Something

toTell You
The Road
Families Travel
When a Child Is Gay

Gilbert Herdt and Bruce Koff

Foreword by the Rev. Paul Beeman, PFLAG President
 Something
to Tell You

BETWEEN MEN ~ BETWEEN WOMEN:

LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES
Lillian Faderman and Larry Gross, Editors
 ▼
Something
to Tell You
The Road Families
Travel When a
Child Is Gay

Gilbert Herdt and Bruce Koff

Columbia University Press NEW YORK

 C
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 
New York Chichester, West Sussex
Copyright ©  Columbia University Press
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Herdt, Gilbert H., –
Something to tell you : the road families travel when a child is gay /
Gilbert Herdt and Bruce Koff.
p. cm.—(Between men—between women)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN ––– (cloth : alk. paper)
. Parents of gays. . Gay youth—Family relationships.
. Coming out (Sexual orientation) I. Koff, Bruce. II. Title.
III. Series.
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 Between Men ~ Between Women
Lesbian and Gay Studies

Lillian Faderman and Larry Gross, Editors

Advisory Board of Editors

CLAUDIA CARD
TERRY CASTLE
JOHN D’EMILIO
ESTHER NEWTON
ANNE PEPLAU
EUGENE RICE
KENDALL THOMAS
JEFFREY WEEKS

Between Men ~ Between Women is a forum for current les-

bian and gay scholarship in the humanities and social sci-
ences. The series includes both books that rest within spe-
cific traditional disciplines and are substantially about gay
men, bisexuals, or lesbians and books that are interdiscipli-
nary in ways that reveal new insights into gay, bisexual, or
lesbian experience, transform traditional disciplinary meth-
ods in consequence of the perspectives that experience pro-
vides, or begin to establish lesbian and gay studies as a free-
standing inquiry. Established to contribute to an increased
understanding of lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men, the
series also aims to provide through that understanding a
wider comprehension of culture in general.
We dedicate this book with love to our partners and families for
their constant love, generosity, and support:

To Gil’s parents, Gilbert and Delores Herdt

To Gil’s partner, Niels Teunis
To Niels’s parents, Henk Teunis and Hennie Roelofs
To Bruce’s parents, Robert and Vicki Koff
To Bruce’s partner, Mitchell Channon
To Mitchell’s parents, Vivian and Mayer Channon
 Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your
thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not
to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with
yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of
the infinite, and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for
gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so
He loves also the bow that is stable.
—Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
 Contents

Foreword by the Rev. Paul Beeman, PFLAG President xiii

Preface xvii
Acknowledgments xxi

Introduction: When Your Child Says, “I Have Something to Tell You . . .” 

Chapter  The Heterosexual Family Myth: How It Can Be Harmful 
Chapter  What Affects a Family’s Resilience? 
Chapter  When a Family Loses Its Way: Disintegration 
Chapter  Somewhere in the Middle: Ambivalence 
Chapter  The Family Renewed: Integration 
Chapter  You Have Something to Hear: New Cultural Ideals 
Appendix  Tables 
Appendix  Context and Methods of the Study 
Appendix  Resources 

Notes 
Index 
 Foreword

Where was this book when we needed it eleven years ago? When our
son came out to us as gay and our daughter as lesbian, both within five
months of each other, they got our attention. Fast. But we didn’t know
where to turn.
Like most parents of gays, we wondered what we had done to cause
them to be “that way.” We climbed our family trees, trying to remember
any relatives, past or present, on my wife’s side or mine, “who just might
be, well, you know . . .” (we had trouble saying the H word). We talked
with each other endlessly, and with our children at great length. We read
everything we could get our hands on at the time about homosexual-
ity—short of the embarrassment of checking books out of the public
library (a silly thing to be embarrassed about, we know now).
When we found that a Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and
Gays (PFLAG) chapter met at a church nearby, we took courage and
attended a meeting. We were surprised and pleased to find a lot of nice,
normal people there, people much like us. We found the strength of
those meetings in the shared experiences of other families. That is one
of the strengths of this book as well. But like most parents and families,
we needed more.
By sharing and evaluating a large variety of fascinating family

