Oy Vey My Daughter's Gay (3 page)

“Women
complain about PMS, but I think of it as the only time I can be my true self.”
- Roseanne Barr

Most people are surprised when I tell them that Lila was
only seventeen when she came out. She had already spent many years prior to
that moment planning and agonising over the deed. Becoming increasingly aware
that being in the closet and being happy were incompatible, she steeled herself
and, just a few weeks earlier, had finally, tentatively, come out to a friend
over e-mail.

I can only imagine the sense of relief she must have felt
at having unloaded her burden. However, the relief didn’t last for long. The
race was now on to tell us before we heard the news from anybody else. Given
how close we were, Lila harboured a dread that somehow, once the news was out
there in the world, we would find out and be distraught that she had told
others before her own parents. Ever the strategist, Lila had deliberately
confided in a friend who lived far enough away so that we wouldn’t accidentally
bump into said friend in the street. 

“Oh, hello, complete strangers. I’ve never met you before,
but I sense you are Lila’s parents. What a coincidence that we should bump into
each other. You didn’t know that Lila was gay? Oh yes, she told me last week.
What a pity she didn’t tell you first.”

The fact that the friend was loyal to Lila and had no
interest in telling us, no knowledge of where we lived, or even what we looked
like, was of little consequence. Lila felt she had to tell us − and soon.

This wasn’t Lila’s first deadline, but it was her most
pressing. Apparently, throughout her teenage years and even as far back as her
childhood, Lila had set herself ultimatums for coming out to us. I still can’t
imagine a child coming out as being gay and I dread to think how we would have
reacted to that conversation: I’m guessing not as well as the parents in our
favourite sitcom at the time, ‘Ellen’
²
, to paraphrase:

“So how did your parents take it when you told them you
were gay?” Ellen asks her male friend.

“Oh, it took them about a year to come to terms with it,
but by the time I started kindergarten, they were fine!”

Lila recently introduced me to a blog by an American mother
³
whose son came out when he was five. Both she and her husband have been totally
supportive of their son and I am totally in awe of them. The blogger has had
her fair share of negative comments from readers. Many question whether a child
as young as five can possibly be aware of his or her sexual orientation.
Conversely, she has also received many positive comments from gay men and women
who say that, like her son (and Lila), they knew they were gay from a very
early age.

Sadly the Internet wasn’t available when Lila was growing
up. The amount of gay information and support available online would have been
a lifeline for her−it would have been invaluable for us as parents, too.
However, the one thing I’m grateful didn’t exist when Lila came out is YouTube.
Having watched a few young gay people coming out to their parents online, I
shudder to think of the amount of hate mail John and I might have received had
Lila’s coming out been videoed and posted online. Conversely, YouTube may have
a positive effect on parents. Knowing there’s a possibility that you may end up
being judged globally might cause you to think more carefully about your
response to your child coming out. For example, I might have responded very
differently:
“Lila, darling, I’m so happy you’re gay. And Dad is too, of
course… but could you stand over there? I want my best side on camera.”

Lila, however, had reached the ripe old age of seventeen
and had not yet come out. But now that her friend had been told, she continued
setting herself ultimatums:
“If I get 100% on this test, I’ll tell them…”;
“If I can catch this ball 50 times without dropping it, I’ll tell them…”
But she got 99% on the test, dropped the ball at her 49
^th
catch and
remained anxiously in the closet.

Although there was no Internet, there was Minesweeper,
Lila’s computer game of choice at the time. She promised herself that if she
ever completed the final level she would tell us, which seemed a safe bet as
she was not very good at the game. Then one fateful evening just after Christmas−
yes, you’ve guessed it! She won Minesweeper! She sat staring at the screen in
horror for some minutes. Then she steeled herself, walked directly into the
living room, took a deep breath and blurted it out.

I’ve since considered whether telling us by letter might
have been a better option. A letter would have had so many obvious advantages.
Lila could have composed it in her own time, in calm surroundings. She could
have explained everything she wanted and needed to - like how she felt, that
she had struggled to tell us for years and that it was not (as John was hoping)
a phase that would pass.

A letter would have meant that John and I could have had
our knee-jerk reaction in private. We would have been moved when we read what
she’d already gone through just to have reached this point. When she returned,
we would have taken her in our arms and told her we loved her… At least, that’s
my fantasy. In reality John might still have slammed out of the house and I
might have been left clutching a tear-stained letter.

