Coming Around: Parenting Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Kids (2 page)

In many ways the world is like a rushing river in a constant state of change. If a person stepped into the river twenty years ago, in many societies homosexuality was unacceptable and life as a homosexual was inconsistent with success and happiness. If a person was gay, usually he or she hid it and the future would have appeared bleak or blank (impossible to envision). The idea of a gay couple living as a happy family, married and with children, was unimaginable.

Your child has stepped into friendlier waters. S/he was born into a world in which gays are visible. Gays have created a space in the world and have defined all manner of futures for themselves. Among the possibilities are professional success, marriage and parenthood. Most likely your child is growing up seeing gay people interact and win acceptance in mainstream media. Your child sees gay people smile, laugh and engage successfully with the world at large. S/he has watched gay people speak up for themselves and fight with dignity and grace against those who would deny them basic human rights. Not only does your child have multiple visions for the future, but also your child has words and a history to better understand and explain his or her own minority experience. When your child has questions, s/he has public resources, if not locally then online, that are ready and willing to answer those questions. There is no doubt that as your child matures, s/he will witness or has already witnessed a backlash against gay rights and that s/he will hear or has already heard anti-gay comments, but these attacks against gays are in the context of growing public acceptance.

Why is it important to consider generational differences? If you dread your child’s lifestyle, it may be because you envision your gay child living in the world you lived in when you were young. But your child is not living in that world. Recognizing this will not only help lift the cloud of worry, but also help you be more open to your child’s experience in the present. In addition, recognizing that our world is in constant change regarding the acceptance of homosexuality will help to make you more open-minded about homosexuality.

When you were growing up you may have engaged in a generational battle with your parents. Perhaps it was over something small, like wearing jeans to church or synagogue, getting an earring or coloring your hair. Or it may have been about something big, like living with someone before marriage or moving across the country. At the time, you might have had the feeling that your parents wouldn’t or couldn’t accept change. They didn’t recognize that what you wanted was within the range of normal and acceptable by the standards of your era. You wished that they would just try to see things from your perspective. Now it’s time for you to see things from your child’s perspective. Then it was about your life. Now it is about your child’s life.

Parents with children of all ages, including adult children, may be reading this book. Your child may be telling you of his or her sexual orientation as a teenager or expressing his or her feelings even earlier. Or your child may have come out later in life, in his or her forties, for instance, and his or her perception of opportunities for homosexuals as well as his or her internalized homophobia may reflect the more limiting period during which s/he grew up. In addition, some current teens may reside in school districts and communities that disparage gay-positive influences and bar gay-friendly organizations. If this is the case, your child’s perceptions of homosexuality may be as negative as those of someone from the era when homosexuality was taboo. Both my experience counseling and my research have shown that the sooner your child has contact with gay-positive people and institutions, the sooner the child will be able to question and discard any shame s/he may feel.

L
GBTQ (also initialized GLBTQ) stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer. Over the years, the term
gay
has come to be used generically to mean anyone who is non-heterosexual. Throughout this book I use the term
gay
in this broad manner.
Lesbians
are women who are physically and emotionally attracted to women,
gays
are men who are physically and emotionally attracted to men and
bisexuals
are individuals who are physically and emotionally attracted to both men and women.
Transgender
people are those whose self-described genders do not match their physiology. Individuals who identify as
queer
reject all traditional gender labels and the heteronormativity of conventional society.

While lesbian, gay and bisexual refer to sexual orientation, transgender individuals experience an enduring conflict between internalized gender and biological reality. Though anatomically male,
she
feels female. Though anatomically female,
he
feels male. Many transgender individuals adjust their external presentation, hair, clothing, etc., to correspond with their felt gender. This is called cross-dressing. Transsexual behavior and cross-dressing can serve as a step toward transgender identity acceptance. It’s a kind of “coming out.” However, cross-dressing is not always a sign of transgender identity. Some people cross-dress for reasons other than being transgender, such as for
theatrical performances, for gender experimentation, to make a political statement or because it appeals to their fashion sense.

People often confuse sexual orientation with gender identity. Sexual orientation is about the gender to whom one is attracted: men, women or both. Gender identity has to do with one’s internal experience of being male or female. Some conceive gender as neither male nor female but instead as a range of gender-based sensations. A person may feel female in some circumstances but retain a reservoir of maleness for other situations. Gender is confusing because culture confounds attempts to define it. What is it to be feminine or masculine? In one culture, clothing may define what is feminine and in another, it is the ability to provide food for one’s family. It is possible to feel entirely female and not particularly feminine. Likewise, it’s possible to feel at odds with masculine stereotypes but feel very male.

Gender nonconformity is behavior or appearance that violates gender expectations. Gender nonconformity may or may not be something done in a conscious effort to bend gender rules. Some people are perceived as gender-nonconforming because of size, voice, musculature or interests. Other people consciously counter social expectations of their biological genders, such as a man who wears eye makeup.

Because of its growing use, it’s also important to understand the meaning of
queer
. If you’re a baby boomer like me, you probably wince at the word, but
queer
has been reclaimed by today’s generation. When people of a minority group use with pride a reference term formerly used to shame them, it is called
reclaiming
. Reclaimed words take on deeper meanings than their original pejorative connotations. Those who refer to their sexual orientations as queer reject traditional labels of heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual. They see such labels as limited and limiting, because they are majority conceptions shaped by majority biases and mores. There is a substantial body of queer research that favors a broader conceptualization of sexual orientation and gender identity. While this type of research is still largely marginalized, the detoxified use of
queer
appears to be breaking through into the mainstream, such as in the television show
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
.