xiii
Foreword

accounts, Gilbert Herdt and Bruce Koff move in this book beyond mere
stories into a deeply helpful realm of psychological and cultural under-
standing. Drawing upon the experiences of the parents they inter-
viewed, they summarize those factors that tend to integrate and
strengthen families and those that tend to cause separation and break-
down. They offer alternatives from which families can choose their own
course.
Books such as this one and organizations such as PFLAG exist
because our society does not yet accept and welcome lesbian, gay, bisex-
ual, and transgendered children. Each of the more than  PFLAG
chapters across the country exists as an oasis, a safe haven, an enclave
where openness and unconditional love are the norm—characteristics
that we believe will one day be true of our entire society. But until then,
there are skilled counselors, welcoming communities of faith, PFLAG,
and other local gay-friendly groups. And wonderfully helpful writers
such as Gilbert Herdt and Bruce Koff.
Combining their personal experiences with their study of dozens of
families, they point out how important it is to weave a lesbian or gay
child into the fabric of his or her own household and, beyond it, into
extended family relationships. They admit that sometimes conflicts may
occur with those outside the family circle, but they show that integrated
families are those who took the risk, held firm, and saw their courage pay
off.
Our lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered children live in a sys-
tem that tends to dominate, control, and tyrannize them. Thus it tyran-
nizes all our families as well. It is a system the authors call the Hetero-
sexual Family Myth. It teaches every child—falsely—that heterosexual-
ity is the only normal sexual orientation. Few parents realize just how
devastating this set of beliefs can be for children who are discovering
themselves to be homosexual. The authors understand this well. For me,
one of the most instructive parts of this book is the material on gay
teens, who so often feel that they must reject and conceal a vital aspect of
themselves in order to avoid rejection by others. Sadly, in many contexts
these young people are right. As Herdt and Koff state, “The need to con-
ceal the self becomes even more critical in the face of the violence and
harassment so common in high school.” The often abusive treatment
meted out to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered persons, young
and old, is based on false assumptions that take many forms and present

xiv
 Foreword

many faces. Such assumptions have become a system perpetrated

throughout our society and internalized by us all, even including gay
people themselves and those of us in their families.
Yet the responses of many families in this study point toward over-
coming difficulty with devotion. A variety of factors—experience in
working through past crises, a healthy respect for differences, past expo-
sure to gay people, finding supportive friends—can help families find
their way, not only past the crisis but to new strength and a broader
worldview. But of foremost importance, these writers found, is a refusal
to be cowed. The families least likely to fare well were those who
retreated into silence, treating their child’s homosexuality as a shameful
secret. They suffered deeply internalized oppression and sometimes the
disintegration of the family into harmful patterns, including compro-
mised relationships, distancing from others, deceitfulness, loss of close-
ness, and stunted maturity. The result was untold stress for all con-
cerned.
You will read here of some religious families whose faith offers them
strength in diversity. Yet for others, the religion to which they would
turn is committed to silence and inactivity or even to teachings that con-
demn their children. Likewise, the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t
pursue” farce is shown to be equally destructive, since gays are still
being drummed out of the military, even while its leaders tolerate het-
erosexual adultery. How can we deal with this? The authors point out
that homophobia does not have power over us unless we surrender to it.
Gay people became homosexual in ways they did not choose and cannot
control, just as heterosexuals neither choose nor can control their het-
erosexuality. But gays who are the victims of antigay propaganda—and
we, their families—are nevertheless responsible for the way we respond.
The web of homophobia can be broken as we learn to see homosexual-
ity as it really is—simply another normal aspect of sexuality—and then
describe that reality with the clarity of loving conviction.
Our goal is not just to free our loved ones from the tyranny of homo-
phobia and the heterosexual family myth but to liberate all people to live
in the light of full equality. As the authors ask, “What better lesson for
America—a society challenged as never before by its diversity—than to
see families, one by one, accepting and cherishing diversity?”
If you ask me, we are engaged in this commitment to real family val-
ues because it is exciting to strengthen our families and make them

xv
Foreword

whole, because we have found stimulating ways to grow and expand our
own horizons, and, frankly, because it’s fun. We have new learning to do
and new friends to make; we have support to give and deep appreciation
to receive from our own kids, plus a few million more who value our
standing boldly with them.
As Herdt and Koff conclude, “When parents choose to integrate their
gay or lesbian child fully into their lives, they commit an act of love and
heroism.” In the process, we ourselves become liberated souls.
The Rev. Paul Beeman
National President, Parents, Families,
and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG)

