next African American mother talked about how a recent murder of a young lesbian contributed to her fears for her daughter:
You know. There was just a young girl murdered in Newark. See, Erica hangs in Newark. That’s another thing I worry about. She always stays up there with her friend in Newark. You got these people with these issues behind this sort of thing and it’s just—it’s a fear that something might happen to her because of her sexual preference.
Earlier, vicarious courtesy stigma was defined as the angst parents empathically feel because their loved one is stigmatized (Corrigan and Miller 2004). During family sensitization, when parents suspected their children might be gay, they began to worry about how their sons and daughters would be affected by societal intolerance and discrimination. Once they knew for sure, their fears became more real and intense.
White middle- and upper-middle-class parents, particularly fathers, were especially concerned about discrimination in the workforce. This father was a wealthy businessman in New Jersey. He described his initial feelings upon learning of his daughter’s lesbianism three years ago:
Maybe there was some shame involved. In other words, do I want people to know my daughter is a lesbian? Even to this day, depending on the situation. And, I’ve even instructed her, because she’s going into the workforce, I said, “You’re going to have to be very, very careful . . .” Thank God she’s chosen a field where it’s acceptable.
Like other parents, he shielded his sense of self-blame from his daughter but not his concerns about life being more difficult for her. His daughter reported: “I think maybe he was worried about it being rough for me. I mean it is obviously not the easier path.” Another mother had symptoms of depression, including profound sadness and insomnia, in the months after her daughter came out. She recalled:
I was scared for her. I was afraid people would be mean and not love her any more. I have family members that are very cold, closed-minded people. Like my brother, who is a bitter angry man, who hates you if you are not like him, if you are not white. He is a jealous kind of person, if you have more than he has. I couldn’t even really talk to anyone about it. I felt like, who can I tell? I thought about going to talk to someone, and I finally told my sister because we are so close, and she was pretty shocked.
Her daughter recalled,
I think she was definitely worried about the whole family thing and what I would do about that. I don’t think she thought I could ever have kids or anything like that and telling her brothers and sisters. They’ve never really had to deal with anything like this before, and I don’t think she thought a couple of them would take it very well.
Once again, the youth were aware of their parents’ feelings of worry for their well-being. Perhaps they had an easier time recognizing these concerns because parents in all families seem to have a natural tendency to worry about their children’s safety; thus parental worry is a normal part of family life. So parents were able to be up-front with their children about these concerns, and their children were able to recognize them and take them in stride.
In addition, it might have been easier for the young people to acknowledge parental anxiety for their well-being because it was a sure sign that their parents still loved and cared for them. Parental worry, typical and expected, irritating but also perhaps a bit comforting, was proof that they would not be rejected as they had originally feared.
As stated earlier in this book, gay and lesbian youth have to find ways to cope with real or anticipated stigma. However, once parents knew, they suddenly found themselves in a crash course on this topic. Public stigma is the second type of courtesy stigma identified by Corrigan and Miller and describes the harsh judgment aimed directly at those associated with the stigmatized person. Once parents knew their child was lesbian or gay, they also knew they would have to deal with other people’s criticism and prejudice, especially in light of the still commonly held belief that their own faulty parenting produced a lesbian or gay child. Parents learned what the young people already knew—where there is stigma, there is often shame. Once parents knew their children’s sexual orientation, they worried about others’ condemnation—of their children, but also of themselves. As Frank, who was quoted previously, recalled:
I was probably more—I don’t know—selfish with myself. What are my friends going to say or this or that? Is that selfish? I don’t know . . . I’m not very good with words. Embarrassed? More worried about myself—you know what I’m saying? It was hard, I took my nephews to the side and I told them. They’re like brothers, you know. Everybody accepted it. And Wanda is a great kid. Always was. My sister was OK. [I] never told my parents. Pop is gone, Mom is ninety years old and she’s out in left field: Alzheimer’s, you know. My father-in-law, forget it!
And this mother of an eighteen-year-old son:
At that point [when the child comes out] you start thinking stupid things like, “What are people going to say? The family?” You start worrying, “Oh my God, my mom!” . . . thinking about my mom, his [husband’s] mom, old-fashioned people. For them I think it is really hard, and I don’t think we knew too much years ago. I remember my mother-in-law when she found out . . . she said you should take him to a doctor, maybe they will give him a pill and make him straight. So I knew that if they thought that, they are more ignorant about it, they don’t have a clue.
This fear of stigma—what other people will think—becomes and remains increasingly important as families traverse the adjustment trajectory and is an ongoing issue to be addressed clinically, as will be described in subsequent sections of this chapter.
Of the seventy-six parents interviewed, five cited religious concerns as problematic when they first learned their children were gay. This mother described:
When he told me he was gay, I was disappointed because, first of all, he used to go to Catholic school, that means he was baptized, had first Holy Communion, he had Confirmation, and now suddenly, you know, he doesn’t have to go to church. He said he didn’t believe in God . . . I was disappointed. I never expected that. That’s not the way I raised him to be.
This father recalled:
At the time [when their son came out], we were more religious than we are now, and we lived in the middle of a very Orthodox community. I mean, we lived two doors from our synagogue. All of a sudden, we have this whole situation about how do we deal with this whole problem—our son’s gay, and we’re living in a religious community.
Parents were also worried that their children’s homosexuality would prevent their sons and daughters from getting into Heaven. “I worried because of the religious aspect because I would hate that she wouldn’t get to Heaven because of that.”
Considering that Catholicism and many fundamentalist Christian churches have been among the most outspoken opponents of gay rights, it is rather surprising that more parents did not identify religion as an important factor in their adjustment. Of course, I cannot know for sure, but I strongly suspect that parents having the most difficulty adjusting to the news that their child is gay are among those having the most trouble reconciling their religious beliefs with their children’s sexual orientation. And, as I stated early, people who are struggling to come to terms with this issue are probably the least likely to talk to a gay researcher. However, in my clinical work as well as my other research, I have seen how parents’ religious views could get in the way of their adjustment and can even impede parent-child relationships.
Sadly, the Catholic Church, the Evangelical Church, and some other fundamentalist Protestant and Jewish congregations use biblical justifications to deny gays civil rights and legal protections. I am no biblical scholar, but I think it is important to point out that doing this is simply wrongheaded. Church leaders and clergy have used Scripture, selectively interpreted and stripped of its historical context, to justify people’s personal prejudices under the guise of strictly following the word of God.
From a historical perspective, this is nothing new. Leviticus states: “Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind: it is abomination. Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable” (Lev. 18:22), and this passage is the one most famously used to condemn homosexuality. However, the Bible includes all sorts of mandates that have no place in today’s civilized world. Fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible have been used to justify slavery in the U.S. (Foner 1988, Gaustad and Noll 2003). In addition to its admonition against homosexuality, Leviticus also has passages that permit fathers to sell their daughters into slavery (21:7), prohibit men from shaving their beards (19:27), and Exodus calls for the death of anyone who works on the Sabbath (Exod. 35:2; The New American Bible 1991). Thus people who claim to adhere strictly to the Bible and use its teachings to justify denying lesbians and gays their rights are arbitrarily selecting certain teachings to follow while ignoring others.
If you are a fundamentalist Christian and object to homosexuality because of your religion, this line of reasoning has probably not changed your mind. Despite having repeated these logical arguments over and over, I have yet to convince anyone to abandon such ideas, perhaps because such beliefs are not based on the principles of logic but rather what is believed to be (dare I say it?) a higher wisdom. Nevertheless, lesbian and gay youth and their parents must face the conflict between their religious beliefs and their children’s homosexuality, and they may need the support of understanding professionals to help them reconcile their spiritual beliefs with love of their children in a way that maintains family connections. Not an easy task—but certainly a necessary one.
Parents do not react to their children’s coming out in a vacuum. The interpersonal family context plays a role in parent-child relationships during family discovery and also later, as parents begin to adjust to the news that a son or daughter is gay. Even though the young lesbian and gay respondents might not have known the exact cause of their parent’s suffering, some parents were so overwhelmed with guilt, grief, and worry that these feelings affected the parent-child relationship. As stated earlier, the task of families with older adolescents or young adults is to support them to feel confident enough to develop autonomy yet remain connected to family. During the family discovery phase, guilty, sad, anxious parents in this sample faced children who were seeking their understanding and acceptance, which inevitably led to family discord rather than the accepting, supportive interactions the youth sought and needed.
