2000-10-13 - 23:51:50
Family Outings

Family Outings

Mr. Plutonium's near-outing of himself to his Dad reminds me of the courage required to come out as queer to loved ones, especially to parents.

In so doing, we risk everything. Everything might change, for the worse. We might get rejected, disowned, tossed out of the house. And yet, keeping ourselves closeted erects a wall between us and those who once knew--and loved--us best.

The worst way to come out to your dad is by accidentally leaving a gay porn video in the family VCR; that happened to someone I knew.

Living an out gay life for fourteen years now, there isn't a whole lot of "coming out" left for me to do. But each time I choose to come out to someone, I still taste that fear, all these years later. That fear of abandonment, of the person throwing a hissy fit. It gets easier, mind you, but that potential-- for abstracted social prejudice to manifest as personal, in-your-face hatred--is omnipresent. The courage to risk interpersonal rupture, each and every time we come out, is a lifetime requirement of queerness.

I've been lucky, or perhaps blessed. My immediate family has been incredibly supportive; coming out to them was nonetheless one of the most stressful experiences of my life.

I came out to Mom first. Many of you have read of her wonderful presence in my life today; still, I was nervous telling her. I was nearly 21. It was November 1986, just a few days after I came out to a whole living-room-full of my college friends, that I decided to tell her. She was in college at the same time I was, and one night I went over to her place for supper. I'd spent that whole afternoon reading a couple books on families coming to terms with homosexuality in the university library, to psyche myself up. (One of the titles, I remember, was Families Matter by Dr. Charles Silverstein.)

After supper, we adjourned to the living room. I was sitting on the couch, she was in the easy chair beside me. She must have known something was up; I was obviously on edge. Kept talking about this, that, and the other thing in a most distracted way. Finally, I said I had something to say. Mom got very attentive. Then I hummed and hawwed; my preamble meandered for so long, my nervousness was so evident, that by the time I finally looked at her, moments before blurting out the words "I'm gay," she was literally shaking with anxiety.

"Oh, is that all?" she said, once I'd blurted, relievedly catching her breath. Not that it wasn't a big deal, but she'd been bracing herself for a far worse announcement.

Mom said that she was surprised, but that my news was fine with her. She knew several lesbians, and the idea of homosexuality was not foreign to her. She said she loved me. I started to cry.

We talked and talked and talked. Mom didn't have many questions that night, and was hell-bent on assuring me that she accepted me totally. I left her a pile of books on homosexuality which I'd signed out from the library. The next day, however, the enormity of my news had sunk in. Now, she had questions. How long had I known? (Since Grade 2, I suppose, but I'd only begun to name it and thus sink into an alcoholic depression the year before.) Was I sure? (Yes.) Crying, she expressed that--even though she accepted my being gay--it would be a difficult life for me; she felt profound guilt that somehow, in the way she had raised me, she had made me this way. Yeah, she bought into that whole Freudian crap. We had another big talk about all that, and she felt better afterwards. Reading through the books helped her work through that too.

Mom didn't think Dad would have a negative reaction, and she and I decided that she would be the one to tell him. We went home to the farm the next weekend; I drove back into the city on Sunday alone, and she and Dad came in their car. She told him on the hour and a half drive into town. I was on pins and needles, waiting for them to arrive at our house in the city. I was working on an essay downstairs at the computer when they arrived. I was probably shaking when Dad came downstairs to say hi. I could barely look at him. He looked like he was in shock. He was.

The three of us congregated upstairs, and as soon as Mom broached the topic by saying she'd had a long chat with Dad, he started to cry. "I'm so sorry," he said, over and over again. "I'm so sorry." He was sorry, Mom explained (Dad being in no shape to elaborate) that I had had such a lonely, depressive, alcoholic journey towards accepting myself, that I would now be faced with a lifetime of social prejudice. He was sorry. And, he loved me, would support me in whatever way he could. Both Mom and Dad stressed that any boyfriend, any lover of mine would be as welcome in their home as my sister's husband was. I remember how strange that word sounded, rolling off my mother's tongue: lover. How excited I was at the prospect of some day having one. How I couldn't possibly imagine bringing a man--my lover--home for Christmas.

