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Chapter 1

Coming Out

Chances are if you’re reading this book, your child has told you that they are not heterosexual, or they might be questioning their gender or their identity in some way. Or perhaps you suspect your child might be queer, and may not know how or whether you should talk to them about their gender and/or sexual orientation. The good news is, you are living in a better time to parent your LGBTQ child than at any previous time in history. People can legally marry their same-sex partners. LGBTQ people can openly serve in our country’s military. In many municipalities throughout the United States, LGBTQ people can no longer be fired from their jobs just because of their gender identity or sexual orientation. LGBTQ people are in the media (Anderson Cooper, Don Lemon, Rachel Maddow) and there are positive role models of LGBTQ people in movies, television (Ellen Degeneres, LaVerne Cox, Neil Patrick Harris, Alan Cumming, and a host of others), sports (John Amaechi, Orlando Cruz, Brittney Griner), politics (Jared Polis, Mike Takano, Kate Brown), business (Tim Cook, Megan Smith), and literature (Alice Walker, David Sedaris, Rita Mae Brown, Gore Vidal). And I’m writing this book in 2016, an Olympic year, and the number of out USA Olympic athletes with inspirational stories is truly amazing.1

Many teens are coming out earlier and earlier, feeling safe at their middle or high schools and with their families and their friend group. Older kids (and their parents!) have access to the Internet, with its wealth of information, support, resources, and community. (Almost three-quarters of LGBTQ teens say they are more honest about themselves online than they are in the real world.)

But. But. According to research and youth surveys,2 40 percent of LGBTQ youth say they live in communities that are not accepting of LGBTQ people. LGBTQ youth are still twice as likely to be physically assaulted at school (kicked, shoved, or hit). Twenty-six percent of LGBTQ youth say their biggest problems are not being accepted by their family, being bullied at school, and fear of coming out. Ninety-two percent of LGBTQ teens say that they hear negative messages about LGBTQ people at school, on the Internet, and among their friends. In the United States, 1.6 million youth experience homelessness each year. Of that number, 40 percent of those youth identify as LGBTQ.3

According to A Healthy Chicago for LGBT Youth,4 LGBTQ youth were more likely to report depression and depressive symptoms, suicide attempts, and self-injury. They were more likely to be underweight and vomit to lose weight. They were more likely to report risky sex behaviors, to not have had proper HIV education, and were more likely to become pregnant (I know this seems strange, but LGBTQ youth are less likely to use a birth control method if they engage in heterosexual sex). LGBTQ youth were also more likely than their heterosexual cisgender (those who identity with the gender in which they were born) counterparts to use tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana. They were also more likely to experience sexual violence and victimization. The paper’s abstract concludes, “Due to the presence of these disparities at such a young age, they are likely to influence the health and well-being of LGBTQ Chicagoans throughout their lifespans.” I’m not a social science researcher, but I think one could easily imagine that the data in Chicago probably is a fair reflection of the rest of the United States.

That’s a lot to take in. Parenting, an enterprise already fraught with worry (breast-feeding, formula feeding, co-sleeping, sleep-training, oh my God is it normal for them to have a fever this high with an ear infection?, disposable diapers, cloth diapers, money concerns, education choices, extracurricular choices, friend drama, and always, no matter what the age, AM I SCREWING UP MY KID?) becomes doubly if not triply more fraught as your child’s risk of mental, emotional, and physical peril increase, simply because they were born “different.”

The good news is, parents can do a lot. They can’t do everything. We still live in a very homophobic and intolerant world, but we can do a lot. I hope this book is a resource in helping you and your child make it through this challenging time.

The Many Different Reactions to Coming Out

Sometimes in novels, TV shows or movies, an LGBTQ child comes out to a distant parent. The distant parent stands in shock. Depending on the narrative, the distant parent hugs their child and says they love them anyway (ouch) or hits them (oh God). These are the two stories that play out the most frequently in popular culture. And like most over-used tropes, they are damaging in their simplicity, reducing real life to two not-so-good extremes. I’m not saying neither one of these things ever happen, but in addition to these two stereotypes, there are a lot of other parental reactions. Those reactions, and the consequences of those reactions, need to be discussed in a realistic (non-romanticized / non-Hollywood) way.