In some families parental distress and disapproval sometimes created conflict. Like many other parents in this study, the mother of a gay male graduate student in this Italian/Puerto Rican family was initially ashamed. She feared for her son’s safety and was concerned she would not have grandchildren. When asked what she thought about when her son first came out to her, she replied:
AIDS definitely. Discrimination definitely, that is one of the worst. People see two men together and really they don’t even know the person and they make judgments. And, as a parent, you don’t want your kid to go through all that. Yes, grandchildren is in it. And probably because we thought this kid at the time was this perfect kid, with school going so good and everything going for him. And then this came about, and I thought this is a big cross he has to carry now—and a little shameful for us. In my family we’ve heard comments already. And over the years, you know, you hear different things . . . just in general, like your hairdresser is a gay male, maybe, and they have a certain word for him. You hear that in conversation and then you find out your kid is like that. And you hear all these people talking about this, and now your kid is one of them. It was difficult and it still is.
Her feelings, along with her son’s wish for her understanding and support, resulted in ongoing family conflict during the discovery phase. Both she and her son described angry, painful family arguments initially after he came out. The NIMBY effect was certainly an issue for this mother.
Like that first month was very difficult, the way I treated him, the words I said. So he was in shock, not expecting me to be saying such things. I think he would have expected me to be more understanding, because the funny part—was this lesbian cousin I am telling you about, I was very understanding and accepting of her. But when it hit home and it is your own kid, I flipped out. So, knowing him, he probably thought I was so accepting with her, and then him seeing this other side of me go crazy like that. It was very bad.
Her son, like most of the respondents, felt relieved right after he came out to his parents, but he also recalled the pressure he initially felt from his mother and father. Although his parents did not discuss this in their interviews, the son reported that they would have long talks with him to try to convince him that he was not gay, which, of course, resulted in conflict:
[At the time] when I went home, no matter what time I came home, they would be waiting and we would have to have a two-hour discussion about how I wasn’t gay. I had to keep coming out. The frustration was that they were trying to deal with it and then subsuming me with their trying to deal with it; as I am too trying to deal with the fact that I was coming out. So I was frustrated and tense, I would walk home and I would walk into the house and it was the same scene every day. That was like three months . . . They were there in the living room and there was a discussion about me not being gay going on. That was frustrating.
He recalled a particularly disturbing conversation he had with them:
When I came home one time from [college in] Delaware, they sat me down for a talk. We never have talks like that. And they told me they were willing to take a loan out, because they were watching a TV show [and learned that] for $10,000 I could get a piece of my brain cut out and then I wouldn’t be gay any more. I sat at the table and I let them talk, and then I said to them, “All I want you to do is think about what you just said to me. You want me to get my head cut open, a piece of my brain cut out. I am going upstairs and I will pretend that we never had this conversation. But I really want you to think about what you just said, because it hurts me.” And for like a day I just didn’t say anything. Didn’t argue, didn’t do anything but just let time go.
For other families, rather than overt conflict, the parent’s initial shock and struggle with the child’s sexual orientation led to a simmering tension and distance between parent and child. This mother of a lesbian recalled: “I think we became more distant . . . or I should say distant because we never were distant before . . . and it was, if we started to talk, I would start to cry. It was never a good conversation . . . It was never anything but that; her, of course, being upset that I wasn’t accepting and me feeling like I was never going to accept it.” Her daughter recalled:
And within five minutes of me talking about it, she said, “I’m not OK with this, you know?” In a nasty way in which . . . she made her point clear. So we had a miniconversation, I got upset, and I definitely started with drawing from her . . . staying at school and seeing friends and my girlfriend, and that’s it. You know, not wanting to bother with her so much . . . since she didn’t accept it . . . I felt, I couldn’t talk to her about anything.
Susan was quoted earlier in this chapter as feeling guilty for being too close to her son Mitch when he was a toddler, and she worried this closeness made him gay. She remembered that when she first learned Mitch was gay a year ago she became so anxious that she experienced a bout of colitis. In recalling how the relationship changed, she described the initial distance: “Well we didn’t ask him anything. We didn’t ask him about young men in his life or any of that stuff. We just didn’t. It wasn’t like we were in denial, but we just didn’t feel comfortable. And I don’t think my husband feels comfortable yet.” According to her son’s report, she may have shielded him from some of her more intense feelings. However, her son recalled how the family members distanced from each other:
She didn’t cry. I was very shocked because I talk to a lot of people about coming out, because I find it to be really therapeutic to talk about it with people, and I am under the impression that most parents get really upset and cry . . . Still, it made it harder to talk . . . both of us found it harder to talk to each other, I would say, up until about several months ago.
With regard to his father, he recalled: “No contact basically. We would avoid each other at all costs, which we still pretty much do. It is just that I don’t want to walk right in the home and be yelled at right away.”
During his interview, Frank, the previously quoted butcher, tearfully recalled his early feelings of disappointment when he first learned of his daughter’s lesbianism: “Well, you expect a wedding. You expect a son-in-law and to go fishing and get drunk, this is what I expected . . . Maybe I still want it to go away, I don’t know. I accept it. I’m not going to make life miserable. But, yeah, what parent wouldn’t want everything perfect, come on, if you can understand that.” He recalled his relationship with his daughter, Wanda, during the first year after he found out: “She didn’t kiss me for a year . . . We just like avoided. We were like two magnets flipped around . . . That’s what it felt like. No arguments. You could feel that aura around us, if you know what I’m saying.”
Frank’s wife and Wanda’s mother Donna recalled the distance and family strain:
Well, we definitely weren’t ourselves. I mean, you know, she wasn’t her typical silly self—she’ll act, like, silly at times, most of the times, that’s when you know she’s all right, but she wasn’t. And I was just sitting on the couch all the time, basically. I definitely was upset—sad, not mad or anything, but just sad, being that she wouldn’t get married and have grandchildren.
Wanda remembered the tension and distancing in her family. In talking about her relationship with her mother at the time, she recalled:
I withdrew from her, and she definitely wanted to talk about it . . . and I just did not want to even think about it. No discussion. I didn’t want to answer questions. I just wanted to pretend like it wasn’t happening. I would see her eyes would be red. She wouldn’t cry in front of me, but her eyes would be red. She would just be very quiet. We didn’t talk much. Christmas was just like a big facade. It was horrible.
She did not say much about changes in her relationship with her father, perhaps because, like most of the respondents, she had been much closer to her mother, so the shift in the maternal relationship was more noticeable and more traumatic for her. “He didn’t believe it at first. He was just shocked, stunned.”
The distance and avoidance described in this section seemed to be a way for the families to prevent overt conflict or arguments about the children’s sexual orientation. During this early stage, children’ feelings were raw and parents were overwhelmed. Thus it seemed as if the family’s circuits were too much in danger of overload for this topic to be discussed in any way that could be meaningful or productive.
DISTANCE INITIATED BY YOUTH. Even though the young respondents felt relief and gratitude for not being rejected, it doesn’t mean that the kids were totally comfortable with the whole idea of their parents now knowing their secret. Try to imagine you have a disfiguring mark on your face that has been there since you were born. You have walked around your whole life wearing a veil to hide it and protect yourself from other people’s stares and reactions of disgust. However, as time goes on, you learn there are people who have a similar facial blemish who, instead of being ashamed, are proud to show it. As a matter of fact, you come to learn to your surprise that they do not consider the mark a disfigurement but, instead, a type of badge of honor. Your weariness with hiding, along with the example set by these people, inspires you to shed your veil. You would probably feel liberated—but you still might also feel rather naked. After years of hiding, the residual shame is much harder to discard than that veil.
In about half of the families in which there was distance during the family discovery phase, it was the gay sons or lesbian daughters who initiated it—often because they felt ashamed or embarrassed—despite their relief at not being rejected. In this next African American family, the mother discovered her daughter was a lesbian and, unlike most parents in this study, was very accepting right from the start. She worked hard to show her daughter that she had no problem with her sexual orientation. She affirmed, “I tried to get closer.” Nevertheless, even though her daughter felt relieved, she also felt embarrassed:
I did kind of pull away. Because, like I said, when I told her about it, it just felt wrong, and I was embarrassed every time I saw her. It was like, “Well she knows about you now. She’s thinking about this.” I don’t know why . . . to this day I don’t know why, it just felt wrong for her to know . . . I felt relieved, but, again, it was also embarrassing. I don’t know why, but it was just embarrassing talking about that aspect. Like I said, I had kept it to myself, it was a personal thing that I shared only with myself, and it felt really weird, like she was intruding in on a part of me that she wasn’t supposed to be in . . . even though I invited her into that space.
