It couldn’t have been more than five minutes after our lips parted that the tremendousness of that kiss, and all that kiss meant, hit me. Still in a daze, I pulled myself up the stairs in time to catch a glimpse of her jogging to her car through my window. Her ponytail bopping up and down caused me to smile. I sighed as I watched her get into her car and drive away. Then I wandered to the bathroom to catch my breath. I stared at myself in the mirror. My hands were shaking as I grabbed the sink and held on for dear life. I stared deeply into my reflection. “Shit!” I exclaimed. The tears that had been forming for what felt like an eternity were now pouring down my face as I whispered, “I’m…I’m gay.”
—From the journal of Alex, the author’s daughter
I remember the moment I first knew something was different about my daughter, Alex. I was walking past her bedroom, where she and a friend sat laughing in front of the computer screen, and I paused in the doorway to say hello. Alex looked up, smiling from ear to ear, and answered, “Hey, Mom. We’re just working.” I leaned against the doorjamb and studied Alex as I struggled to figure out what my intuition was trying to tell me.
Alex, then a sophomore at Walt Whitman High School, looked up again and smiled, “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”
My eyes narrowed as I gave her my “mother on a mission” look. She responded by shaking her head: “Weird, Mom. You’re just weird.”
Laughing, I answered, “I missed you is all.” She laughed as well, and suddenly, I knew why the alarm bells were ringing: Alex was in a remarkably good mood for a 15-year-old girl who seemed intent on driving me insane with worry. Her behavior around that time had bordered on self-destructive.
Alex in a good mood? Alex smiling? Something definitely was going on. I recalled several instances of Alex gazing at her “friend” and then it hit me: I recognized the look. How could I have missed it? Alex was in love for the first time? Only Alex was not in love with a boy. She was in love with a girl.
So many pieces fell into place at that moment: Alex refusing from age 2 on to wear a dress; Alex starting (and winning) a small rumble on the playground when one of the boys took the ball she was playing with; Alex never throwing a fit when she couldn’t go out with Evan, her amazingly cute, football-playing boyfriend; Alex being secretive and moody and angry. I could go on and on. How did I miss so many clues?
I didn’t want Alex to ever live a lie—not for me, not for anybody. And I quickly understood that accepting Alex meant saying goodbye to my dreams for her (marriage, a son-in-law who loved our family) and getting used to some different dreams—another daughter-in-law perhaps when Alex decided to settle down. I am a far cry from a perfect parent, but I understood instinctively that Alex being gay was an integral part of who she was. I understood that it was crucial for Alex’s well-being that I accepted her.
Like Alex, more teens are coming out in junior high and high school today than ever before. “The average age is estimated to be between 13 and 14,” says Linda Goldman, a Chevy Chase licensed professional counselor and author of Coming Out, Coming In. When they do, an important and new dynamic is set in motion for the parents of these gay children: They have to deal with the reality of their child being gay while the child is still living at home. This is important because, as Goldman puts it, “How a parent responds often determines how a young teen views his or her self.”
According to Goldman, when lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) young people know that their parents love them for who they are, coping with the difficulties of coming out becomes much easier. Accepting parents tend to have teens who have a sense of themselves and their own worth; rejecting parents tend to have gay teens who struggle to find a safe place in this world, Goldman says.
Rejecting behavior
Caitlin Ryan, a lead researcher and director of The Family Acceptance Project at the César E. Chávez Institute at San Francisco State University, has spent several years studying how parental responses to the news that a child is gay influences the mental and physical health of LGBT youths. Her landmark research in The Journal of Pediatrics shows that the LGBT teens whose parents were rejecting—including calling them names, telling them they were going to hell and not allowing them to associate with their gay friends—were 8.4 times more likely to report having attempted suicide. Compared with LGBT youths whose families were accepting, these teens also were 5.9 times more likely to report high levels of depression, 3.4 times more likely to use illegal drugs, and 3.4 times more likely to report having engaged in unprotected sexual intercourse.
“We have always known that gay children were very affected by whether or not their parents were supportive of them, but this is the first time we have evidence that [rejecting behavior by parents] has an extremely negative effect on LGBT young adults’ mental and physical health, contributing to a much higher incidence of depression, illegal drug use, risk for HIV infection and suicide attempts,” Ryan says.
Lisa (not her real name), now 21, understands parental rejection all too well. She is from Bethesda and came out to friends at Walt Whitman in the 10th grade. She didn’t tell her mother, who later read Lisa’s diary and learned that her daughter was gay. Lisa’s mom took her to a therapist she hoped could help her daughter become “normal”—or heterosexual.
When the therapist wasn’t willing to try to reorient Lisa, her mother grounded her, taking away her phone, car and computer for the entire summer. “It was really hard. I couldn’t talk to my friends. I felt completely isolated,” Lisa says. “My mom told me I was a disgrace to the family and read Bible passages tome to prove how evil being gay was.” Her mother also threatened to not pay for her college.