xvi
 Preface

The story of this work begins with a large project conducted in Chicago.
In  anthropologist Gilbert Herdt, along with developmental psy-
chologist Andrew Boxer and their colleagues at the University of
Chicago, initiated a study of the identity development of gay and lesbian
teenagers and their families and communities in the metropolitan area of
Chicago that would continue until . During this time, Bruce Koff
served as director of Horizons Community Services, and his work and
knowledge in this area led to the invitation to co-author this book. The
project consisted of four separate but complementary studies: () a his-
torical and ethnographic investigation of Chicago’s north side “gay
town” area, from  to the present (directed by anthropologist
Richard Herrell and assisted by Herdt); () an ethnographic study of a
gay and lesbian social services agency, Horizons Community Services,
Inc. (founded in ), which sponsors many lesbian/gay activities and
support groups for lesbian/gay/bisexual teens in Chicago (directed by
Herdt and assisted by graduate students at the University of Chicago);
() a developmental identity study based upon interviews with  youth
between the ages of thirteen and twenty, who represented the composite
population of Chicago in terms of social class, ethnicity, religion, edu-
cation, and other social factors (directed by Boxer, with the assistance of

xvii
Preface

Herdt, clinical psychologist Floyd Irvin, and graduate students from the
University of Chicago); and () intensive interviews conducted with
approximately fifty parents of lesbians and gays (directed by Boxer and
assisted by Herdt). All responses were written, and the many quotes
from parents in this book are derived from these responses.
In order to enhance our understanding of the ways in which culture,
individuals, and families interact over time to create positive or negative
mental health, social worker Bruce Koff and Gilbert Herdt also con-
ducted follow-up interviews with youth and parents. We administered to
each parent a semistructured interview and a battery of paper-and-pen-
cil tests that would reveal to us the parents’ thinking and life experiences
and enable us to assess their mental health. We wished to examine in par-
ticular the parents’ processes of coping with a child’s coming out. Some-
thing to Tell You is based upon these interviews with parents of lesbian
and gay children.
What kinds of parents were these? They ranged in age from their late
thirties to their seventies, with an average age of sixty. They were mid-
dle-class as well as working-class people. In most cases, their sons and
daughters had come out to them during young adulthood. The average
length of time since the children had disclosed their homosexuality to
their parents was five years prior to the interview, and the range was
from less than one year to more than ten years. Unlike the subjects of
other studies of this kind, none of the parents were seen in clinical situ-
ations. Generally, they were no different from parents in average fami-
lies. None of them were so disrupted that their lives could not go on. We
located them primarily through the Chicago chapter of Parents, Fami-
lies, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) and the Horizons
Community Services program for Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Teens.
However, we were also fortunate to be able to interview some parents
who shunned any public group that would draw attention to them as par-
ents of lesbians and gays. We believe that as a result of our interviews
with a diversity of parents we can help shed new light on the struggle to
integrate gay and lesbian children into ordinary families.
While the cultural identities of “gay” and “lesbian” are not univer-
sal—and, therefore, the stories in this book do not apply to the experi-
ences of people in all times and places—nevertheless their significance
holds for parents of gays and lesbians in the industrialized and urban
areas of the United States and Western Europe. Our cross-cultural work

xviii
 Preface

and our work in Holland, where Gilbert Herdt has taught and conducted
institutes and collaborated in research with Dutch colleagues for some
years, convinces us that the American experience of the parents of gays
and lesbians has parallels in Western European centers.
The realization that a child is gay or lesbian can plunge a family into
a dilemma they may never have anticipated. A door is flung open, and
parents, not knowing what lies beyond, can only choose whether or not
to walk through it to the future. This book is primarily about parents
who have made the passage. Our interviews with them have enabled us
to detail the challenges they have faced, the decisions they have made,
the strategies they have employed, and some surprising rewards they
have garnered as a result.
What actually happens to the family as a result of learning that a son
or daughter is gay? How is the parents’ marriage affected? Is the self-
esteem of the parents affected? How do relationships with brothers and
sisters change? How does communication change? What impact does
the disclosure have on the integrity of the individual members of a fam-
ily? As we sought to answer these questions by analyzing our interviews
with parents of lesbians and gays, we discerned often a healthy sequence
in the developmental responses to a child’s disclosure. Many of the sto-
ries parents tell in this book suggest that we should think of how fami-
lies cope with having a gay child as a long process—as if they are
embarking on a difficult voyage in very stormy seas. To negotiate the
trip successfully requires a map and a very sturdy vessel—solid and sta-
ble family bonds. There are many travails on such a voyage, but if all
goes well, the vessel can hope to arrive safely in port and, perhaps, even
be better off for the passage.
As a significant number of the parents that we interviewed have con-
cluded, once they embraced their gay or lesbian child, they experienced
immensely positive changes in key aspects of their lives: Marital rela-
tionships and family bonds were strengthened, better relations with
friends were fostered, and the parents felt an improvement in their own
self-esteem. Something to Tell You is their story of how such positive
changes came about.
The primary purpose of this book is to address the needs of parents
of gays and lesbians, as well as the professionals and caring others who
are in positions to be of support to them. Why is such a book necessary?
Because the issue of gay and lesbian children in the family is fraught