This sense of embarrassment was particularly acute for youth who came out as a result of being confronted by their parents, rather than on their own initiative. As described in the previous chapter, Martha discovered her adolescent daughter Jennifer was a lesbian by finding and reading her diary. Martha tried hard to be accepting of her daughter. She told the interviewer: “I wanted to have contact and Jennifer didn’t.” However, her daughter felt exposed and embarrassed that her mother found out before she was ready to tell her. Jennifer recalled:
Oh my God, I screamed at her. I remember when I came back, that night she came in to my room and she handed [the diary] to me, and I was like, “Did you read it? Did you read it?” And then she told me that she read it, and I just started screaming at her, “GET OUT OF MY ROOM!” I was screaming at her, and she was like, “Jennifer, it’s OK! Jennifer, it’s OK!” She just wanted to get close to me like, because that was all she wanted from me. But I was screaming, “GET OUT OF MY ROOM! I HATE YOU!” I think I pushed her aside and ran out. I wasn’t ready for her to know, even though she was accepting, which is rare and any kid would die for . . . I just could not bear to see her—because someone so close to me knew something so personal. The way that she was willing to accept me made my life easier. But, since she had found out so much personal information, I was so mad. I feel like I went silently crazy about it. Because of the very private nature of everything . . . everything was relating to this one issue, and she was finding out everything about it. I had no privacy after that.
Two different but related ideas might explain the tendency for some youth to feel embarrassed during the family discovery phase. First of all, the boundaries separating parent and child subsystems are meant to keep information about parental sexuality from children and vice versa. The common reluctance of families to discuss youth or parental sexual behavior is evidence of the importance of family boundaries regarding sexuality. When parents find out their children are gay, these boundaries are breached, whereby the typically taboo subject of the child’s sexuality suddenly becomes a topic for open discussion. This understandably creates anxiety in the child, which no doubt makes him want to self-protectively distance.
Moreover, the anxiety around this breach of boundaries is compounded by the inescapable reality that, by coming out, gay youth admit that they are engaging in, or planning to engage in, sexual activities that are outside the mainstream. Those who are known to engage in nontraditional, nonprocreative sexual behaviors have long been targets of ridicule, discrimination, and punishment (Graff 2004). Fellatio, cunnilingus, and anal sex, particularly between members of the same sex, have long been considered sinful, particularly by Judeo-Christian religions, and have historically been criminalized in Western European and American culture. Until a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2003, many states had laws on the books that made such practices illegal (Lawrence v. Texas 2003).
Goffman (1963) describes how some manage the effects of stigma by “passing,” or concealing the part of themselves that is stigmatized. Hiding one’s homosexuality by remaining “in the closet” is a common way of protecting oneself from the painful effects of stigma. As discussed in chapter 1, gay and lesbian youth who were realizing their sexuality were also learning that it was wrong and needed to be kept hidden for self-protection. Keeping a stigmatized identity hidden and then revealing it (by choice or by force) to someone as close as one’s father or mother is perhaps akin to ripping a scab off a wound that has not fully healed. The person feels sore and overexposed.
These feelings of embarrassment and shame left these young people feeling vulnerable to the negative effects of parental disapproval, guilt, and worry. Thus they distanced to avoid facing their parents’ feelings. Vicente, a Latino gay man, described how, after his mother told his father he was gay, Vicente distanced from him, fearing his disapproval. Nevertheless, the father, who was divorced from Vicente’s mother and living in a separate home nearby, seemed to be reaching out to his son during this time.
I just stopped talking to him. My fault, not his, because he did try to talk to me . . . I’m just afraid of him disapproving. I just didn’t talk to him. He would call and I wouldn’t pick up. There would be voice mail, I wouldn’t answer them. Although I’ve never really lived with my father, I still care for him a lot. I don’t want him to say something or do something that will hurt my feelings more. After Mom told him, I went over to spend like a week with him, and we didn’t mention anything—not once. That was fine. But I still feel uncomfortable . . . after he found out I just ignored him, I didn’t want to talk to him for like two years. I think I was more, like, shy to talk to him. I didn’t know how to approach him. Even today I just don’t want to, I am not comfortable talking to him about it. I know he wants a Mr. Macho son and I think I am pretty macho, but I still have sex with guys, and to him I think that is always going to be wrong.
Unfortunately, Vicente’s father did not agree to be interviewed. However, by his son’s report, he showed no overt signs of disapproving or rejecting Vicente, either during the discovery phase or anytime thereafter. It is unclear how much this was a function of not having the chance to express his disapproval because his son cut off communication with him. Nevertheless, what the recollections of this young man and others in this study suggest is that the need for self-protection from anticipated or imagined parental disapproval could be another reason for withdrawal.
In several families, daughters and sons recalled distance during the discovery phase when their parents did not. Norman, the father from Guyana, said his relationship with his son stayed the same after Franklin came out, however, his son recalled that right after he told his father “he didn’t really talk to me. He would say ‘Hi’ less than usual . . . He withdrew . . . Like he was in denial—he didn’t want to believe it.” Franklin also recalled tension with his mother, but her view on this could not be confirmed; she was deceased at the time of the interview.
As stated earlier, the young people would withdraw from parents when they saw actual signs of disapproval. This young woman recalled:
No, [there was] no talk about it. And then when I finally did tell my mother there was still no talk about it. I would mention it, I would say, “I have a crush on someone.” And she would be like . . . it would be really awkward. Really, we haven’t talked about it at all until probably a year [after I came out]. I might have mentioned it again the spring of my sophomore year, which is twelve months later, because I had my first girlfriend.
However, her mother did not recall any changes in her relationship with her daughter after she came out. When asked specifically about this, she replied: “No. I still had the same basic emotional response to her. You know, basically I love her, so that stayed the same.” Even though Chauncey felt relieved, there was distance between him and his mother after he came out:
It was less talking. Because I felt she wasn’t ready. Yes, she would say stuff. She definitely uttered a disparaging remark to me that was really hurtful, and I’d rather not repeat it. I was really hurt by it. She said it out of anger, but I forgot what we were fighting about. But that was like immediately after . . . I would say less than six months after it happened. Yeah, I pulled away from her big time. I started not coming home.
However, his mother Marie felt the relationship remained unchanged throughout the family discovery phase.
In the following family, there was a significant discrepancy between parent and child. This mother recalled some awkward hesitation on the part of her twenty-three-year-old daughter initially after she came out:
I would kid her and say, “You know, a hug a day.” And she would kind of back off a little bit and not want to be hugged. But now it is like, “Hey, I am home,” and she is much more open in that way . . . Maybe I am a little more loving too—I am trying to listen. I will ask her about her relationship, which she really doesn’t want to talk about.
Her daughter perceived the relationship during the discovery phase very differently:
I think I wanted to talk about it with her more than she wanted to talk about it with me. I wanted to tell her stuff, and she kind of just pushed it away. I would call her a lot from work, because it would be easier for me to talk about it on the phone than face to face. And she would try to push it away. Yeah, she kind of would blow it off or block it out. Like I had told her a couple of times that I was seeing someone, and she would kind of push that off. If it would come up, like if she [girlfriend] would call me at my house, my mom was like, “Oh, I didn’t know you were seeing anyone.” I was like, “I told you a couple of times.”
Tara, the previously quoted eighteen-year-old chemistry student, and both her parents participated in the study. Both her mother and her father denied there was any difference in the interactions with their daughter during the discovery phase. However, in remembering her relationship with her mother and father right after she came out, she recalled:
TARA: It was still bad mostly. We didn’t talk at all. Not until a couple of years, like two years ago, that I actually could sit down and have a conversation with my mother. . . . We would just get into fights.
INTERVIEWER: OK. How about with your dad?
TARA: I avoided him.
Though more research in this area is needed, there are several plausible explanations for why parents were less likely to recall or report deterioration in the relationship with their children. First of all, parents may have perceived their love and commitment to their children to be unwavering and unconditional. Therefore, in their minds, this basic relationship stayed the same, despite whatever arguments or distancing occurred during this period.
It is also possible that parents did not want to admit to themselves that there was parent-child distancing. Dissonance reduction might have some relevance here. This theory holds that when people’s behavior is at odds with what they know or believe, they will change their ways of thinking to decrease the inconsistency (Festinger 1962). In order to maintain their self-images as good parents, despite negative or distancing reactions to their children, parents may have been more invested in remembering their relationships with their children during family discovery as more positive than they actually were.
Furthermore, social desirability or the wish to maintain a good image (or at least not embarrass oneself) in the presence of the interviewer may also have been at work. As stated earlier, the interviewer team for this study consisted of a lesbian woman, a mother of a lesbian who is clearly well-adjusted to her daughter’s sexuality, and the author, an openly gay man. We reassured parents that we would not be shocked by their responses and that we had either witnessed or experienced firsthand a variety of parent reactions, which we believed were understandable. However, in spite of our continued reassurances that we wanted the honest truth and would not be judgmental, it is quite possible that parent respondents worried that their interviewers would think they were uncaring parents or might be offended by honest parental responses that could be interpreted as antigay. Certainly wanting to look good in the presence of a researcher is not uncommon during interview research (LaSala 2003; Laslett and Rapoport 1975; Padgett 2008).
