The Wedding: A Family's Coming Out Story (11 page)

SHELDON
AND
ROSLYN

July
1995 - September 1995

SHELDON   
When Andrew made the
announcement to us back in January, no one was sure what he and Doug had in
mind, in terms of a ceremony or a celebration. Then, over the summer, their
vision of the event took shape. To our surprise, they decided to hold it in
Montreal, rather than New York. What’s more, they wanted all the usual
trappings of a traditional wedding - and on a large scale. News of these plans
spread through our community. And people began to express their opinions. Some
were more hurtful than others.

I certainly identified with their feelings. Yet
it didn’t help to hear one close friend say, “Why does it have to be in your
face?” Or to have another friend, a very sincere person who I think very highly
of, tell me “Look, I would support my child 100%, up to a point. I would tell
him, a commitment ceremony at the house, fine. Anything else, count me out.” If
I was hearing this from good friends, I could only imagine what mere
acquaintances were saying out of earshot.

Some blamed Roslyn. “What is she doing to you?”
was a thread woven through many responses.

Others, I sensed, were wagging a finger at
Andrew. Their muted, subtly disapproving reactions suggested they held Andrew
culpable for the crime they imagined being perpetrated against me.
“Who the
hell does he think he is? He knows who his parents are! He knows this isn’t
comfortable for his father, can’t he realize there’s a reason why he’s not
comfortable?”

ROSLYN
   
A
ceremony
in Montreal
?

That news was the fuel that switched Sheldon’s
simmering discomfort on high.

Andrew called me a few weeks after he had announced
their engagement to report that they’d decided to marry in Montreal.

“We’re trying to figure out the best weekend to
come up and look for a hall. Do you have any ideas?”

Taken aback, I didn’t make any suggestions.

“Well, you’ll come with us when we go?”

“Mmmm-hmmm.” My ambivalence may have shown.

And Sheldon’s initial discomfort was very
understandable. I empathized with his objections to the wedding as the boys
were now envisioning it. What I had trouble coming to terms with was his worry
about how the community would judge us. For me, there was a fine line - but a
crucial one - between worrying about our own comfort level and worrying about
the approval of friends and acquaintances.

A few weeks after the boys’ decision to hold the
ceremony in Montreal, I approached Sheldon several times to discuss the new
arrangement. On my third or fourth attempt, Sheldon finally opened up a bit.
“You know people aren’t comfortable with this. It’s never been done, and you
know I’m not the one to be the first. The community isn’t ready.”

“It’s not just the community, it’s YOU. Either
they will respond positively or negatively, but that’s not the issue. This is
your son, and this is what he wants. Give me some concrete reasons why he
shouldn’t be able to have an affair of this style.”

Until this point I’d been somewhat restrained in
my support for these new plans. I was denying my own feelings, both those of
pleasure and of dismay. Back in January, when Andrew first announced the
engagement, I was stunned by how traditional it all seemed. Doug giving him a
ring, then finding a hall, it was so identical to what heterosexuals do that it
shocked me. I didn’t imagine they would want to incorporate formalities,
rituals that were so linked to men and women. It just shows how rigidly placed
these values are in our psyches. My first thought was “Oh my God!,” rather than
“How nice!”

As Sheldon reiterated his reservations, “This
community doesn’t want this here, I keep telling you...” I was finally forming
a stance of my own. I answered back: “If all you can say is the community this,
the community that, to me it says you’re ashamed of your son. You want to hide
him; you want to do it some place that isn’t Montreal. It’s hiding from
society, and from yourself. It’s playing a game. We’ll go to New York, we’ll
have sisters, brothers and a dozen friends, we don’t have to face people. If
you really love your son, you won’t hide. Since when do you allow your friends
to tell you how to react to your own child?”

Over the past several years, I had done much of
the work of coming to terms with the fact that both of our sons were gay. I had
felt keenly all of the classic stages that parents suffer, from sadness to
anger to shame; much of this even before our sons disclosed their sexual orientation
to us.

As Sheldon repeated his fear, for the fourth or
fifth time, “It’s never been done! What will people say about this?” I had an
epiphany that stirred me to an astonishing self-realization.

I looked at Sheldon, and his negative reaction
to the news of the wedding.. And, to my shock, I saw myself in him.

“Oh my God, is that me?”

I lay in bed, next to Sheldon, staring up at the
ceiling, but I might as well have been looking in a mirror.

“I’ve been holding back. When Andrew talks to me
about this, I clam up. I’m not overjoyed. Why have I been behaving this way?”

I’ve never seen myself in this light.

“That’s not me,”
I
said.

When it all came to me so clearly, I wanted to
shout it out, to turn to Sheldon and say I’d figured out why I’d been so cool
to Andrew since the engagement. But I held back. I couldn’t share this with
him. He was so relentlessly negative about the whole subject, and anything I
might say now would sound like a pointy fingered accusation. I just turned over
and tried to go to sleep while he read. It was the beginning of a rift in our
communication that would quickly deepen.

Once I’d seen myself more clearly, my attitude
took a sharp U-turn. I started getting very involved in the planning of the
wedding. Whatever advice Andrew asked, I was there with my party planner hat
firmly in place. Rolling up my sleeves, and warming up my dialing finger, I set
the action into high gear, helping the boys find a band, a D.J., a
photographer, all the usual wedding accoutrements.