xix
Preface

with complexity. Our research and clinical work has convinced us of two
things: () gays and lesbians are too often unprepared to handle the con-
flicts with their parents and families that stem from their coming out, and
() parents are unprepared for the painful and difficult steps that will lead
them from the shock and denial of their initial reactions to a discovery
of how to integrate their lesbian or gay child fully back into the family.
The rules of how to behave in the situation—for example, how to nego-
tiate the child’s coming out to the extended family—have not been for-
mulated. While part of the deficit may lie in us as individuals, it surely
resides largely in our culture. In fact, we would argue that it is generally
not the gay or lesbian child who is impaired or the family that is flawed;
rather, as we will discuss in chapter , it is the society that is handicapped
by a cultural myth that has outlived its usefulness and time.
Despite the tenacious existence of that cultural myth, we believe that
legislative, judicial, and personal changes that will bring about a better
and more decent America—one in which stigma and discrimination
against lesbians and gays and their families will be no more—are soon
to come and merit continued support. It is our hope that this book will
succeed not only in opening up a new conversation about what a good
family life can be and helping parents to embrace their gay and lesbian
children but also in breaking down prejudice and helping to put an end
to a cultural myth that retains the power to be destructive.

xx
 Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the support of many
colleagues and friends, as well as several institutions, over a period of
years. For support of the original research on which this book is based,
we should like to thank the Spencer Foundation of Chicago and, in par-
ticular, Linda May Fitzgerald and Nancy Foster. The grant was made to
Gilbert Herdt (Principal Investigator) and Andrew Boxer, (Project
Director) for the project, “Cultural Competence and Sexual Orienta-
tion: A Study of Adolescence in Chicago.” Additional support for data
analysis came from grants of the Biomedical Research Fund of the
Social Sciences Division, University of Chicago. The writing of this
book was completed while Gilbert Herdt was supported by a Guggen-
heim Fellowship and The Robert S. Vaughn Visiting Fellowship at the
Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, Vanderbilt University.
We are especially grateful to the late Andrew Boxer, our colleague and
friend, who was the director of the original study and collaborated in the
collection and analysis of these data and has supported our effort to
make this work public.
We would like to praise again our field director, Rachelle Ballmer,
whose intelligence, good cheer, and dedication made our project possi-
ble. We would also like to thank psychologist Dr. Floyd Irvin, anthro-

xxi
Acknowledgments

pologist Richard Herrell, and psychologist Lisa Pickens for their

research support, and Mark Tegenfeldt for technical support.
We are very grateful to our colleagues who conducted the fine
detailed interviews necessary to the success of the early project:
Rachelle Ballmer, Andrew Boxer, Jerry Olson, Valerie Glover, Elizabeth
Davies, Mary Olmstead, and Amy Blumenthal.
We are grateful to several friends and colleagues for support of the
early project, and wish especially to thank sociologist Judith Cook and
psychoanalyst Bertram Cohler.
Our friends at PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians
and Gays) deserve a hearty thanks for their help in this study. We would
like to offer special praise to Mayer and Vivian Channon, who were
extremely helpful. We are grateful for their friendship and support. We
also thank Gerda Muri and Nancy Johnson for their kindness.
For their reading and comments on this book, we would like to offer
our appreciation and gratitude to Caitlin Ryan, Andy Boxer, Harlie
Ezgur, and Linda Meyers.
Finally, for her gracious and kind patience and keen eye, we offer
warm thanks to our editor, Ann Miller, at Columbia University Press.

xxii
Something
to Tell You
 ▼
Introduction
When Your Child Says,
“I Have Something
to Tell You . . .”

