A
By Les Norman
It was fourteen years ago when our youngest son Nick came out to us. It seems another age. Perhaps it was, but I think not entirely. Things haven’t changed that much. When he said the words “Mum, Dad, I’m gay,” it seemed to falsify those years of raising a son to take his place in the world. Were those twenty-five years a complete fantasy, just play-acting on the stage of life? We told Nick we loved him, no matter what, but I know that I felt ashamed, not for him, but for the whole family, and for myself.
I can’t answer for anyone else in all of this, because we all felt that we needed to keep this thing hidden, our awful secret. We kept it hidden even from each other. That was the hard thing. Nick went back to Minneapolis, but Janet and I couldn’t find a way to communicate with each other about what was going on inside us. We each had to deal in our own way with our own stereotypes, our own fears, our own glimmerings of understanding. If only I had had someone in whom I could confide. My minister? Hardly. When there had been “jokes” about “queers” and “pansies” at the Saturday lunchtime meetings of our men’s group, he had not stopped the conversation, but had joined in the laughter, just as I used to do. My therapist? I did speak to him about my sorrow, and he sympathized, and said that Nick was suffering from a kind of arrested development. That did nothing to help. My support group? Are you kidding? Do real men have support groups? Perhaps they do now, but not then, not men of my generation. I felt terribly alone, the only man in the world who bore this burden.
There was one place, though it took me six months to realize it was there. The big corporation I worked for was intent on bringing out the full potential of its employees, and so had instituted a program of valuing diversity. I was a member of a group which met every month to discuss such issues as gender and race, and how we could eliminate prejudice and its consequences. It eventually came to me that what I was trying to deal with was another example where prejudice governed how we acted, and I hesitantly brought up my situation at a group meeting. My words brought expressions of sympathy, but nothing else. However, at the close of the meeting, one of the women said privately to me, “I haven’t told this to the group, but I’m a lesbian. I know of an organization that might be able to help you. It’s called P-Flag, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.” But it took me a few more months before I was ready to expose myself and go to a meeting.
At the same time as this, I was also finding my way within the wider Church. One Sunday we were visiting the Church on the Green in New Haven, a re-union of friends from Star Island. That morning, our friend John Hay unexpectedly preached on the gospel call to welcome people of all sexual orientations, and said that following the service there would be an opportunity to hear from the local Gay and Lesbian Alliance. At that meeting one of the speakers talked about his son, and how he had wrestled with accepting him as he is. He told my story. I was no longer alone.
Strengthened by this knowledge, I also began to explore what it meant to be a Christian and to be fully welcoming of gays and lesbians. I was ideally situated to do this, since I was now attending Andover Newton Theological School part time, while still making a living in the computer field. In one of my term papers I wrote of my situation and my struggle, and the professor wrote back sympathetically, encouraging me in my work of discovery and learning, and offering her help. This was the first entry point, and it led me to many others. I began to feel my way into a whole hidden world of folk struggling to make a place for themselves in church and society, though swathed in silence, the only voices they heard being those of condemnation and bigotry.
Eventually I did go to a PFLAG meeting, and there I discovered that I was not alone, that there were indeed many other parents who had suffered as I had done, but who were now on the journey beyond acceptance. And then, at one meeting, I had an epiphany. It suddenly came to me that indeed there was a problem, but it was not a problem that my son was gay. It was instead a problem that society would not accept him for who he was. It was society that needed to be changed, not my son. I was no longer alone in the silence, and I resolved to be silent myself no longer, for it is the silence that kills the spirit, it is the silence that is death to accepting the diversity of our own humanity.
But that was all about how I felt. I was a straight father who fit all the norms of the society I lived in. If I had felt alone, how must my son have felt, and still must feel?