Along with my new found desire to make this
event a success on a personal level, I started to look at its potentially
positive impact on our community. While the wider Jewish community has
traditionally supported many liberal causes, gay rights is a unique matter. For
many Jews, supporting civil rights for blacks may be an easy decision, since it
has reverberations in the world at large but does little to change our daily
lives, in our own homes. But when a child discloses he or she is gay, a
societal problem that we’d rather keep at arm’s length comes rushing toward us
with outstretched arms. And rather than mustering compassion for an
issue
,
we become consumed by a dilemma that’s struck us, literally, where we live. Or,
if it’s the child of a neighbor, or friend, it’s a problem that many of us
treat like it will disappear if we only ignore it. This reflex to hide
homosexuality, indeed to hide homosexuals themselves, had gone on far too long,
and taken far too many emotional casualties in our community. And I’d already
been working for some time to change that.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

It was a hot sunny day in the spring of 1986
when I walked through the gates of McGill University. I was fifty-one years old
and about to embark on a path which would eventually lead me to a Master’s
Degree in Social Work. I was on a high. I had been accepted into the Special
Bachelor of Social Work program, which was specifically designed for mature
people with experience in the helping professions. Starting a new career at
this stage in my life was exhilarating and also scary. How would I balance the
demands of family with full-time schooling? Sheldon and the kids were most
supportive of my new adventure.

I noticed a nice looking young man surrounded by
his own entourage, and he had everybody in stitches. I’m a sucker for blue eyes
and a great sense of humor, so I joined the group. A few weeks after we met,
Mark Mazer confided to me that he was gay. My questions concerning his coming
out and his family’s reaction were rampant, and he always answered everything.
Then I caught myself wondering, how did he make love?

I became utterly fixated on that. I think many
heterosexuals are. And every time I saw another person I surmised to be gay,
that’s what I would think of... how do they “do it”? And specifically, what was
the “it”? Getting to know Mark helped rid me of some of the ridiculous
fantasies I’d had. I soon learned that their love making isn’t much different
from ours. He helped me see gay people like any other people, with concerns and
issues, family problems, the same things the rest of us face, with the extra
stress of dealing with other people’s reactions to their sexuality. This is how
I came to realize that their sexual orientation doesn’t change them in any way.
That was really an awakening. I gained a new perspective on homosexuality, and
we bonded very quickly.

As luck would have it, we did our internship
together at the Montreal General Hospital in outpatient psychiatry. We ran a
group together, and ate a lot of muffins and drank a lot of coffee and put on a
lot of weight. We became “the odd couple”, and dining out on Thursday night
became a ritual. We often bumped into my couples friends, who always raised an
eyebrow when I introduced my “friend” Mark. One night when Sheldon had tennis and
couldn’t accompany me to a screening of Shoah, Mark escorted me. Once again,
the eyebrows were raised, and there was whispering. The following morning by
coincidence, the hospital was making a breakfast for outgoing interns at seven
thirty a.m. at the Ritz Canton. You can just imagine the stares we drew when
some acquaintances who had seen us the night before at the movie (Shoah is five
hours long, and let out after midnight) saw the two of us standing outside the
hotel together at dawn.

When Mitchell came out to us that fall, he was
twenty five years old. Mark had become an invaluable source of advice and
compassion. Exposing myself emotionally, I asked Mark the countless questions
that burned inside me. We talked for hours and I cried. I remember dropping him
off at his apartment after midnight, hardly able to see my way home, blinded by
tears. After months of seeking Mark’s counsel, I had a much deeper
understanding of the hardships of being a gay person in a largely straight
society. I also felt that somehow I had healed and that I could go on with my
life. But I wanted the answer to one more question. “What do other parents do?”

“About what?”

“Who do parents of gay children talk to about
all this? If I hadn’t been able to talk to you about all this turmoil, this
guilt, this new experience, I don’t know what I would have done. I can’t
understand how other parents cope.” Then Mark had a logical and inspired
notion.

“Roz, we have to start our own group.”

Finally, four years later in 1991, the first
impetus toward actually creating the group came from the Rabbi at one of the
conservative synagogues in Montreal. Rabbi Len Wasser contacted a Jewish
organization for lesbian, gay and bisexual people called YACHDAV, which
translates from Hebrew into “together”. The members wanted to take part in the
same rituals as other Jews, but for a variety of reasons couldn’t observe them
with their families. And though they wished to practice their faith in
synagogue, they didn’t feel welcome in their families’ congregations. So they
held services together in their own homes, and the group became a community.
When Rabbi Wasser called YACHDAV, he was looking for counseling services for
parents of gay and lesbian children. He was given Mark’s name.

 “Honestly,” the Rabbi told Mark “I don’t know
what to tell them. I try to be understanding, helpful, but my training doesn’t
give me the expertise to counsel these parents. If you’ll hold a group, I’ll
find you room in the synagogue for meetings.”

Confident that our group would have a home with
Rabbi Wasser, Mark and I created a ten week curriculum for a psychoeducational
group where parents of gays and lesbians would learn to address their fears.

We watched parents arrive at their first meeting
terrified of merely entering the room, for fear of meeting someone they knew.
They couldn’t fathom that any other parent in this group was bound to be in the
same boat. Some came in hopes of finding a way to change their child. Most were
grasping at straws, hoping to negotiate the opposing reflexes to reject the
stranger they saw in their child, and to draw closer to the person inside they
knew and loved.

The parents who made the fastest progress were
almost always the ones who came to the class as soon as they found out about
their child’s sexuality, before patterns of avoidance set in. One parent, who
approached us soon after her daughter came out to her, expressed a typical
concern about how her friends would judge her, and her daughter. “We’re all
invited to the wedding of our son’s friend. My daughter’s invitation is for her
and a guest. What if she brings the woman she’s seeing? What will people think?
Will they dance together? What am I going to do?” Her catalogue of
apprehensions piled up.