I had never known anybody who was gay

before. It was like the bottom of the world
dropped out. I loved him and was so proud he
had done well; but it was like a death in the
family and I couldn’t talk to anyone.
—Flora, sixty-eight-year-old mother of a gay son
E V E N N OW, AT T H E E N D O F T H E T W E N T I E T H C E N T U RY, it is still
very difficult to stand up and say, “I am a parent of a gay child.” Parents
are generally unprepared to deal with the profound challenge of having
a gay son or lesbian daughter. When the child declares, “I have some-
thing to tell you . . . I’m gay,” it often feels to a parent as though a dream
is shattered. As the mother of a gay son said to us: “At first I think I was
disappointed, because you do have dreams. He’s a shining Adonis—so
of course we had dreams. It’s hard to bury those dreams!” Yet, as we dis-
covered in our interviews with parents, those who can learn to integrate
their gay and lesbian children into their families often find unexpected,
rich rewards.

The Burton Family’s “Integration”

Mark and Peggy Burton (all names and identifying information have
been changed throughout this book, in order to preserve the anonymity
of the interview subjects) were married in their early twenties and
moved quickly toward creating a family. Peggy gave birth to Julie one
year later, and four years after that brought Joey into the world. Unfor-
tunately, Mark and Peggy lapsed into an increasingly joyless relation-
ship, burdened by the pressures of children and finances. As Peggy’s
dissatisfaction grew, so did her drinking. As a result, she acknowledges
now, she was not fully available to her children. Peggy and Mark
divorced when Julie was fourteen years old and Joey was ten. Peggy
also got sober, entered a recovery program, and focused more on her
children.
Peggy described her daughter Julie as having been a “bright and spe-
cial” child. Julie excelled academically and athletically, and, not surpris-
ingly, she gained admission to an Ivy League college. Julie ’s accom-
plishments reassured Peggy that her children had managed to overcome
the potentially devastating effects of her troubled marriage and painful
divorce and her years as an active alcoholic.


Introduction

So it was a tremendous shock when Julie called her mother from col-
lege and told her that she was involved with another woman. As Peggy
described it, “I wish the Earth could have opened and swallowed me up!”
Like so many parents, she struggled between blaming herself and blam-
ing others. “I wanted to fly out there and beat up whoever it was that I
thought was seducing her.” Then Peggy thought, “I’d done it to her. For
the first trimester (of my pregnancy with Julie) I bled intermittently and
was given progesterone. . . . I thought I’d altered her sexuality with the
hormones.”
Peggy was so shocked by Julie ’s disclosure that she couldn’t talk to
her. “I just cut her out. I felt irate, but instead of talking, I blocked it
out . . . totally denied it. I wanted to believe she was being pursued and
was only concerned about hurting this person’s feelings by being too
rejecting.”
Peggy wanted for Julie what most mothers want for their daughters:
for her “to meet a wonderful man who would love her—a vine-covered
cottage with three children, a flourishing career with theatrical work on
the side. I wanted her to have everything.” Julie ’s disclosure precipitated
what Peggy describes as “a period of severe depression.”
Now, however, Peggy embraces Julie ’s sexual orientation as “just
another piece of information.” She has a close and communicative rela-
tionship with her daughter and has welcomed Julie ’s lover into her
home. She is proud of Julie and proud of herself.
How Peggy Burton progressed from a state of devastation to a rela-
tionship of comfort and pride was a result of the process we call “inte-
gration,” by which we mean the rejoining of a missing element to the
whole. As we describe in subsequent chapters, the stigma associated
with homosexuality, and the concomitant fear associated with it, often
compel the gay or lesbian child and his or her family to separate or to
deny any parts of the child’s life and personality that could reveal a
homosexual identity. The subsequent “disintegration” is insidious and
often devastating to the family. However, the disintegration may be
reversed. Through our interviews with parents, we have found that
when the missing pieces are woven back into the family, the fabric is
strengthened. The family affirms its own “integrity”—a term that the
dictionary defines as “the quality or condition of being whole or undi-
vided; completeness.”