Dad, who is not much of a reader, immediately began devouring the books on homosexuality I'd brought home. He read, and read, and read. Mom read too, although she didn't require the basic "101" stuff as much as he did. Dad admitted to me a couple weeks later that he couldn't fathom the sexual attraction part, that he couldn't get his mind around it. I didn't know what to say; it was an extremely awkward moment between us. Ultimately, his inability to understand what turned me on didn't much matter; what was important was that he wholeheartedly supported my right to live an authentic life. And, he did. And, over time, he too became completely comfortable not only with my gender-object-choice, but also the gusto with which I am sometimes known to live out my zany erotics.

As I came out and began to make gay friends, I realized how lucky I was; most of the guys I met were not out to their parents for fear of rejection, and some had been rejected to some degree. Many of these friends and boyfriends got "adopted" into my family; many of my ex-boyfriends kept in touch with Mom long after they stopped talking to me.

Mom, Dad and I were all worried about my sister Anne's husband's reaction. We didn't know Brad well enough; they had a year old baby boy (who grew up to be my very fine nephew, Travis), and the worst-case scenario was that Brad would freak out and deny me access to his son. So, we put off my coming out to Anne for another few months. When I did finally tell my sister over a few drinks in a hoity-toity lounge one night, her first question was, "Well, have you 'been' with a guy yet?" I said that I had. "And, did you like it?" I said that I did. "That's great; I'm so happy for you. Isn't sex great???" Happy-tears streaming down my face, I said that it was. Anne told Brad later that night, and his reaction was, "Oh? Cool."

And we all thought that my gayness was not something worth upsetting Dad's mother over. Grandma was ninety at the time, and while I was--or perhaps, because I was--her favorite grandchild, we didn’t think someone of her generation could understand it. Over the next year, as I visited her weekly, I felt the wall go up between us, on my end. There was only so much I could talk to her about. And, she kept asking me--and this was something new--if I'd found a girlfriend yet. I did not like the squirming evasiveness I had to keep performing.

A year later, it all came out in the wash; some nosy neighbor, a lifelong friend of Grandma's from the rural area where our family lived, had confronted Grandma months' before about the rumors flying around town that I was gay. "I've been hearing the most awful things about your grandson," this bitch said to her over tea one day, "It can't be true: is he a homosexual?" Grandma was shocked and offended beyond belief; a fifty year friendship between the two women was obliterated in an instant. And Grandma never spoke a word of this to anyone in our family for months, let the shocking news fester inside her until finally one day she asked her eldest daughter, Myra, if it was true. So all those months when she'd kept asking me if I had a girlfriend, she was trying to discern whether or not the rumor she'd so rudely been confronted with was true.

Once everything came out in the open, Grandma and I were able to get close again. By the time I next saw her, she had already read some of those same books on homosexuality, had come to understand my sexual orientation on a basic level. Our first face-to-face meeting was something I'll never forget. I apologized, as had Mom and Dad previously, for not telling her right away. She expressed her steadfast love and support of me, asked me if I had a "special friend" yet. I had just met Matt, and so I shyly indicated that yes there was someone special in my life. "Well, I want to meet him. You bring him around for tea!" She asked me about other of my college friends she'd met over the past few years. "What about those boys, Chas and Todd? Are they homos?"

I thought I would die, hearing such lingo from Grandma's mouth.

"Or," she went on, "are they straight?"

I told her that they were straight. "Oh, okay, well then, I certainly want to meet this special friend Matt."

As far as my immediate family goes, I have been most fortunate. Not everyone is so lucky. Each time I've come out, it's been scary. Moving through that fear, risking the worst-case scenario to form a more authentic bond has definitely been worth it.

I don't blame folks for staying closeted. Coming out to family members is scary. And for too many, in this age of Ellen and Will & Grace and Svend Robinson and Bill Clinton, announcing one's sexuality can still rupture family ties. There is no right or wrong way to handle this.

But when I think of my Grandma, and my Dad, and my brother-in-law, I realize that sometimes the straight relative's journey is such that they need our coming out so that they can surprise us. And probably themselves too.

Previous | Next