Emotionally and financially, Lisa felt abandoned and alone. She decided that the best course of action, the one course that guaranteed her future, was to never again mention anything about being gay to her mother. “What amazes me even today is that my mother never even asked me how I felt; she just told me I couldn’t be gay,” Lisa says. Her mother is far happier in her denial, but Lisa feels the loss each day. “I had no idea she would react so strongly and be so rejecting,” Lisa says. “The sad thing is, she is missing out on so much of me and my life because she refuses to know me as a lesbian. What upsets me the most is having to dress and pretend to be a girly-girl for my mom. It is not me. A whole chunk of me does not exist for her.”
Kate Runyon, executive director of Silver Spring-based Equality Maryland, the state’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender civil rights organization, says parents in liberal areas such as Montgomery County are not necessarily more accepting of gay children than people elsewhere are. “The myth that middle-and upper-class LGBT kids from suburbia have parents who are completely accepting is absolutely false,” says Runyon, who lives in Baltimore. “Suburbia just does its rejecting differently.” Experts say these parents might not throw their child out, but they frequently make it extremely uncomfortable to be in the family’s home. They often engage in verbal abuse, threaten to take away financial support, and question their children about whether their friends are gay. Some enroll their child in a conversion therapy program.
“Eventually, the home becomes such an uncomfortable place that the kid leaves,” says Cheryl Richards, a foster parent recruiter and trainer for Hearts & Homes for Youth Inc., an organization in Silver Spring that provides services for troubled youths (many of whom are abused, neglected or runaways) and runs one shelter and three group homes (often called “safe homes”) in Montgomery County. Hearts & Homes and Equality Maryland are raising money in hopes of building a safe home in Rockville for LGBT youths.
“We have based the need to open such a home on information from social workers, reports on homeless gay youth and agency experience,” Richards says. Though there is no data available on the number of homeless LGBT youths in Montgomery County, statistics in a report from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force show that LGBT kids make up about 40 percent of the homeless youth population nationally. Few social workers are trained to deal with the issues that accompany a homeless LGBT youth, Richards says. All workers in the proposed safe home would be trained to deal with these issues, and each child would have his or her own bedroom.
Teens hurting
“I left home after my mom caught me with my girlfriend,” says Megan (not her real name),who lived in Potomac as a teenager and attended Whitman. “My mom refused to speak tome, then turned off my cell phone. I tried to apologize, but she wouldn’t listen.” Megan ran away because she didn’t think she could take even one more day in the house. “I would have killed myself if I had stayed another day,” says Megan, who was 16 at the time. She “couch surfed” from one friend’s house to another while continuing to attend school.
After several days, Megan’s mom called the police and reported her missing. The police went to Whitman, found her in the library and “put me in handcuffs,” Megan says. “I couldn’t believe it. I was in shock.” She was taken to the assistant principal’s office, where her mom was waiting. No one mentioned Megan being gay. The police then took Megan to the Potomac Ridge Behavioral Health facility in Rockville for an evaluation. Four hours later, the therapist told Megan’s mom that her daughter was gay—that nothing was emotionally or behaviorally wrong with her, Megan recalls. Her mother, to Megan’s great surprise, argued strongly with the man, but he did not budge from his analysis. “This happens more than most people realize, and education and class status does not change this,” says Richards of Hearts & Homes. “Many suburban parents would rather label their child a delinquent than LGBT.”
As Megan and her mother were driving home, her mother suggested that perhaps Megan should be emancipated by the courts, meaning that her mother would no longer be legally responsible for her daughter’s care. “She felt if I couldn’t live by her rules, that I shouldn’t be supported by her,” Megan says. And Megan agreed, though, “I wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to take care of myself. The last few days had been really hard.” But Megan’s mother quickly backed down and asked her to continue living at home. “We came to an uneasy truce,” Megan says. “My mom blamed herself for my being gay. Her efforts to fix me left some deep scars. Sadly, neither one of us communicated what we were feeling: her need to protect me, and my need to be loved, regardless.”
Ryan, the San Francisco State University researcher, says one of her most poignant findings is that rejecting parents often are acting out of concern. They are seeking to force their children to change so that their children will better fit in the world. “Underneath parents’ disappointment, shame and anger is, more often than not, a strong abiding love,” she says.
The lack of communication between Megan and her mother continued. Megan went to college, but she dropped out in her third year. She smoked cigarettes and pot and ended up weighing barely 100 pounds. “I shut down. My mom and I did not speak for two years,” she says. “Then my mom missed me, I guess. We started slowly putting our relationship back together. She agreed to pay for my school, and I agreed to go to therapy once a month with her. We now talk every day. She accepts me for who I am, but it was a long, hard path. She actually wants to meet my girlfriends. But for a long while, I felt unloved and abandoned.” Megan is now 24, has graduated from college and wants to work in the social justice field.
Richards, of Hearts & Homes, talks about Jackie (not her real name), a Silver Spring girl who wound up in foster care after telling her family that she was gay. Unaware of what had caused the rift with Jackie’s mother, Richards and a case worker sought to reunite the family. “But for some reason, our best efforts just weren’t working. Her mother treated her with such great disdain. We had no idea why,” Richards says. “This is a great girl. It took a long time to discover [that] Jackie was gay. Jackie wasn’t talking, and neither was her mother.” When Jackie’s mother rejected her for being gay, Richards says, Jackie learned a powerful lesson: You cannot trust people to love you for who you are. “And so she kept being gay a secret,” Richards says.