An additional explanation is also possible. Perhaps the young people wanted more closeness with their parents than they were able to get at this time, so they were more likely to perceive parent-child distance whether or not it actually increased during family discovery. Vulnerable young people wanted reassurance and comforting from parents who themselves were having difficulty coping with their initial reactions. Bob, the successful stockbroker quoted in previous sections of this book, tearfully described his sense of loss right around the time his daughter came out:
You know, I went through the blame, anger, grief, blah, blah, blah . . . and recognized that much of my anger and grief was because of the destruction of my future for her. You know the picket fence, the two grandchildren, the dog, the wonderful husband . . . etc. You have your children’s whole future laid out for them in your mind, you know, living happily ever after. I was angry at God . . . at life . . . for giving me a lesbian daughter. All the problems . . . all the challenges . . . all the loss of these picket fence images and so forth . . . Why am I stuck with this burden? Why couldn’t it be somebody else?
His daughter, Ellie recalled:
He called me [soon after coming out]. And he was crying and upset and scared and he went through the entire grief process of dealing with accepting things. He said to me that he was mourning the loss of the daughter he thought he had and the life that he thought I would have. He was fearing my future and how that would affect me. In retrospect, I felt hurt by the process that he was going through. I wanted him to just say, “I accept you no matter what,” which he did in those conversations, but he also said a lot of “But I am scared. But I am worried. But I am angry.” I just wanted the blanket “That’s OK.” But nobody gets the blanket in that situation.
Interestingly, this respondent’s mother did not participate, yet this young woman claimed her mother still had initial and ongoing problems because of her inability to accept or adjust to her daughter’s lesbianism. Nevertheless, this father-daughter relationship illustrates how family members’ divergent perspectives and needs can create frustration and conflict during the family discovery phase. Different recollections of the parents and children following the child’s coming out is a finding somewhat unique to this study and further research of the relationships of parents and their children could help confirm, clarify, or suggest additional reasons for this phenomenon.
As stated earlier, youth had been unaware of the extent parents blamed themselves for their homosexuality. They were also not conscious of how their parents mourned the loss of the image of them as heterosexual. Parents at times were perhaps shielding their children from the reasons for these feelings, keeping them to themselves and fortifying family boundaries that had been breached when the child came out.
However, for some of the families in this study, this type of shielding took on an even more protective function. Several parents believed their children to be emotionally frail when they came out, and in these cases their protective instincts took over. They shielded their children from their most troubling feelings and reactions during the discovery phase and instead worked hard to appear supportive. This was especially true for parents of children who were suicidal around the time they came out. Fred, whose son Mike had cut his wrists in church immediately before coming out, described: “Well, in that situation where he has attempted suicide you are kind of walking on eggshells. You don’t want to be too hard. You don’t want to be too easy. You are kind of playing it by ear. You are trying to feel things out. Sticking your toe in the water to see how hot or cold it is.” Ann, Mike’s mother became clinically depressed during the family discovery phase as she mourned the loss of a future daughter-in-law and grandchildren. She described a similar perception of the experience of the family atmosphere around the time she and her husband learned their son was gay:
We kind of had to feel our way because, with the house being small, Mike can hear the TV out here, and it was right around the time that Ellen came out, and I was very aware that I might have been laughing at things and I wasn’t sure if it was OK. I didn’t want to offend him. And there were other shows where something would be presented and I wasn’t sure, you know . . . should I leave it on? So I asked him, “Does it bother you?”
Mike seemed unaware that his mother was struggling to adjust to the news that he was gay and that his parents felt they needed to be extra cautious around him. Perhaps his parents’ protectiveness, along with his relief over not being rejected, worked together to prevent him from noticing any changes in his parents’ behavior: “They didn’t care, they just wanted me to be happy . . . I never felt persecuted.”
In this next family, we also see the tendency for parents to shield their children from their self-blame in an effort to maintain connections with their children. Nancy, the African American school administrator and mother of Joelle, recalled feeling very sad, lonely, and inferior as a parent and wondered: “Is there some failing in my nurturing that somehow she is looking to other women to nurture her in a way that I didn’t nurture her?” Nancy’s daughter Joelle had severe anxiety and depression at the time of her interview and was having trouble adjusting to her first year away at college. This mother recalled that, during the discovery phase, Joelle also seemed emotionally fragile, so she was very careful to try to shield her daughter from her reactions in an effort to protect her feelings: “I think that . . . maybe I was more unsure of myself—I never really thought about this—because I didn’t want to damage her . . . maybe any further than I already had or something. You know, it was like walking on eggshells.” Joelle had no idea of her mother’s initial self-blame or worries about hurting her. In recalling her relationship with her mother during this time: “I think the relationships just in general continued to grow as I, like, got older and we talked more openly. We continued to talk openly just like I would have as a child.”
In some families it wasn’t the child who was emotionally fragile but the relationship between parent and child that was vulnerable during the family discovery period. Parents tried to protect or shield their children from their feelings because they wanted to preserve their relationships with them.
Gloria, a previously quoted mother, spoke during her interview of how she felt distant from her twenty-two-year-old son Noah. But, ever since he left the house to live in an apartment on his own, she yearned for a closer relationship with him, and after our interview she sought my advice about how to get him to call her more often. She recalled how, two years ago, when she realized her son was gay after finding gay porn on his computer, she felt very much to blame: “I thought: ‘What had I done?’ My friends had nice straight children and I didn’t. I had this abomination. I am being very frank. I had this abomination in my house arising out of my parenting.” However, she put aside her feelings to try to be a support to her son: “Well, I was resolved to be helped . . . to get information and education. I was resolved not to take those first worries and impressions and then let this separate me from my son.” Her son understood that his mother was thinking of family factors, yet seemed unaware of the extent to which she was experiencing self-blame. He described his mother’s initial reaction as follows:
NOAH: OK. So even though she cried a little bit at the beginning she was still basically supportive.
INTERVIEWER: Did she say anything in particular?
NOAH: I don’t remember. I am sure there was some asking of “Are you sure about this?” I think there was some talk of how it “happened.” Which is to say that it didn’t happen, it just is. It wasn’t having a bad father or being an only child or the water. It is just like genetic. So nothing either of us could do about it except be happy.
In these families we see the important role of protective family boundaries. Fear of disapproval or rejection from family members as well as the breach of the taboo subject of sexuality led youth to distance from their parents: in effect, establishing self-protective boundaries. For families in which children seemed emotionally vulnerable because of mental illness, or where parent-child relationship seemed tenuous, parents strengthened and maintained these protective boundaries. Based on these findings, clinicians would be advised to find ways to acknowledge and at times fortify these boundaries for families in the discovery stage, and this will be further discussed later in this chapter.
There were a small handful of families in which parents and children reported their relationships immediately improved following the child coming out. For these families, something seemed to give way once parents knew their child was gay. Like a clogged pipe that is suddenly cleared, communication was now able to flow freely.
This next quoted respondent, Adele, was the mother of Jay, the young man who developed colitis as a result of the bullying he experienced at school. She suspected her son might be gay for several years before finding out for sure following his suicide attempt four years ago. At that time she was very anxious and worried for her son. However, when asked how, if at all, her relationship with her son changed immediately after she learned he was gay, she said:
If anything I think maybe it was a little bit closer . . . The one thing I am thinking of, which is so silly, is going up to our cottage in Maine that summer . . . and finding a really neat wind spinner that was a rainbow and hanging that outside. That’s what popped into my head . . . Jay and I found it together in a store and thought this would be something nice to hang on the cottage.
It seemed as if Jay’s relief and belief that he could finally be honest with his mother helped enhance their relationship. Jay recalled feeling as if he and his mother were close again after the period of tension and distance that preceded his coming out:
We would joke. We were friendly again. It was almost as if I was five again. She was Mommy and I was Jay and everything was happy. . . . And I just went from being evil psycho teenager to happy young adult like that (smacks hands together). And she is the one who got me involved with High-tops and 1st and 3rd (support groups for LGBT youth). She is the one who researched it all. . . . There was less fighting, less crap. There was nothing in the way of us being normal people. There was no tension in the air. And it got better and better. It was, very quickly, within that summer, I would say, we became just as close as we are now.
Even his relationship with his father improved immediately after he came out to him: “I was nice to him . . . Because I didn’t hate him anymore . . . I didn’t have any of that angst. I didn’t have any of that anger built up inside of me that I was taking out on him. And I became a nice person again. Relationships with just about everyone I knew improved.”
