A Story of Family Acceptance

I have noted many times on this blog as to how fortunate I was to have parents who accepted me without hesitation when I finally came out of the closet after decades of denial and endless amounts of self-hate.  Indeed, to reflect my endless gratitude and appreciation to my parents, I endowed the George D. and Marion Phelps Hamar/HRBOR Scholarship that benefits LGBT graduating high school students (a link to the scholarship is at right on this blog).  But far too many LGBT individuals are not as lucky as I was.  Some find themselves disowned and cut off from their families both emotionally and financially.  This past weekend, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni shared a story of his own father's method of dealing with having a gay son.  Some of Bruni's father's initial ways of dealing with the news and his assessments of those who are not accepting of gays are reminiscent of my own dad's views.  Here are some column highlights:

FOR a long while, my father’s way of coping was to walk quietly from the room. He doesn’t remember this. I do. I can still see it, still feel the pinch in my chest when the word “gay” came up — perhaps in reference to some event in the news, or perhaps in reference to me — and he’d wordlessly take his leave of whatever conversation my mother and my siblings and I were having. He’d drift away, not in disgust but in discomfort, not in a huff but in a whisper.

And I was grateful. Discomfort beat rejection. So long as he wasn’t pushing me away, I didn’t need him to pull me in. Heart-to-hearts weren’t his style, anyway. With Dad you didn’t discuss longings, anxieties, hurts.

But at some point Dad, like America, changed. I don’t mean he grew weepy, huggy. I mean he traveled from what seemed to me a pained acquiescence to a different, happier, better place. He found peace enough with who I am to insist on introducing my partner, Tom, to his friends at the golf club. Peace enough to compliment me on articles of mine that use the same three-letter word that once chased him off. Peace enough to sit down with me over lunch last week and chart his journey, which I’d never summoned the courage to ask him about before. 

It’s been an extraordinary year, probably the most extraordinary yet in this country’s expanding, deepening embrace of gays and lesbians as citizens of equal stature, equal worth. For the first time, an American president still in office stated his belief that two men or two women should be able to marry. For the first time, voters themselves — not lawmakers, not courts — made same-sex marriage legal.

He’s 77. Closing in fast on 78. Hasn’t voted for a Democrat in a presidential election since Kennedy. Pledged a fraternity in college. Served as an officer in the Navy. Chose accounting as his profession. Remained married to his high school sweetheart, my mother, until she died in 1996, just shy of their 40th anniversary. He still mentions her daily.

She was the freer spirit, and I told her I was gay back in 1981, when I was 17. She implored me not to tell him — too risky, she said — and to let her handle it. A few years later, she informed me that she’d done so, and that was that. Dad said nothing to me. I said nothing to him. 

I was sure that he’d resolved simply to put what he’d learned about me out of his mind and pretend it didn’t exist. I was wrong. He was mulling it over, trying to figure it out. “It was just so unusual to me,” he recalled, groping for the right word. 

He’d heard it said that gay people were somehow stunted, maybe even ill. But that made no sense to him, because he was confident that I was neither of those things.  He’d heard it said that peculiar upbringings turned children gay. “I thought about it a lot,” he said, “and I came to the conclusion that it had to be in your genes, in you, because I couldn’t think how the environment for you was any different than it was for your two brothers.” 

He said he worried that I was in for a more difficult, less complete life than they and my sister were. I asked him why he’d never broached that with me. He said that it would have been an insult — that I was obviously smart enough to have assessed the terrain and figured out for myself how I was going to navigate it.

[W]hen I would write candidly about my life, as I did on occasion, he’d flinch a bit. Still does.

But he has decided that such writing is necessary. “There’s prejudice out there, and it’s good to fight that,” he said, adding that visibility and openness are obviously integral to that battle. “I’m convinced that people who don’t accept gays just don’t really know any of them.”  He’s increasingly irked at his political party, which he thinks is signing its own death warrant with its attitude toward gays, toward guns, toward immigrants. 

[H]e’s not prepared to say that what two committed men or two committed women share is anything less than what a man and a woman do. In any case, he noted, society is moving in only one direction on this front. And he’s O.K. with that. 

He shook his head: “I almost think I love you more for it — for being what you are rather than what was expected of you.” 

For far too many years I tried to be what I thought was expected.  Yes, I have three amazing children as a result, but it cause me, them and their mother much avoidable misery.   As for my dad, he went further than Bruni's father - he left the GOP in disgust over its anti-gay agenda.  Sadly, my dad did not live to meet the boyfriend, but he accepted my ex and the two of them used to call each other and chat on the phone.  That men like Bruni's dad and my late father can get it give hope that we are going to win the war against the Christofascists.