In many cases, your child has been thinking about coming out to you for a lot longer than you have been expecting them to come out. One of the clichés that surrounds being the parent of a gay child is that before your child comes out to you, “you must have known on some level.” When my daughter Casandra came out to my husband and me shortly before her 13th birthday, I did not even suspect that she was attracted to girls. My sister is a lesbian and many of my close friends are gay. Because of my relationships with them, very early in my life I realized that sexual orientation is just one small aspect of any human being. My cluelessness about my daughter’s sexual orientation wasn’t denial. Like many parents of adolescents, I just didn’t know what was going on in her head. Whatever stereotypes there are about gayness, my daughter doesn’t fit them (some kids do and some kids don’t). Casandra played with dolls. She loved Blues Clues. Her favorite Disney movie was Mulan. Casandra liked her long hair braided. She didn’t care if she wore a dress or sweatpants (now jeans and a t-shirt are her favorites). She was (and is!) my beloved little girl—not my beloved-little-girl-who-might-be-gay.

The trouble with finding support (or sharing with other parents) when your child comes out is that you might inadvertently out your child to others before they are ready. Your LGBTQ child may also have already heard horrible messages about gay people from our culture and society—even from friends, the media, or perhaps from their religious community. To add further complexity to this delicate situation, your child has probably planned this talk with you for days, weeks, maybe even months or years. They’ve been looking for the right opportunity to discuss this and you may have been oblivious. You’ve been stressed about work, worried about what’s for dinner, and trying to remember what time you’re supposed to pick them and/or their siblings up from basketball practice. So you might very well be driving them home from soccer practice or school and your preteen or teen might turn to you and say, “Mom… I think I might be gay,” or “Dad, I’ve been questioning my gender.” And yes, you could have had your suspicions. Or you could have known for sure. Or you could have not had a clue. All of these are possibilities. None of them mean you are a bad parent. And it will still be different because it will be the first time they’ve vocalized this and entrusted you with this important aspect of who they are, regardless if they are nine or nineteen.

Dead silence to the coming out pronouncement is probably your child’s greatest fear next to a screaming match. Even if you are totally baffled and blindsided, try to say something nonjudgmental like, “Can you tell me a little bit more about this?” or, “Okay, let’s talk.” Don’t let this be a one-time conversation. Bring it up again when you feel more prepared and have had a chance to think about what your child has shared with you. Affirm your child with love—tell them you love them and want good things for them, regardless of their gender or the gender of their future spouse. When my daughter Casandra came out, she was young and didn’t know all the words surrounding gender and sexuality. She was still working through what she felt. My husband and I told her we didn’t care whether her future partner was a man or a woman. What we cared about was whether he or she loved Casandra and treated her well. I told Casandra I wanted her to have what her dad and I have—a long, good marriage full of ups and downs and personal growth and couple growth (and secretly I was also thinking grandchildren… but no pressure, Casandra!).

This may be not politically correct to say, but it is okay to mourn. You and your child have lost something. You’ve lost belonging to a social norm, and with it the rights and privileges of “normal.” It really upset me at first that I would never see my daughter get married in a Catholic church. My husband and I were both raised Catholic, and our children even attended a Catholic school for a time. I watched that dream die and I had to be okay with it. I knew that sending a message of unconditional love to my daughter was even more important than that particular (and unfortunately deeply homophobic) way of expressing my religious faith. I was very worried (and still am) about Casandra’s physical, psychological, and emotional safety. But just remember that with everything that is “taken away” with an LGBTQ identity, other things are given. Casandra (who is now 20) and I are close, and part of the reason for that is because we have had to face “not normal” together. Your child will see the world in a different way because they are in a minority. So yes, mourn, but then remember that the loss of normalcy offers up other gifts to you and to your child, including the loss of the sometimes toxic heteronormative (the assumption that everyone is straight and a family consists of a mother and father, etc.) expectations of our society, expectations such as how someone of a certain gender should dress or act: “the woman” being expected to do the bulk of household chores, boys not crying, etc.

Whenever anything happens that might cause our child pain or put them at risk or in harm’s way, we tend to blame ourselves as parents. We will cover this in the next chapter, but recent studies have shown that being gay probably has to do with genetic protectors called epi-marks5 and that being transgender is probably the brain structure with which a child is born. It’s not something you or they can control, any more than you could have controlled their eye color or their height.