Feelings of relief played a major role in the improvement in family relationships. Parents who had long suspected or who had noticed something seemed to be wrong with their child—that she seemed distant or unhappy—were relieved to finally know for sure what was going on, even though they might themselves be struggling with feelings of guilt, loss, and fear. As stated before, even though they felt overexposed, the young people in this study still experienced a great deal of relief and gratitude toward their parents because they did not reject them.
An additional factor that seemed to improve family relationships during family discovery was the new honesty that was possible. Despite parents feeling distressed and youth feeling exposed, it must have been a relief for these families to finally be able to talk about what had been a secret for so long. This mother of a twenty-three-year-old gay man, who herself was a social worker, described how good it felt to relate to her son after she knew about his sexual orientation:
I felt a relief. I felt that our interactions became honest. I wasn’t pretending, like if he would say he went out with Bill and Sue, you know, “Oh, who are they?” And it was like I didn’t ask any more who Bill and Sue were, I didn’t care. I interacted more with him then to make sure he was OK and that he knew I was OK. I needed him to know that I was truly OK, that I was the same mom.
Her son also noticed the improvement in the relationship with his mother right after he came out to her:
Yes, there was a change. Because we had pretty much talked about everything that was going on in my life, so after I told her then it allowed me to talk about my relationship with my boyfriend at the time and things like that. It was actually a lot of fun having her to talk to about that . . . kind of cool to be able to include her.
He also mentioned some minor improvement in his relationship with his father:
I don’t know if it is related or not, but, after he found out, it did seem we started talking a little bit more. He seemed a little bit more interested in what was going on with me in California. He would ask more questions about how I was doing, what I was doing. Before he was kind of curious, but it just seemed like he actually cared more about it.
Wolf (1991) and Garcia-Preto (1999) describe how the onset of sexuality, along with the adolescent mandate to move away from parents and childhood, can strain communication in heterosexual families. When families are launching (or preparing to launch) their sons and daughters, the challenge is to give the children the “roots” of family connection and security that enables them to use their “wings” to explore their own freedom sufficiently to establish independence. A family in which parents leave room for a child to be openly lesbian or gay but where strong parent-child relationships are maintained is manifesting a good balance between supporting autonomy and connectedness.
In two additional families both the mother and the child agreed that their relationship improved even though the ongoing distance in children’s relationships with their fathers remained the same. When asked how, if at all, their relationship changed after her seventeen-year-old daughter came out, this African American mother recalled: “Our relationship got better. Once I gave her space, it got better, so her being gay or lesbian had nothing to do with me against her because of that. And like I said, it was the same, my feelings didn’t change.” Her seventeen-year-old daughter agreed: “Yeah, [after I came out our relationship changed] for the better. Like I said, before we weren’t able to talk about anything, and when I say anything, I mean anything. After I told her I was gay, things got much better.” Her father never lived with the family, and her relationship with him had always been distant. Coming out to him did nothing to change this.
Candace attributed some of the improvement in her relationship with her twenty-four-year-old son Ryan to the new honesty that was possible between them along with his growing emotional maturity.
Well, again, his age had a lot to do with it too. He had been in the mode of not talking to me for a couple of years. So now he was very understanding and would talk to me when I would ask him questions. So I initiated the conversation, and he would talk to me, so long as he wasn’t in a bad mood or late for school or something.
Ryan recalled the relationship becoming increasingly open after he came out to her: “I think things got better, our relationship was open. Like she wanted to know if my friend Zach and I were dating, and I told her no, we were just friends. So that was a good thing. I don’t know if she believed me, but I did tell her. So now she could know things that she didn’t know before.” Clearly, things got better between them during the family discovery phase.
However, with regard to his father who was divorced from Candace and whom Ryan only saw twice a year, he stated: “I don’t think things changed. We were never really that communicative anyway.” As discussed previously, father-child relationships are generally more distant than their mother-child counterparts. This was certainly true among families in this sample, so in some ways it is not surprising that if paternal relationships were distant or strained before the children came out they remained so afterward.
Sometime gay and lesbian children saw improvements in their relationships with their parents during family discovery even if their parents believed things stayed the same. For example, Toshi’s mother stated that her relationship with her son did not change immediately after coming out. It remained as strong as it had always been, even though she began to worry for his safety once he came out to her. However, Toshi insisted that his relationship with both his mother and father improved immediately after coming out:
It got closer. It just happened that way. I mean, when you can be honest about something which was a major issue for you that definitely makes it closer, especially when your parents actually help you out, instead of like, “No! We hate you!” . . . We definitely talk. I don’t feel uncomfortable at all. I don’t have to lie to them as much. I guess the whole honesty type of thing really strengthened the relationship.
As stated in a previous section of this chapter, in some families youth had a tendency to see parent-child relationships deteriorate while the parents believed they stayed the same, and this could be explained by parents’ efforts to maintain (and project) their self-images as good, all-accepting parents. A similar explanation might apply to families in which youth believed their relationships improved when parents thought they stayed the same. Parents might prefer to believe and/or report no improvement in their relationship with their children because such a report might suggest a time when their relationships with their children were less than optimal. Such parents might have been unwilling to admit, either to themselves or an outside researcher, that their relationship with their children had been anything but invariably strong in order to maintain their self-images as good parents.
However, the reports of Gloria and Noah suggest another explanation. Gloria remembered the relationship with her twenty-two-year-old son Noah as being distant right after he came out because she put so much energy into shielding her son from her feelings of profound self-blame, which she experienced immediately after Noah told her he was gay. Nevertheless, her son recalled:
I really just remember it improving. I think it took time and I think it took her reading those books and joining PFLAG, but I just remember it improving, and the only really significant difference in terms of our conversation was she would ask about boys and if I was seeing anyone. I felt now she knew everything about me, so I could keep telling her things. We talked more. I was more open with her.
Apparently, Gloria did such a good job shielding her son from her reactions that Noah believed the relationship improved. The importance of protective family boundaries that emerged during family discovery has clinical implications that I will return to later in this chapter.
According to the extensive literature available, mothers are generally closer to their children than fathers. As stated repeatedly in this book, compared to fathers, mothers have more contact with their children, are more likely to talk with their children about emotional issues, and are more likely to discuss sex with them (Craig 2006; Finley and Schwartz 2006; Kirkman, Rosenthal, and Feldman 2002; Rosen 1999). Even though sex role socialization is a common explanation for these differences, some of the findings of this study suggest that systemic factors may play a part in maintaining these differences.
Among these parents, there was a small handful of fathers who were historically, emotionally distant from their children but who then became closer to them initially after they came out. Invariably, in these families, the mothers, who had traditionally enjoyed intimate relationships with their sons and daughters, were having a difficult time coping with their children’s newly disclosed sexual orientation. As can be seen by the quoted responses that follow, the new mother-child distance opened up an opportunity for some fathers and youth to develop closer connections, often to the children’s surprise. This new closeness was an unexpected silver lining in the coming-out process.
Remember Bob, the successful stockbroker? His daughter, Ellie, spoke of how historically she had been closer to her mother. However, things changed dramatically when this young woman began to befriend openly gay people before she came out. Her religiously Episcopalian mother vehemently disapproved of her friendship choices, and when she made her feelings known to her daughter this, unsurprisingly, led to arguments. Immediately after Ellie told her parents, she felt relieved to finally be more honest with her family, even though coming out seemed to aggravate the already thorny relationship she had with her mother (who, perhaps for this reason, declined to be interviewed for this study). However, Ellie identified positive postcoming-out changes in her relationship with her father.
I felt like I could be honest with her about my life. The door was open, whether she wanted it open or not. It improved my relationship with my father greatly. The number one biggest improvement was in our relationship. If someone would have asked me when I was younger if this would happen . . . I would have said, “No. There is no way in hell my dad would accept something like this.” But it is by far the catalyst to my relationship with my father. I am closer to him now then I ever have been in my entire life.
Bob agreed that he and his daughter became closer right after she came out:
I think it was that the two of us were dealing with a subject that intersected both of us as opposed to most subjects between a father and his twenty-something-year-old daughter. There aren’t that many things that we are both involved in or concerned about and now we [father and daughter] are both involved and concerned with her well-being and her relationship with her parents and her parents’ well-being and education about being gay and what it all meant in the world.
This report of Tony’s father Joe also demonstrates how coming out can improve father-son relationships.
I think, if anything, I felt a much stronger attachment to him, because he had chosen to come out to me. And I think vice versa—I think it worked very positively from both our standpoints. I just felt better about him—I really did. I felt like I was dealing with him as I should be, accepting him for who he was. I felt very good about myself over that fact, that I wasn’t having really any problems doing that. Internally, I was struggling, but externally, with him, I felt very confident in how I was dealing with it. I felt as confident in dealing with him for the first time in my life as I probably ever had.
His son Tony described how his mother, from whom his father recently divorced, had a very hard time coping with his sexual orientation when she initially found out.