It transpired that Lila the strategist had not only
considered the letter option, but spent a lot of time drafting one − or
twenty. This is a girl who handwrote thirty-one drafts of her dissertation for
her Higher English exam (the Scottish equivalent of English A-Levels). She had
eventually decided against the letter option because she couldn’t stand the
agonising wait between presenting us with a letter and returning later to face
our response.

I sometimes wish I had responded to Lila in a letter, as I
found it impossible to tell her how I felt through speech. I have no idea what
I would have put in the letter, or how useful it would have been.  But at least
then I could have told her I loved her and that we’d get through this somehow.
The lines of communication would have remained open.

I also wonder if it would have been better if Lila had come
out to me first, rather than to both of us at once. There were so many
opportunities, especially on our numerous car trips to and from our shared
love, the theatre, where we would indulge in an in-depth analysis of that
evening’s play. Lila admitted that she had considered the possibility of
telling me first, but dismissed it as being unfair to me to have to tell John.

I often wondered why Lila was so reluctant to participate
in conversation about her personal life. I now know that what I mistook for
typical teenage dismissiveness was partially a fear of revealing her sexuality.
She maintains that I did actually ask her once if she was gay. Maybe my heart
sensed something I didn’t. If only she’d grasped that opportunity to tell me.
When I asked her why she hadn’t, she said it had been because of the way I
asked. Sadly, it’s probably true. Unfortunately, even though I was attending
philosophy classes at the time and had come to recognise the difference in
speaking from the heart and speaking from the ego, it proved to be another
matter to actually put it into practice. The trick is to allow a moment of
silence before speaking, giving the heart an opportunity to respond, rather
than the ego. So, while my heart might have said something along the lines of,
‘Are you gay, Lila? You know you can tell me, darling. You’re my daughter and I
love you unconditionally,’ it didn’t get the chance. As usual, my ego weighed
in immediately with, ‘You’re not
gay
, are you?’

After about a week of stony silence, Lila was fed up
playing the victim and steeled herself for an attack. As a normal teenager she
was more than capable of holding her own in any argument.  She still is,
especially when in the grip of PMT.  We learned this when she took to sharing
her menstrual calendar with us whenever we plan a visit:

“I got my period!”

“Errr… well done. Another month without getting pregnant.
Wait a minute – isn’t that one of the bonuses of being a lesbian? Oh...I see...
PMT is over. Safe to visit!”

“Why can’t you just accept it, like everyone else’s
parents?” she demanded. We didn’t have an answer−either for her or for
ourselves. Apparently, parents of her gay friends were completely nonplussed by
their daughters being lesbians. They were happy, nay, ecstatic. They held
parties, displayed cards on their mantelpiece sent by supportive friends and
relatives, reading,
‘Congratulations, Your Daughter Is a Lesbian’
. Lila
was at a loss to understand why we were so traumatised. In truth, we were too.
She must have suspected we would take it hard. Otherwise, why did she try and
fail to come out to us so many times?

The problem was that we weren’t even capable of arguing at
that time. Even my ego was momentarily struck dumb. Oh, heart. This could have
been your big chance to shine.

While some parents, admittedly, handled their daughter’s
coming out better than we did, some took it much harder. Lila later admitted
that some of her friends hadn’t even plucked up the courage to come out to
their parents at all, while, sadly, one who did had been disowned.

“Gays
should be running the world. Then there would be no more war.  Just a greater
emphasis on military apparel.” - Roseanne Barr

Lila reckons that every extended family has at least one
gay member. According to family legend my mum’s second sister had married a
‘Nancy Boy’. Ironic, because her name actually
was
Nancy! I’m guessing
she didn’t know he was a Nancy Boy (sorry, ‘gay’) when she married him. Also,
she did go on to marry twice more and, by all accounts, her other husbands were
just like ‘ibidy else,’ so ‘the other thing’ worked out for her in the end. I
hope things also worked out for her ex-husband, but, as he wasn’t strictly a
member of our family, he quickly faded from the picture.