 Introduction

The Cost of Not Integrating

We all grow up with a variety of notions about what it means to be
gay and lesbian: what gay and lesbian people do, how they came to be
“that way,” how they live, how they relate to others, and even how they
age and die. All of these derive from the pervasive idea around which
our society is organized, an idea we call the Heterosexual Family Myth.
By “Myth” we do not mean an ancient story or a deception so much as
an ideal theme that embodies our culture and guides us in organizing our
beliefs and actions. The Heterosexual Family Myth is thus a cultural
ideal. It embodies a set of expectations for how one ’s life should unfold.
Unfortunately, it is uncompromising. It insists that only through het-
erosexual union and the bearing of children within such a union can all
happiness and positive meaning be achieved. It implies that deviation
from this path is less meaningful, less worthy of social approval, less ful-
filling, and, ultimately, less happy.
Thus, having been imbued with the Myth, almost all parents in our
study described their initial disappointment in learning that their child
was lesbian or gay. Often they expressed their disappointment in the
context of not having grandchildren, since, for them as for most older
parents, grandchildren represent the fulfillment of the Myth—a crown-
ing achievement to a life dedicated to the ideal of heterosexuality. Of
course, lesbians and gay men are increasingly choosing to have children
through adoption and donor insemination. But despite this fairly recent
development, the fear that they will never be grandparents was disheart-
ening to most of the parents that we interviewed, as we will discuss in
chapter . More significantly, how the parents learned to confront the
Myth—and how they went about building a new culture that could ame-
liorate the old legacy of confusion and pain left to them by an ideal that
is no longer relevant to their lives—constitutes a crucial element in
Something to Tell You.
The concept of a gay or lesbian “identity” is very recent by histori-
cal standards. It is hard to believe that the notion of “the homosexual”
emerged only about . In earlier eras it was thought that anyone
might behave homosexually (and some societies approved while others
disapproved). But there was no concept of the homosexual as a category
of persons. The nineteenth-century invention of “the homosexual” as


Introduction

being a person apart from other people led soon to the creation in our
culture of a new “spoiled identity,” as the sociologist Erwin Goffman
once called it. Our society now demeans lesbians and gay men through
hate, discrimination, and violence. Families with gay or lesbian off-
spring must confront this unfortunate legacy, for as a child “comes out”
(proclaims his or her homosexuality) to parents, hoping to be affirmed,
the parents ironically find their own identity suddenly “spoiled” by hav-
ing a gay or lesbian child.
It is easy enough to identify the various risks of accepting the gay or
lesbian child’s special identity and integrating him or her into the fam-
ily. For many families, the price that a path of integration exacts may be
too high. For example, telling the grandparents may be “too much for
them to handle.” Parents may risk ridicule or pity from friends for pub-
licly embracing their lesbian daughter and her lover. Disclosing that a
family has a gay or lesbian child may cause other relatives and acquain-
tances to question the parent’s effectiveness or even cause them to ques-
tion the parent’s own sexual orientation. Accepting and supporting a gay
or lesbian child may also place the parents at odds with their own church,
mosque, or synagogue.
Since the challenge of fully acknowledging that a child is gay or les-
bian and integrating him or her into a family is frequently arduous and
daunting, why pursue the idea at all? Why can’t we simply agree to
ignore it, to adapt the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy of the U.S. mili-
tary to relationships with our children, so that we, too, can just get
along? Because the inability or the failure to pursue an integrated path
may have hidden costs that are far more lasting and damaging to the
family.
In her book The Family Heart: A Memoir of When Our Son Came Out,
Robb Forman Dew passionately describes her own horror at the “atroc-
ity” of silence with which so many parents respond initially to the sub-
ject of homosexuality: “We unknowingly let our children grow up in a
society that reflects back at them utter scorn for their legitimate emo-
tions. And if our children look to us for confirmation or denial of their
dawning understanding of how hard their lives might be, they are met
with nothing but a lethal silence, or worse—our unwitting but implied
concurrence.”1
Many researchers note that parents’ rejection or intolerance of their
child’s sexual orientation can significantly diminish the child’s self-


 Introduction

esteem and capacity to function effectively in life. As one author charac-

terized this, gay or lesbian children, compelled to limit their disclosures
to the family, “become half-members of the family unit, afraid and
alienated, unable ever to be totally open and spontaneous, to trust or be
trusted, to develop a fully socialized sense of self-affirmation. This sad
stunting of human potential breeds stress for gay people and their fami-
lies alike—stress characterized by secrecy, ignorance, helplessness and
distance.”2 Gay and lesbian adolescents are particularly vulnerable to
the loss of parental support in their battle to integrate their sexual orien-
tation. Recent studies have shown that the average age today of first
same-sex fantasies and experiences is quite young, perhaps even
younger than a generation ago. In our own study of gay and lesbian
youth, the average age of first same-sex attraction was . years for
boys, and . years for girls. The average age of first same-sex experi-
ence was . years for boys and . years for girls.3 As one researcher
notes, “Compared to older persons, early and middle adolescents may be
generally less able to cope with the isolation and stigma of a homosex-
ual identity.” They desperately need parental support. The cost of not
getting such support may be grave. As other studies have shown, gay
and lesbian youth are at greater risk for suicide, homelessness, and sub-
stance abuse than other young people. Indeed, one federally funded
study found that  percent of street youth may be gay or lesbian.4
A family’s failure to fully integrate the life of its lesbian or gay child,
regardless of the child’s age, will fragment and overburden the lives of
all concerned. Gay or lesbian adult children may determine that it is bet-
ter to move far away from the family and thus avoid the complications
of incorporating a lover or life partner within the family system. Others
may be so willing to accommodate themselves to their parents’ condi-
tional acceptance that they may consciously or unconsciously avoid
involvement in lasting or committed same-sex relationships. Parents
may thus be spared the humiliation they associate with having a homo-
sexual child—and the child avoids the discomfort of “causing” this pain
to the family or, worse, triggering a complete break with the family. But
the cost to the child of such denial is tremendous.
Early in development, gay or lesbian children may exhibit accommo-
dation behavior that can be crippling. It can lead to their habitually
assuming codependent roles or people-pleasing behaviors within all
later relationships. In effect, the gay or lesbian person concludes, “The


