Read This is a Book for Parents of Gay Kids: A Question & Answer Guide to Everyday Life Online
Authors: Dannielle Owens-Reid,Kristin Russo
This is a Book for Parents of Gay Kids: A Question & Answer Guide to Everyday Life (2 page)
This book will address many of your concerns, from the initial coming-out process to how to reconcile your child’s sexuality with your religious beliefs to how to handle sleepovers. You’ll also hear from parents and children who have been through the process and can share their experiences—both what has worked and what hasn’t. As the book is laid out in a question-and-answer format, it will be very easy to find the items that feel relevant to you at any given time. There is no need to read this book cover to cover (though, go right ahead if you feel like it!), and it can be revisited as your experience with your child unfolds. Today you are seeking answers to questions that are very different from the questions you may have a year from now. That is all part of the process. We have also included key takeaways (“The Bottom Line”) at the end of each chapter, so there are many ways to digest this information, depending on your personal experience and interests.
While our advice is based on our discussions with countless parents and their children, we, of course, cannot represent the experience of every single family. You may find that our advice helps you enormously in some situations, but that in others, it doesn’t work
perfectly—and that is totally okay! This book is meant to tackle some of the initial, tough questions that you may have, and to help you begin (and continue) a dialogue with your child, family members, and other loved ones. We encourage you to use this book as a stepping stone toward an even deeper exploration of this process with your child. There is an extensive Resources section at the end of this book to help you continue that work.
There are so many parents who truly want to be able to understand, help, and support their child in any way possible. By picking up this book, it’s clear that you are one of those parents. We hope this book can help you feel more comfortable starting that conversation and building a strong, open relationship. This book was written to help you foster communication with your child about his or her sexuality, to provide answers to the many questions that arise moments (or years) after your child has come out to you, and to give insight into what is often happening on the other side of that divide, inside your child’s experience. To help you understand our personal perspectives, here is a look at what it was like for each of us to come out to our parents.
KRISTIN’S COMING-OUT STORY
Mashed potatoes, overcooked stuffing, and an antibiotic-infused Butterball turkey: these are the markers of the American holiday known as Thanksgiving. Unless, of course, you were at my house on November 26, 1998. If that were the case, you would have also found a slightly tipsy, wine-drinking mom; a smiling, story-telling dad; a sullen, prepubescent little sister; and me at the age of seventeen, clad in Salvation Army–sourced clothing, about to tell my parents that I was gay.
First, some background. Until my senior year in high school, I identified as a straight girl with very close girlfriends and a deep adoration for Liv Tyler. My very observant mother, however, had asked me countless times if I was a lesbian. My answer was always the same: “No, Mom, calm down and stop asking me!” Then, in the fall of 1997, I met a girl. We became friends. We hung out. We kissed. We liked kissing. We did some other stuff. This happened a few times, and then that thing happened. That oh-dear-God-my-stomach-is-squeezed-and-my-heart-is-in-my-throat thing. I liked this girl.
In addition to my oh-my-God-I’m-gay panic, I was horrified that my mother had been right all along. As we all know, telling your parents that they are right about anything is almost impossible between the ages of eleven and twenty-four. I didn’t breathe a word of my gayness to anyone but my close friends for almost a year, which brings us back to the Thanksgiving Day surprise.
Once my sister had left the table, I began to complain about an awful translation of the Bible that had been given to me by a relative. I said something like, “They make it sound like God hates gay people, but that is a load of BS.” My mom looked up from her stuffing, her eyes troubled
by my angry tone, and asked, for the hundredth time, “Kristin, is there something you want to tell us?” Then . . . it just happened. I dug my fingers into my palm, mustered up as much teenage courage as I could, and answered, “Yes. I want to tell you both that I’m gay.”
Silence.
The first thing my parents said to me, and the thing I will always remember, was that I was their daughter and they would always love me. For that, I was (and still am) very thankful. After this initial reaction, however, my mother began what would be a very long journey in reconciling her love for her child with her deeply instilled religious beliefs. The first few years were very hard. My mother and I fought a lot. She cried a lot, and I yelled even more. Through all of it, though, we never stopped loving each other.
Over time, the yelling calmed into a dialogue. She allowed herself to meet my girlfriend. Our conversations progressed, and she began to ask me questions. Slowly, girlfriends were invited over for dinner, and my mother and I found common ground amid differing beliefs.
The thing about coming out is that it isn’t one moment at a Thanksgiving dinner table. It is a process that takes patience, understanding, and compassion. It is different for everyone. All we can do is share as much of ourselves as we feel comfortable with and work diligently at accepting who we are, with or without the understanding of those around us.
DANNIELLE’S COMING-OUT STORY
I told my mom I was gay while we were making jewelry in the living room. I was nineteen, we were sitting on the floor placing weird green rocks on some sort of thick fishing line, and I said, “Mom, I have to tell you something: I’m dating someone . . . and it’s a girl.” She immediately screamed, “That’s okay, Ellen is gay and I love Ellen!” Referring, of course, to Ellen DeGeneres. I didn’t have much of a response after that. She asked me a few questions about the girl I was dating and suggested we make her a necklace.