I told her, and it was awful. And Mom was the one I was sure would be on my side . . . It definitely affected our relationship. I pulled back a lot. Because hers was the support I had really counted on and had counted on my entire life. She certainly wasn’t unsupportive—the whole thing just made her so upset. She kind of withdrew . . . I did withdraw a little bit too. We both kind of withdrew. I would make periodic forays towards my mom. Like when it was just the two of us in the house, “I would say how are you feeling about things? How are you feeling about me?” And often her response would be, “I love you and I need to work through this, I need to get used to this.” Just something sort of like the issue is not up for discussion at the moment.
This distance with his mother seemed to throw open a window that allowed a closer relationship between Joe and Tony to develop:
TONY: Dad and I kind of engaged. We started talking a lot more, about this and other things. Like I said, he joined PFLAG and he would invite me to come with him to the meetings. He was very curious about where David [my partner] and I went, not in a nosey way, just like, “Do you go out dancing? Where do you go?” He became just more accessible.
INTERVIEWER: And it didn’t feel like he was being intrusive?
TONY: No. It didn’t at all. Sometimes my mom would ask these things, and when she did it would feel like that, even if she was asking the same thing.
INTERVIEWER: What was the difference, the thing that told you OK, this is nosey, versus this feels like he is being accessible?
TONY: A lot of it is just the dynamic of my relationship. Mom and I, because we are on so much the same wavelength, we can say many more things with a single statement. By simply asking me where it was that David and I went dancing, Mom could also be asking, “Are you being safe?” She could be asking, “Are you going to some den of sin and having sex with forty people?” And it was hard for me to figure out which of those questions she was asking, whereas, with Dad, what he asked was what he was asking.
It is interesting and important to note that improvements among families in which coming out led to more positive relationships between fathers and children continued beyond the family discovery phase right up to the time the family members were interviewed. As a matter of fact, in all the families in which there were improvements in parent-child relationships during family discovery, they continued throughout the family adjustment trajectory—and these families were joined by others who experienced family relationship enhancement later on, after parents had the time and opportunity to adjust.
When a family finds out for sure that a daughter or son is gay, it has an immediate, disruptive impact on the family and its members, particularly parents. Well-meaning parents who do not reject their children may grapple with feelings of self-blame, grief, and worry, and, in this study, such feelings carried many parents into an emotional crisis as they struggled with anxiety and depression. In some families these feelings spilled over to create conflict. However, in others, family members were able to avoid overt conflict by distancing—and the experiences of these families suggest a possible coping strategy for families wrestling with the challenges of the discovery stage.
After an explosion, a cloud of smoke engulfs the area in a dark, tense silence, and, until it clears, nobody knows how the landscape will be changed. A version of this edgy quiet was present in the families in this study whereby distance seemed to be the defining characteristic of family relationships during the family discovery stage immediately after the child had come out.
From a structural perspective, these findings underscore how parents and children can mutually act in ways to modify parent-child boundaries during the family discovery stage, making them thicker, stronger, and more protective. None of the parents in this study rejected their children because they were lesbian or gay, however, after discovery, parents struggled with feelings of surprise, guilt, grief, and fear. In an effort to avoid conflict and protect their children, many parents seemed to emotionally retreat to their corners. Although there was tension in many of these families, and the children knew they were upset, the distance that occurred during family discovery seemed to allow parents to deal with their feelings of guilt and mourning on their own without inciting overt family conflict.
Children may also play a role in creating these thick boundaries. First of all, in this study, once their parents knew about their homosexuality, children initially felt exposed and anxious. After years of hiding, it can be unsettling and embarrassing that parents are now aware of this very personal and, for some, shameful information. Therefore, some children may need to distance from their parents in an effort to restore their bearings and get accustomed to the idea that their parents now know what they have long kept a secret.
Second, these findings suggest that a child’s relief over not being rejected can create a smokescreen behind which they cannot see or can avoid seeing their parents’ guilt and mourning. Knowing their parents were coping with feelings of self-blame and loss would put them face to face with their parent’s thinking that they were abnormal. Because, during family discovery, children are so afraid of rejection or extreme parental disapproval, they may be unwilling or unable to cope with any of their parents’ strong negative feelings.
In order to avoid facing their parents’ disapproval and also to prevent family conflict, young people found ways to distance from their parents by avoiding certain topics of discussion, at times creating a situation where there was less contact with parents—in effect reinforcing these boundaries in an effort to maintain some kind of fragile peace in the family during this difficult time. Although there was tension in many of these families, and the children knew they were upset, this seemed to allow parents to deal with their guilt and feelings of loss without inciting overt family conflict. This tentative and somewhat uneasy calm may be an important component of family adjustment
Therapists put a premium on close family communication, so it is hard to think of family distancing as a good thing, even though, for the families described herein, it was. Nevertheless, thick, mutually reinforced family boundaries are not without their problems. Many families in this study described a nervous tension as an unpleasant component of this distance. Furthermore, as stated by Ellie, children who came out to their parents were seeking a blanket of comfort. However, parents who were initially over-whelmed by the news were unavailable to offer this to their children.
Nevertheless, this distance can be a way family members maintain themselves and their relationships, at least until the dust settles and the family can get used to the idea that the secret is out. Thus some temporary disengagement, rather than being problematic, might indeed be functional and could even be recommended by therapists working with families in the throes of the discovery phase.
The prevailing wisdom in family therapy is that clinicians need to bring everyone together to talk openly about their concerns. However, if undertaken at the wrong time, particularly too early in the family adjustment trajectory, this can be counterproductive. Clinicians approached by anguished families in the discovery phase might find themselves in the perplexing cross fire of distraught parents and offspring who are feeling overexposed and embarrassed. Or, instead of fighting (or to prevent them from doing so), family members may have retreated behind their own walls of cold silence. Based on the findings of this study, it would be fruitless to push family members to talk everything out when they are too hurt and angry to listen and understand one anothers’ perspectives. Thus individual sessions with parents and children might be the best place to start.
SEPARATE SESSIONS. Protective parents might not want to share their feelings of self-blame and loss with their children, and young people might be distancing or shutting down in the presence of their parents to protect themselves from their disapproval and avoid conflict. Based on these findings, mutual distancing is something family therapists might want to support, particularly during the period immediately after the child has come out. Thus, when therapists are sought out by a family that is struggling with a daughter or son coming out, family sessions may not be what’s called for. Instead, it is probably a better idea to routinely meet with family members individually, at least initially, to first assess how they are doing and whether or not they are emotionally able to participate in a productive family session.
Parents seeking therapy at this time will need help coping with guilt, loss, and anxiety. The therapist is advised to assess parents for guilt and grief as these feelings were frequent sources of mental health symptoms in this sample during the family discovery phase. If parents are extremely depressed and anxious because they are blaming themselves or overwhelmed with feelings of loss, they may need to be seen alone for a while.
Some family therapists have suggested that traumatized family members need to first get a chance to express their intense feelings to the therapist alone. If distressed parents who are newly aware of their children’s sexual orientation feel sufficiently heard and understood by the clinician, they will experience the emotional relief necessary to be receptive to referrals for education and support. Subsequently, once they are calmer and better informed, they will also be better able to productively discuss issues in a family session (Guerin and Pendagast 1976; LaSala 2000).
A cornerstone of good clinical practice is the establishment of an empathic, supportive relationship with clients. As anyone in the helping professions knows, this kind of relationship is easier to describe than it is to establish and maintain. Like the interviewers in this study, practitioners need to find ways to break through the walls of parental reluctance and assure mothers and fathers that they can discuss all of their feelings, including their guilt and shame, without fear of being judged.
But what if the therapist is judgmental? Working with these families can inspire a maelstrom of feelings, some of them contradictory. We might think that parents who don’t immediately accept their coming-out sons and daughters are bad parents and, at the same time, wonder if there isn’t something wrong with these people for having gay children in the first place. Unfortunately, family therapists do not spring from the soil, fully formed, as nonjudgmental adults; they grow up in the same society as their clients and are exposed to the same homophobic, oppressive messages about gays and lesbians. Rachel, one of the mothers in this study, talked about how homophobia and heterosexism “has to be burnt out of you.” At the end of chapter 11 advised therapists and other human service workers to make ongoing efforts to look inward, examine their ideas and feelings, and seek information and exposure to lesbians and gays. It is my sincerest hope that readers follow this advice.
TOLERATING INTOLERANCE. Those who enter human service professions do so because they care deeply about human suffering and hope to help eradicate it. Seeing a vulnerable person in pain not only breaks our hearts but makes us want to do something to help. Thus it is understandable for human service professionals to want to protect children, even, at times, from their own parents. It may be hard not to negatively judge parents who are not accepting of their children, particularly fathers and mothers who say ugly things to them when they first learn they are gay. I knew of several parents who told their coming-out children that they would rather have learned their sons or daughters were murderers. Of course, it is understandably difficult for most therapists to hear such a thing and yet remain neutral.