When you are responding in that series of conversations to your child coming out, please try to be as gentle as you can. Remember how much your parents’ opinions and reactions mean(t) to you, especially in those younger, vulnerable years. Words that would be fine to a friend, sibling, or co-worker may be taken in a different way by your child, who will be reading every bit of your body language for clues to what you are thinking. And don’t trick yourself into thinking they can’t read you well. They’ve spent their whole lives with you. They probably know what you’re going to say and do before you do. Parents can inflict a lot of damage on their LGBTQ children, or they can do a lot of good. Good is a lot easier and better for your kid, as well as for our aching, conflicted world.

Try to avoid saying, “Are you sure?” in response to whatever they are telling you. If they are talking about this, they are pretty sure. And even if they aren’t sure, they don’t want to be asked this question as a first response to their initiating this discussion. That doesn’t mean if you say, “are you sure” or if you’ve already said, “are you sure?” you’ve scarred your child for life. Just keep the lines of communication open, and ask them what they’ve been thinking and what they are feeling.

If you suspect your child might be LGBTQ but they have not said anything to you yet, it is hard to know what “the right thing” to do is. Asking someone if they are gay should not be seen as a negative question, but unfortunately, sometimes shame is attached to that word, especially in the heteronormative culture in middle and high schools. Your child might have already been teased at school for being gay and they may not have told you. Male students at my son’s high school frequently call the male swimmers and water polo players gay “because they wear Speedos” for practice and competition. (This reminds me of a saying that went through my high school in the 80s about guys getting pierced ears—“right’s gay but left is okay.”) Yes, just by putting on a Speedo or piercing your right ear, it changes your sexual preference/identity just like that.

But to have your parents question your identity in these younger years may be taken the wrong way; through no fault of yours, this may be seen as interrogation from a preteen or teen perspective. You know your own child best, so if you think you can ask that question and not over-question or inadvertently hurt your child, then ask. But if you’re not sure, just give them space. Create opportunities to talk positively about LGBTQ people. This should be easy to do between the news, social media, and daily events. Tell stories about your friends and/or family who are LGBTQ. Talk about their challenges as well as their daily lives. Leave some quiet space in your own life (I know how challenging this is) to allow opportunity for your child to start a conversation with you if they want or need to. When they feel the time is right, your child will come to you.

We’ve Come a Long Way

In the struggle for the LGBTQ community to get the rights that they and their allies have fought so hard for, it has been necessary to show stories and messages that allow straight people to see and understand how discrimination affects an LGBTQ’s person everyday life. For instance, the right to marry brings many everyday things that make LGBTQ people’s lives easier—the default right of inheritance, the default right of making medical decisions if their spouse is incapacitated and doesn’t have a power of attorney, visitation rights in intensive care, taxes, and even little things like some car companies letting your spouse drive your rental car too with no additional cost or paperwork.

The good thing is this has been very effective and these narratives are true. The downside is that easily digested stories don’t always reflect the nuances and difficulties of real life. Sometimes when someone says they are bisexual, it is a “stage” on the way to realizing and/or accepting they might be gay. Sometimes it means they will be bisexual for the rest of their lives. Someone can be both transgender and gay. People can be “gay” and non-binary gender, or prefer not to identify with either gender. People can be bisexual and “choose” their partner, regardless of their partner’s gender, just because they really love that particular person. I personally think that the Kinsey Scale, while old and often used in unhelpful ways (“oh? You’re a four? You’re mostly gay”), still does offer a useful way to look at sexual orientation. Some teens do get confused (questioning) because they have experienced attraction to both boys and girls. The Kinsey Scale, when not used to gather ammunition to label people, shows that all of our sexuality exists on a spectrum, and it can reassure a teen that they are not the only person on the planet who has had these seemingly conflicting thoughts. According to the Kinsey Institute website,6 “The Kinsey Scale does not address all possible sexual identities. The Klein Sexual Orientation Grid and the Storms Scale have stepped in to further define sexual expression. The Klein Sexual Orientation Grid, developed by Fritz Klein, features seven variables and three situations in time: past, present, and ideal. The Storms Scale, developed by Michael D. Storms, plots eroticism on an X and Y axis. This allows for a much greater range of descriptions. Kinsey, Storm, and Klein are three of more than 200 scales to measure and describe sexual orientation.” As Patrick Richards Fink says on his Huffington Post blog,7 “It (The Kinsey Scale) was a valuable and useful thing when it first came out, because it was one of the first attempts to show that there are plenty of ways to be human other than strict heterosexuality.” My friend who is a therapist and social worker says, “Sometimes when people are confused about their sexual orientation, I ask them about who they think about when they masturbate. That gives a clue.” Another friend, who identifies as lesbian, told me, “I’ve enjoyed sex with men before, but I’ve never fallen in love with a man. Only women.” Casandra jokes that she is 97 percent gay, but Misha Collins (who plays Castiel on the TV Show Supernatural) is her three percent straight. Identities can change, and as much as we love a neat and tidy story, there aren’t too many of those in parenting, or across the scope of a single lived life.