There was at least one more skeleton in our family closet,
however. When I was growing up, I often heard my cousin Larry described as a
‘confirmed bachelor’, but I paid little attention. He was twenty-five years
older than me and I didn’t really know him.  Although, on the one occasion we
met he struck me as witty, intelligent and urbane. We were all shocked when he
eventually married a woman he’d met at an airport. Sadly, six months later, he
died − of a heart attack, I was told.

When I heard the news, I mourned with fleeting sadness.
However, my interest was reignited some time later when, on a rare visit, his
brother revealed, in hushed tones, that he and his mother had discovered a
drawer full of strange clothes after Larry’s death. It was a collection of camp
outfits − and not Boy Scout ones. We weren’t furnished with the specifics
of the drawer, but I later came to think of it as the ‘Village People’ drawer.

Apparently, it was a huge shock to Larry’s brother and his
mum. (Their dad was long since deceased.) They had probably known Larry was
gay, but, as far as they were aware, it had been a genteel, under-the-radar
sort of affair. This drawer suggested parading along the local pier dressed in
velvet trousers and chaps (leather trousers worn by cowboys over jeans – and
some non-cowboys with no jeans). It was hard to imagine this conservatively
dressed, middle-aged man having had such a diametrically opposed alter ego. But,
as my mum was fond of stating, “The quiet ones are the worst!” Back then, I
don’t know what I thought about Larry’s secret life. With the benefit of
hindsight, I’m glad he got to be himself, even if it was only for a few guilty
hours at weekends.

His mother died six months after Larry; by family accounts,
of a broken heart. I hate to think it was because of that drawer. Larry’s mum
was by far the most cosmopolitan of her sisters. She was well travelled,
intellectual and bohemian. She and Larry were exceptionally close. I believe
she would have been accepting and supportive – in fact, the exact two things
that everyone (including me) expected that I would have been when Lila came
out.

As a quintessential 1970s teenager, I had no particular
interest in the gay plight. My personal crusade involved religion. Sporting an
afghan coat and patchouli oil (a pungent combination, especially when I was
caught in a rainstorm), my happy hippy outlook did not resonate well with the
small clique that constituted my local Jewish community, in all its
narrow-minded, hierarchical glory. By the age of sixteen, I had realised that
money was the main source of status within that group; that I didn’t have
enough of it and that, as such, I was always going to be pretty low in the
pecking order. And, so, I rebelled and, contrary to my parents’ aspirations for
me, dated and subsequently married ‘out’ of the Jewish community. Marrying out
didn’t create a family precedent in itself – as I said, my elder brother had
got there first. However, I did manage to tread new ground and create something
of a furore by shouting it from the rooftops, while berating the whole Jewish
religion to boot. Our weekly Jewish newspaper had recently run an article by a
right-wing group, the gist being that parents should actively discourage
intermarriage.  Preaching to the converted, I fear. Having just started dating
John, I furiously dashed off a response on the merits (nay selflessness) of
dating a non-Jew.  For good measure, I threw in a barb or two about how the
Jewish religion, in my ‘vast’ experience, was more based on wealth than
spirituality.

The editor must have thought all his birthdays had come at
once. He published my letter, sat back, chain-smoked, snapped his braces and
waited for the sparks to fly. (This was back in 1976. Smoking in buildings was
still permitted and trawling for porn on the Internet didn’t exist.) Our local
Jewish community may have been small, but a remarkably large number took up
their pens in response.  One lone female wrote in to say she agreed with me,
but I noticed she didn’t sign her name. She might have been brave, but, unlike
me, she wasn’t stupid. The general theme was that ‘Hell hath no fury like a
woman scorned!’ Ouch! People shunned my mum in the street. Her aunt phoned to
disinherit her, berating her for allowing her daughter to disgrace the family.
I was undoubtedly the villain of the (Jewish) piece, but, surprisingly, no one
approached me personally. Maybe they didn’t want to be tainted by association.

In retrospect, I realise how supportive my parents were
about the whole incident. In truth, they didn’t ‘allow’ anything. The first
they knew of the letter’s existence was when it glared out at them from their
weekly newspaper, bearing their dear daughter’s name in large letters. I don’t
even remember them being angry with me over it. They had been subjected to my
high jinks since I was five and had long since given up any hope of controlling
me. Sadly, they are no longer around to enjoy compliments, but, anyway, belated
kudos, Mum and Dad.