I think many people have that general sense of relief right after they come out to their parents. For one second, I felt that it was totally over and I would never have to do it again. Oh man, was I wrong. Not even two days passed before my mother called me in tears, begging that I not cut my hair or start wearing tracksuits. While other people might have been offended by her ignorance, I was just scared. I tried to explain to her that I wasn’t planning to change anything about myself or the way I lived. It was hard, though, because I was only nineteen years old, and I had no clue who I was or who I was going to be in the years to come.
It took a number of years before my mother stopped asking me to wear dresses and stopped wondering if I was going to end up with a man. She asked me why I didn’t want to get married, which confused me because I
did
want marriage; I just didn’t want to marry a man (which to her, I think, meant I wasn’t really getting married). She wanted to know why I didn’t want kids (again, I did). She wanted to know why I didn’t want a “normal life.” All of her questions really confused me—I felt terrible, lost, and hurt. I thought, “She’s right. What is wrong with me that I don’t want to be normal and happy? Why am I making this harder for myself?”
This experience was in part why I wanted to write this book. I wondered how things might have been different if my mother had known the effect her words would have on me. Did she know how it felt to be asked, “Why don’t you ever want a family?” Maybe a book like this would have helped our conversations, if even just a little bit. Maybe we’d be closer now.
Eventually, with the help of my friends and the rest of my family, I realized my mom’s opinions were her own, that they weren’t a reflection of my reality, and that I could be happy with who I was—and who I am. I had to go on my own journey to discover who I was and who I wanted to be for the rest of my life, but I know it would have been a quicker and easier path had my mom had the tools to talk to me.
Identities are complex, and the words we use to describe them are exceptionally tricky.
There are about eight bajillion (rough estimate) different ways in which we understand ourselves, our identities, and our sexualities. Insofar as sexuality is concerned, there are individuals who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, and that list goes on. Where gender is concerned, there are people who identify as transgender, genderqueer, gender nonconforming, and the list goes on.
(Many of these words are defined in the Glossary, page 215)
. When writing a book for parents whose children have come out to them as one of these many identity permutations, we had to make a few very difficult decisions. At the outset, we asked ourselves: Should we attempt (and inevitably fail) to include all of these identity categories within and throughout the text? We knew that the sometimes overlapping, sometimes markedly different, experiences of kids questioning sexuality and those questioning gender identity would make it impossible to include answers pertinent to
all
identities in
all
of our answers. While certain concerns (such as, “Will my child always be viewed differently?”) address a large range of experience, other concerns (“I feel that marriage should be reserved for a man and a woman”) were much more specific.
Given that, we decided to narrow our primary focus to sexuality. Take note: This book, first, is a book for parents whose children are questioning their sexuality, or have come out to them as gay,
lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, or any of the other myriad words that represent a sexual identity. However, take note again: Having spent many years in the company of LGBTQ youth (both currently and when we
were
youth), we are very aware of the complexities and intricacies of sexuality and gender identity. Our chapter on gender scratches the surface of what it means to question one’s gender, and what it means to be the parent of a child who is in the midst of that questioning. We encourage all parents to read
chapter 7
, regardless of how your child identifies. We all have relationships with gender, and these are highly relevant and important concerns, even if they don’t impact your child directly. If your child
is
questioning their gender, this chapter should give you the first few bits of information needed to better understand what that means, and we encourage you to seek out further resources that focus more specifically on this experience. We also recommend that you read past the gender chapter, as many of the questions and answers contained in the following pages address experiences beyond sexuality.
After deciding to focus the core of this book on sexuality, we were still left with a battle of words. Identity categories, and the words used to describe them, are very specific to the person who chooses to use them. What one person means when using the word
lesbian
to refer to themselves can be very different from what another person means. Some people, especially in younger generations, have come to use the word
queer
as an umbrella term encompassing any divergence from a heterosexual or
cisgender
(self-identifying with the gender assigned at birth) identity. However, many individuals, especially in older generations, view the word
queer
as insulting or derogatory. Words, as previously discussed, are exceptionally tricky. We have chosen to use the word
gay
throughout the majority of this book as a one-word representation of the many, many different sexual identities that your child (or, anyone, for that matter) may use to describe themselves.
Coming Out
Kids come out to their parents in various ways: across a dinner table, in a letter, by text message, or through a song composed on their ukulele. Some coming-out moments happen accidentally; others are planned and thought out for months or even years. Some begin in tears and end in laughter (or more tears); others are welcomed with a knowing nod and a bear hug. Families differ vastly, so there isn’t one single experience that you can expect when your child comes out. The one thing all coming-out moments share, however, is that they are not confined to a single moment. Sure, there is the first utterance of the phrase, “I’m gay, Mom,” or the first time you accidentally overhear your son telling his boyfriend that he has really cute dimples, but coming out is a much larger process for you and your child, and it merely begins with that initial experience.