Introduction

only way for me to ensure that others will not reject me is to do whatever
the other person wants and be whatever the other person wants me to
be.” The results of such an approach to intimate relationships can be dis-
astrous. Generally, it is impossible to please others in this way. Power
becomes so unequally distributed within relationships that it generates
immense resentment as well. The tendency toward self-destructive
accommodation can be so deeply rooted that it can render an individual
more vulnerable to abuse within his or her romantic and sexual relations
in later life.
Even in nonromantic relationships, such as those with friends or col-
leagues at work, the effects of this accommodation dynamic can be pro-
found. Often, individuals who so readily accommodate others, who say
“Yes,” when really they feel “No,” wind up exploited and feeling chron-
ically overburdened. In work settings, they may rise rapidly in a hierar-
chy that promotes the “dedicated” worker who is willing to leave little
room in life for anything else but work, and stress or burnout invariably
follow.
Some gay and lesbian children will even internalize and reflect the
homophobia they find within the responses of their parents. Each “fag
joke” a parent or sibling utters, every epithet or derisive comment made
about lesbians or gay men, is a wound to the heart of gay or lesbian chil-
dren. They experience the self as the target of these seemingly casual
cruelties, whether or not the cruelties are directed specifically at them. It
is even more cruel when the comments are directed against the child.
The brother who taunts his sister for looking like a “dyke,” the father
who mocks his son for acting like a “fairy,” both contribute to a gay or
lesbian child’s propensity toward depression, self-hatred, and self-
destructiveness.
Gay or lesbian children may develop a very limited view of them-
selves in response to family hostility. For example, they may feel unwor-
thy of another’s love or seek ways to dispel a sense of unworthiness
through addictive or self-destructive means. Michelangelo Signorile, in
his recent analysis of gay male culture, draws a stark relationship
between the impaired self-esteem of gay men and a core element of gay
male culture that fosters self-destructive behavior in a drive for affirma-
tion.5 He notes that the use of drugs, the pursuit of the “perfect body,”
the desperate wish to be the object of desire even to the point of risking
HIV infection, are all potential manifestations of alienation and insuffi-


 Introduction

cient feelings of self-worth. He argues that homophobia engenders

within some gay men the notion that they are only of value as a sexual
object. Others may feel limited to certain careers or feel condemned to
failure. While there may be significant differences between how lesbians
and gay men cope with these psychological wounds, both populations
appear to be at risk for further harm as a consequence of being wounded.
With such a legacy of pain, it is no wonder that gay and lesbian teens
may be two to three times more likely to attempt suicide than their het-
erosexual counterparts.6
When families reinforce the shame and stigma associated with homo-
sexuality by their rejection, silence, or even limited tolerance for that
aspect of their child’s identity, they risk further disabling the develop-
mental process of both individual and family resilience and growth. Gay
or lesbian children may direct what they perceive as hatred back toward
themselves: denying deepest feelings and desires or condemning them-
selves for having them; or—most tragic of all—rejecting themselves
completely through the act of suicide. Such are the potential destructive
costs to children when families stumble on the path toward integration.
But what are the hidden costs to parents when they feel compelled to
conceal a child’s sexual orientation? As surely as the gay son or daugh-
ter exits a “closet” by coming out to parents—so this very act of disclo-
sure creates a “closet” for the parents. They must now decide whether or
not to “come out” as parents of a lesbian daughter or gay son. Not doing
so can produce effects that are parallel to those their children have faced.
Parents, like their gay and lesbian children, may also internalize a sense
of shame or failure. Those who pride themselves on living honorably
and honestly may find themselves deeply compromised by the sudden
need to deceive others or conceal such a critical change in their lives.
Each time parents seek to steer a discussion with their peers away from
areas that may reveal their child’s sexual orientation, each time they
gloss over details or inflate the child’s accomplishments in one area in
order to deny their disappointment in another area, they distance them-
selves in their relationships from others. They lose faith in the closeness
of family as well as friends.
We learned repeatedly through the parents that we interviewed about
the difference it can make in the lives of all family members to choose
the path of integration. For parents it is freeing in positive and unex-
pected ways. The inability of families to integrate their gay or lesbian