Some LGBTQ History

To understand a little of what your child is going to face in the United Sates as someone with a nontraditional sexual orientation or gender identity, you have to understand that until 1973, the American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a mental illness.8 Gay men and lesbian women were condemned by pretty much all major religions, and many religions and sects keep up that condemnation today. The act of homosexual sex, even in your own home, was punishable by fines, 20 years in prison, or even a life sentence, depending on what state you lived in. (Except for Illinois—little known bastion of gay rights in the United States, who repealed their sodomy laws in 1962.) Despite the Supreme Court decision (Lawrence v. Texas) which struck down sodomy laws almost 14 years ago, sodomy laws are still on the books in 12 states, and in four of those states, sodomy is only legal if you aren’t gay.

But we’ve come a long way, and as a parent of a gay child, I am forever grateful to the people who fought so hard and so long so that not only can she one day get married to her future partner (if she so chooses), but they fought for her physical, mental, and emotional safety as well.

One of the key turning points in gay rights was the Stonewall Uprising, which began on June 28, 1969. According to the PBS special American Experience: Stonewall Uprising9 in the early morning, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay bar in the Greenwich Village section of New York City. These raids were not unusual in the late 1960s. (This is why June is traditionally Pride month, to honor the Stonewall riots.) New York City had the largest gay population in the United States at that time, and aggressively upheld its anti-sodomy laws. Vice squads regularly raided gay bars and baths, and they solicited and entrapped the gay men there. These vice squads arrested on average over 100 men a week. “It was a nightmare for the lesbian or gay man who was arrested and caught up in the juggernaut but it was also a nightmare for the lesbians or gay men who lived in the closet,” Yale Law School professor William Eskridge says in American Experience: Stonewall Uprising. “This produced an enormous amount of anger within the lesbian and gay community in New York City. Eventually something was bound to blow.”

The Stonewall Inn was “a dive.” According to the pbs.org website describing the film, Stonewall was “operated by the Mafia, the bar served watered-down drinks without a liquor license.” But it was one of the few places in New York City (and really the entire United States) where LGBTQ people could just go and hang out and be their authentic selves. Many of the people who went to Stonewall were among the most marginalized of the LGBTQ community, the “outcasts” at the time—drag queens, transgender individuals, etc.

Previous vice squad raids of Stonewall had all followed the same pattern. The police came in and arrested people; the bar closed and then reopened in a couple of hours. But on that night, the people in the bar resisted arrest, and the police quickly realized they were vastly outnumbered. An LBGTQ crowd filled the street outside of the bar and threw things at the police, shouting things like “gay power.” The spontaneous uprising continued for six days.10

This happened when I was just over a year old. This tremendous battle for acceptance, equality, and basic human rights has been fought, inch by inch, in less than 50 years.

On June 24, 2016, President Obama designated the Stonewall Inn as a national monument.11 “I’m designating the Stonewall National Monument as the newest addition to America’s National Park System. Stonewall will be our first national monument to tell the story of the struggle for LGBTQ rights. I believe our national parks should reflect the full story of our country, the richness and diversity and uniquely American spirit that has always defined us. That we are stronger together. That out of many, we are one,” the president said.

Your child could be coming out in a better world, certainly. But, without these and many other LGBTQ heroes, it would be much worse. With your love, guidance, and support, your child will take their place in this welcoming community full of diversity.