Let your child define him or herself and adopt your child’s language when referring to his or her sexual or gender orientation. Don’t make the assumption that because your child is gay that s/he is unhappy or uncomfortable with his or her gender. If your child is
transgender, don’t make assumptions about sexual orientation. If you grew up in a time when words like
gay
and
queer
were reserved for gay-bashing, it may be difficult for you to utter them. Remember, your child is from a different era and s/he has the right to name his or her experience. If you have to, drive around in your car with the windows shut saying “queer” and “gay” as many times as necessary until they become just words.

You might wonder,
Why the big fuss over labels
?

The majority will often apply derogatory names to a minority group or degrade the minority’s natural name(s). When a minority group is beaten down for a long time, individuals within the group internalize the majority’s negative feelings and believe themselves to be inferior. In essence, the minority identity and its names are poisoned by the negative attitudes of the majority and that poison seeps into its people. A group that accepts its inferiority will be treated as inferior. Silence and invisibility ensure this. The minority group reasserts itself by throwing off imposed labels, reclaiming labels that have been tarnished and engaging in the process of rediscovering identity. I say this is a process, because rediscovering identity is complex, especially when one’s identity has been bruised and battered, sometimes beyond recognition.

There will come a time when labeling one’s sexual orientation will be out of vogue. Whether one is homosexual or heterosexual will carry no more importance than being brunette or blond. That day will be possible, because attacks against homosexuals will end. There will be no reason for gays to fight for their good name, because homosexuality will have thrown off any negative connotation. On that day, gay rights will be human rights and human rights will be gay rights. Until then, labels remain important. Analysis and debate over gays’ identity and over definition of that identity is the only way to detect and remove the poison of injected inferiority. Asserting themselves is the only way to defeat those who might still attempt to demean gays or limit their rights.

H
omophobia is part of our social indoctrination. Whether you’re gay or straight, liberal or conservative, most of us were brought up to think that being gay is abnormal. We all have a tendency to be homophobic. Even gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer people can be homophobic. In fact, most LGBTQs believe, to some degree, the bad things said about them simply because those statements have been said so often by so many. We call this internalized homophobia. In this chapter we will discuss the varied reactions parents may have to their child’s coming out, how the homophobic societal indoctrination can affect reactions and how you can give your child the support s/he needs.

IF YOU ARE LIBERAL

Although you have always considered yourself liberal, when your child expresses that s/he is gay, you may experience a mixture of emotional reactions and intense feelings, including:

       
•  Shock: But she dated so many guys!

       
•  Guilt: If I were a good parent he would have confided in me sooner.

       
•  Disappointment and sadness: I really wanted grandchildren.

       
•  Shame: I’m having ugly thoughts and feelings about homosexuality.

       
•  Fear: I don’t want my child to be ostracized.

       
•  Anger: The world isn’t fair to gays.

Perhaps in the past you have considered yourself impervious to stereotypic thoughts about homosexuals and yet those are the very thoughts that keep coming to mind. You feel guilty, but you can’t seem to block them out. Don’t be too hard on yourself.

Resist the urge to turn away from ugly thoughts about homosexuality. Frightening and unhealthy thoughts thrive in the dark where they cannot be examined. Homophobic thoughts are no exception. If you want to disarm homophobia, find out where it hides and bring it into the light. One of best places to look for homophobia is to examine your first reactions upon hearing that your child is gay.

When my partner first told her parents that she was gay, they were, understandably, shocked. There was no evidence of past attraction to young women and plenty of evidence of attraction to young men. In so many ways she was quintessentially heterosexual; she was even a cheerleader and a homecoming queen. Homecoming queens can’t be gay! As it turns out, stereotypes are misleading. Football players, cheerleaders and homecoming queens are just as likely to be gay as anybody else.

Early sexual behavior can be equally misleading. It is a poor predictor of sexual identity. Most lesbians and gays report having had intimate relationships with the opposite sex. Perhaps this is due to efforts to suppress homosexual urges and comply with social expectations of heterosexuality. On the other hand, it may reflect a general tendency for sexual experimentation. Similarly, many heterosexuals report having had sexual experiences with same-sex partners at some point in their lives.
¹

For some of you, the shock of discovering your child is gay is complicated by the fact that s/he wouldn’t or still won’t talk about it or even lied about it, perhaps for years. You don’t know whether to blame your child for not trusting you or to blame yourself for not being perceived as trustworthy. You examine your memories over and over in an effort to recall anything that suggested your child was gay.
Maybe pieces of conversations come to mind, hints and more than hints, and you tell yourself you should have known.

It is time to ease up on the self-blame. It took your son or daughter time to come around to the idea that s/he is gay. Your child was the first to know and s/he got a head start on you on adjusting to the fact. Even if you considered the possibility that your child was gay, confronting him or her with that perception might have backfired. When a child is not yet ready to accept his or her sexual orientation, confrontation can result in further withdrawal. What’s important now is to open the gates of communication so you can talk openly.