However, we must remember that attempting to rescue these children by defending them and attacking their parents is not the best way to help them. Instead, we must find ways to help their parents express, understand, and cope with their feelings so that family relationships can be preserved and strengthened. Keeping this in mind, therapists might need to show parents that, even though they themselves are gay positive, they will not be intolerant of their clients’ intolerance. The therapist can demonstrate that many different feelings are understandable and acceptable by talking about what other parents go through. For understandable reasons, it would be too difficult for newly out gay and lesbian youth to hear this, so, of course, this needs to be done in parents-only sessions.
What scissors are for hairstylists, open, nondirective questions are for therapists, and it is a good idea to use them liberally in interactions with clients. However, some parents of gay children are ashamed of their feelings. In their minds, good parents should never be rejecting or ashamed of their kids, so they might hold back such feelings from their therapists. It is also difficult for people to recognize and face their own shame (Nichols 1995b), therefore it is possible that parent-clients will not fully realize all that they are experiencing and may not recognize certain feelings until their therapists identify them. Nevertheless, the practitioner does not want to give the impression that a client should have certain feelings or that something is wrong if he does not.
Perhaps clinicians should think of themselves as playing the position of catcher in a baseball game. Catchers, of course, don’t control the motion of the ball coming toward them. However, even before the pitch, they have a general idea of its path. When the ball comes their way, they’re crouching, they have their mitts on, and they’re ready to catch it, whether it is a wild pitch or one that sails through the strike zone.
Not all parents experience their feelings in the same way, but clinicians need to communicate to their parent-clients that if they are experiencing certain feelings, such as guilt, shame, anger, mourning, disgust, despair, or fear, they have their catcher’s mitt on and are prepared to hear about them. Therefore, it might be a good idea to invite clients to talk about specific feelings they might be experiencing by saying something like “I know of some parents who feel guilty that they made their children gay. I know others who feel ashamed of themselves and their children when they find out. Others feel disgusted, yet others have none of these feelings. What are you experiencing right now?” Trusting someone with our shameful feelings is not something that happens right away—it takes time before we know we can tell someone our most embarrassing secrets without being judged. Thus, if parents initially deny these feelings, practitioners should be prepared to gently ask about them again in future sessions.
If, like me, you are an openly gay man or a lesbian, you may have to work harder at convincing parents that you are receptive to hearing their most negative feelings. I often tell parents, “I have worked with many parents like you and I know that parents have a variety of reactions, some of which they are ashamed of. I’ve heard it all, so nothing you say will shock me.” Sometimes I find some limited self-disclosure is helpful: “My parents and I are OK now, but when they first found out they had a terrible time and said some pretty awful, hurtful things to me—so there is nothing you can say to me that I will find shocking or offensive.”
Once parents start expressing their feelings, I have three suggestions: 1. normalize, 2. normalize, 3. normalize. Based on the responses of the participants in this research, a variety of feelings are possible, and parents need to know that what they are feeling is not out of the ordinary. When relevant, it might be helpful to use examples from the reports of the parents in this book to help clients see they are not the only ones who feel the way they do.
Considering these findings, it might be a good idea for practitioners to assess parents carefully for depression and anxiety and consider at least a short course of medication if their symptoms are debilitating. Once these feelings are examined and discussed, and parents feel that the clinician truly understands them, parents might then be open to hearing information about gays and lesbians and their lifestyles.
It is a tricky task to offer education and advice to clients without conveying the idea that their feelings are wrong. Clinicians need to empathize with their clients and show they understand their feelings. They need to wait for signs that their parent-clients really know they are understood, such as when their clients vigorously agree with the therapist’s reflections and also when they seem relieved that someone finally, truly understands them. Eventually the clients’ discussion of their feelings will slow down and they will seem as if they have exhausted the topic, with nothing new to add. When therapists think their clients believe that their feelings have been heard, it might be time to suggest they get information on gay and lesbian people and perhaps offer a referral.
Sometimes a bit of trial and error is called for. Carl Whitaker used to advise family therapists to “learn to retreat and advance from every position that you take.” If parents seem unwilling to accept referrals for information when offered, back off and return to exploring and empathizing with their feelings.
SIGNS OF HOPE. In addition to offering support and empathy, it would also be helpful for practitioners to communicate a realistic sense of hope to parents during this phase. As a matter of fact, the therapist should not let even the first session end without giving a message of optimism. Parents in this study described feeling relieved when they learned through PFLAG or from their understanding friends and relatives that they would eventually feel better about their children’s homosexuality. Some even identified benefits to having a lesbian daughter or gay son, such as increased honesty in family relationships. Parents at the beginning of the discovery stage might not be ready to hear this message, but clinicians can tell them that, based on the experiences of other parents, it is unlikely they will feel very badly for a long time.
The good news is that if parents are seeking help from a therapist after learning their child is gay it is likely their intent is to find ways to adjust to this information as well as to maintain the family. Thus the therapist should align with this positive component of the parents’ motivation by offering them hope that they will eventually feel better. This hope is realistic—the stories of these families strongly suggest that it is indeed possible for families not only to survive but to flourish after a child comes out—as we shall see.
It would also be a good idea to assess children separately, at least initially. Sometimes, because they are feeling so raw, exposed, and reactive, they may have distanced from their parents or shut down in an effort to get some breathing space to protect themselves. In addition, the blanket of parental reassurance Ellie mentioned is often just not available at this time, and children are feeling angry and confused that their parents are not able to offer the support they need.
During family discovery it might be the professional helpers in the child’s life who offer that comforting blanket. Like their parents, gay sons and daughters also need a place, away from the family, to vent their complex mix of emotions including fear, relief, anger, frustration, and sadness. The relationship with the therapist or counselor is an ideal place for this.
Like their parents, once they feel heard, young lesbians and gays might be more amenable to education about their parent’s reactions and more receptive to potential reframes of their parents’ seemingly insensitive behavior. Young people may need to be reminded how difficult it was and how much time it took for them to come to terms with their sexual orientations. Therapists can then point out that their parents also need time to get through their own processes. Reframing parental reactions as part of a normal and progressive process, similar to their own adjustment, can go a long way in helping young people not to personalize their family reactions and to avoid participating in hostile interchanges that will only make things worse.
Clinicians need to make sure that their young clients are not trying to get reassurance by demanding immediate approval and acceptance. I know of no children who have won parental acceptance in an argument. As will be described in the next chapter, sometimes, in certain circumstances, mild pushing on the part of the child can be helpful. However, bitter verbal warfare, initiated by children, can backfire and is, in fact, unnecessary in circumstances where parents are already making some effort to adjust by seeking therapy.
Finally, young gays, particularly those whose parents are seeking therapy to help them adjust, have good reason to be hopeful, and clinicians can point this out. If a parent is in any way taking an active role in trying to adjust, such as reading books or researching online, the prognosis is good, and it is likely that parents’ feelings will improve. The seventy-six mothers and fathers in this study found ways to eventually adjust to the news that their daughter or son was gay, so, even though it is not a sure thing, recovery is indeed possible for parents, particularly for those who are seeking help and information.
No man or woman is an island—nor should anyone try to be during a crisis. It is of utmost importance that people access social support during difficult times, and the coming-out period is no exception. Speaking structurally, the boundaries around family systems in crises must loosen up to allow members to receive necessary assistance outside the family walls.
This is particularly important for young, coming-out gays and lesbians who are vulnerable during a difficult time, in need of reassurance and support, but feel distant from their parents. It is advised that therapists and counselors work with their young clients to take an inventory of the people they can lean on during this period. With whom can they talk about their anger at and disappointment with their parents and their fears that they will never be accepted? As we know, for people coping with the emotional ravages of stigma there is something healing about finding a group of others like themselves (Corrigan and Watson 2002). Do the young clients have gay and lesbian or even understanding straight friends they can rely on?
If not, they can be connected to a community of LGBT young people through helpful Web sites. Out proud (http://www.outproud.org/) and the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network (www.glsen.org) are excellent sites where youth not only can get information but can also join online chats with others like themselves.
However, a word of caution is in order. Children must be made aware of Web-related safety issues. They need to understand that some people online are not who they say they are, and sexual predators, unfortunately, are not unheard of on these Web sites. So, if they decide to meet an online acquaintance in person for the first time, it should be done in a public place, preferably with a known friend or, depending on the child’s age, a trusted adult.
Parents who are struggling with the news that a son or daughter is gay and don’t know where to turn need a lifeline—something or someone to assist them in coping with their feelings of guilt, self-blame, and isolation as well as help them deal with the prospect of their own stigmatization as parents of lesbians and gays. For such parents, Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) can be an invaluable source of needed information and sustenance. PFLAG (www.pflag.org/) is a national organization that provides information about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people and sponsors support groups for their parents. Support groups are held at local chapters throughout the country where fathers and mothers can receive guidance and emotional support from a community of parents who, for the most part, have grown to accept their gay children.
Thus clinicians might want to refer parents of families in the discovery (and subsequent) stages of family adjustment to PFLAG as an adjunct to psychotherapy. An excellent, brief, easy-to-read booklet is available on their Web site, which addresses many of the concerns parents typically experience when they first learn a daughter or son is gay, http://www.pflag.org/fileadmin/user_upload/Publications/Daughters_Sons.pdf.
It is worth noting that even though PFLAG has helped many parents, reports of a small number of mothers and fathers in this study suggest that PFLAG might not be for everyone. Such exceptions are discussed in the next chapter.
With regard to information and education, several excellent books that parents might find helpful are available and these include (but are not limited to): Love Ellen: A Mother-Daughter Journey by Betty DeGeneres (DeGeneres 1999). Also, Beyond Acceptance: Parents of Lesbians and Gays Talk About Their Experiences by Carolyn Griffin, Marian Wirth, and Arthur Wirth (1997), Straight Parents, Gay Children by Robert Bernstein (2007), and Fortunate Families: Catholic Families with Lesbian Daughters and Gay Sons by Mary Ellen Lopata (2003).
Therapists are also advised to encourage parents to seek other sources of social support from nonjudgmental friends, relatives, and colleagues. As we will see in chapter 4, parents were greatly assisted by supportive, enlightened, nonjudgmental confidants, not necessarily therapists or PFLAG members, who helped them cope with their feelings of mourning and self-blame.
Based on the findings of this study, clinicians might want to normalize and even prescribe some family distance during the family discovery crisis. Temporarily retreating from each other emotionally can take pressure off relationships during this difficult time and give parents the space they need to work through their most difficult feelings, including their guilt. It can also give youth a much needed opportunity to adjust to the fact that their secret is out. Elsewhere I describe how deliberate, short-term, emotional distancing along with brief, superficial interactions can help family members stay connected, at the same time allowing them the emotional space to work through their feelings (LaSala 2000), and I recommend this for families who are struggling with the challenges of the family discovery phase. Once parents work through their most intense initial emotional reactions, and youth feel less embarrassed and exposed, the family will be ready for family sessions.
As we have seen in this chapter as well as in chapters 1 and 2, young respondents were particularly nervous about telling their fathers they were gay or lesbian. This could be related to the distance the youth experienced with their fathers as they grew up. It was not unusual for children to tell mothers they were gay and then for the mothers to tell fathers. In some families, children and fathers never directly discussed the youth’s homosexuality. As stated repeatedly, it is not uncommon in American families for fathers to be more distant from their children than mothers, and this could at least partially explain these findings. However, from a family therapy viewpoint, relaying such important information indirectly through a third party could be seen as an indicator of an emotional triangle in the family—typically not a good thing (Nichols and Schwartz 2008). Under such circumstances, not only do mothers run the risk of becoming exhausted, but the father-child distance is perpetuated as both miss the opportunity for honest, satisfying communication.
Based on these findings, it is recommended that therapists pay special attention to fathers in their work with these families. Whenever possible, fathers need to be included in treatment and encouraged to talk directly about their feelings regarding their children’s sexual orientation. Distant or relatively silent fathers might be harboring deep distress or, conversely, might be less disapproving than expected. Either way, fathers need to be brought into the fold, included as much as possible in the family work.
Furthermore, the therapist must be careful to avoid taking sides against distant or hostile fathers. Jay talked about how easy it was to make his father a scapegoat, and he might as well be speaking for the many frustrated mothers, children, and therapists who find themselves doing just that. Practitioners must resist this tendency and help the family do so as well. Instead, clinicians should facilitate open dialogue between fathers and children without interference from the mother or the therapist. Keep in mind, even a father who presents as an ogrelike bigot can be hiding considerable worry for his child along with shame that he was not man enough to raise children who are all entirely heterosexual. Furthermore, as the findings from some of the families in this study suggest, family members may collude in ways that keep fathers distant. Active engagement and careful assessment could help determine if fathers are suffering in silence and/or are potential, newly discovered resources for the youth as well as the mother who is having difficulty accepting the news that her daughter or son is gay. More tips on engaging fathers of gay and lesbian children are offered at the end of chapter 4.
So how is the clinician to know when the family is ready for conjoint family therapy? Sadly, there is no fail-safe formula to offer that will work in each and every situation. There is no substitute for careful, sensitive, thoughtful assessment, and this is especially true when working with these families.
Having said that, a general guideline for family therapy to be productive is that family members, particularly parents, need to at least be open to understanding each other’s perspectives. In the midst of their feelings of guilt and mourning, can parents begin to see that their child is seeking honest communication along with acceptance and reassurance? Children might react to parent’s feelings with some version of “You just don’t understand!” and they would be right—parents probably don’t fully understand. That’s why they need their children and the therapist to help them do so.
Can children recognize that their parents need time to adapt to the news of their sexual orientation and their reactions are most likely temporary? One indication that family therapy is appropriate is if at least one member of the family can speak to the others in a calm, rational manner and can be coached to use “I” statements about what she is thinking or how he is feeling, such as “I am worried about you getting HIV” or “I told you I was gay because I wanted us to have an honest relationship.”
The previously mentioned advice from Carl Whitaker about knowing when to retreat is also relevant to this situation. I always tell my students who are nervous about bringing angry, anxious family members together, exposing children to family conflict, that whatever happens when they are together in session is no worse than what they experience at home—so it is extremely unlikely that a premature family therapy session will do any additional, permanent damage. As a matter of fact, even if things go awry, it might be important and validating for a clinician to witness and then point out the family’s damaging interactions. If discussions deteriorate into destructive criticism, contempt, defensiveness, hostility, and withdrawal that cannot be stopped, then the therapist can orchestrate a mutual “retreat” by stopping the session and postponing future family sessions until people are calmer and less reactive.
POSITIVE REFRAMES. Throughout the family adjustment trajectory, but especially during family discovery, there are two important truths for the family therapist to remember: 1. Parents want their children to be happy, healthy, and make them proud, 2. Children want their parents to love, support, and be proud of them. Almost all family communication, no matter how combative, have these wishes driving them, and, like a scuba diver excavating sunken treasure from the ocean floor, it is the therapist’s job to help the family reach through their anxiety, anger, guilt, loss, and conflict and bring these unspoken wishes to the surface.
A lot of this work will be a combination of refraining and encouraging people to “go deeper” and discuss whatever feelings lie beneath the surface of their anger and combativeness. Instead of attacking surprised or intolerant parents, children can be coached to try to understand their points of view and find effective ways to ask for what they need. A statement such as “You are such a bigot—being gay is natural and normal—why can’t you see that?” is translatable into “Please love me and accept me for who I am. I need you to help me feel stronger.” Therapists might reframe the young person’s statement with a comment such as “You care very much what your parents think about you and you want their help and support. Can you find a better way to ask them for what you really need?” By hearing this intervention, even if the child cannot find a better way to ask for help, parents can gain an understanding of what their angry children are really seeking from them.
In the same vein, parents who exclaim “How can you choose this lifestyle? Don’t you know what two men do together?” are in fact saying, in a disguised version, “I would hate to see you get hurt or do something that will cause you humiliation or make you the target of prejudice—especially if it is something I caused. I am afraid that being gay will prevent you from living a happy life, and this fear breaks my heart.” In this case, the therapist can encourage the parents to share these fears with their children in a way that can open up a needed discussion about what it means to be gay, that it does not preclude a happy and healthy life.
During their interviews, several parents told me that, besides me and their child, they had never known any other gay people. Parents of newly out gay children heard me speak at a PFLAG meeting or some other function in which I was recruiting respondents and were fascinated (and relieved) to learn of a gay man who had a successful career, a long-term relationship, and who seemed happy—so they wanted contact with me up close. Thus it cannot be underestimated how isolated and uninformed these families can be and how worried they are for the future of their children. Successful therapy during this phase—perhaps all family therapy—is about getting family members to understand the ways in which their conflicts and distance hide deep yearnings for love, reassurance, acceptance, and relief from fear.
There is much more to say about family sessions, and further suggestions will be presented in later chapters. As the respondent families traversed the family adjustment trajectory, particularly as they progressed from family discovery to recovery, they recalled experiences that suggest what can help and what can impede family adjustment, and these findings have important implications for therapy with gay and lesbian families.