Introduction

child fully can inhibit the normal processes of maturation and growth so
crucial to the child’s development into a fully functioning adult. That
inhibition has a tremendous impact on parents since, as children mature
and embark on their journey outward toward a more autonomous life,
parents can normally expect to relinquish much of the parental role. For
parents the child’s maturation begins a time to rediscover self-identity
anew because the parental identity recedes into the background. The
care-taking parent may choose to return to school or resume a career.
The working parent may pursue a new hobby or shift to a more relaxed
work setting or schedule. The parents may wish to take advantage of
their newfound freedom from the constraints of child-rearing by travel-
ling together. But when the child fails to mature fully, the parents cannot
easily relinquish their roles as parents. Parents cannot obtain a sense of
accomplishment and enjoy a satisfying and fulfilling transition to life
beyond the “empty nest.”
When the child does “come out,” however, the parents have an
opportunity to work through more successfully the developmental tasks
associated with “letting go” of children as they create more autonomous
lives of their own. And ironically, as many of the parents in integrated
families report, the closeness, devotion, and love between family mem-
bers is enhanced. Seeing each other as separate, whole, and complete
individuals allows the family to hold to each other by choice, respect,
and love, rather than by obfuscation, shame, and denial.
Most of the parents in our study were anxious to share their experi-
ences because they have learned so much from having a gay or lesbian
child. Many saw this study as an opportunity to encourage and support
other parents, to say: “Look! We’ve found a way to deal with this. What
we once thought of as a terrible burden has become a gift. Listen to us.
We have something to tell you.”
What they tell us is that parenting today is an art, as much as it is a
skill. Child-rearing in modern American society requires parents to
acknowledge the separateness of children, to value difference in them
and the world around them, and to foster the growth of their unique tal-
ents and spirit. They may not always know what to do as parents, they
say, but they must always approach the task by listening to their hearts.
And at the heart of most parents is the capacity to appreciate truly the
unique identities of their gay or lesbian children, whether they know of
this distinction early on, as some of our parents did, or discover this dif-


 Introduction

ference much later. It is through such open-hearted love that families

transcend what often appears to them initially to be the crisis of having
a lesbian or gay child.
The challenge to parents ought never to be whether to love your gay
or lesbian child, but how. Even the National Conference of Catholic
Bishops emphasized this point in its recent pastoral message, “Always
Our Children.” They state: “Your child may need you and the family
now more than ever. He or she is still the same person. This child, who
has always been God’s gift to you, may now be the cause of another gift:
your family becoming more honest, respectful and supportive.”7 Learn-
ing that a child is gay or lesbian need not lead to the all-too-frequent bat-
tle between the parents and the child. There is, in fact, a vital battle that
must be waged instead—a reckoning between the family as a whole and
the intolerant culture around it that seeks to undermine the family
because it embraces gay or lesbian children and those they love.
In our study it was not always the words of parents that spoke so elo-
quently of love but, rather, their actions. Particularly for those parents
that were well along the path toward integration, love was active. They
not only responded to their child lovingly and supportively when the
child came out to them; they also went an extra step. They purchased
books, read articles, talked to supportive and knowledgeable therapists
and clergy, attended meetings of a national organization, Parents, Fam-
ilies, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), befriended other par-
ents of gays and lesbians, and met and became familiar with local lesbian
and gay communities. They often allowed their gay children to take the
lead in educating them about a new world of which they knew little.
They drew inspiration and pride from the courage of these gay children.
As a result, important changes often occurred. Primarily, parents
learned to “let go” in various ways: to let go of the Myth that only
through heterosexual relationships can families and individuals find ful-
fillment, as well as its corollary, that having gay or lesbian children can
only lead to loss, alienation, and shame; to let go of the children them-
selves, so that those children can resume their developmental path; and
to let go of the parental role enough to determine freely their own next
step in life, having successfully launched their children into responsible
adulthood.
Many of these parents told us in the interviews that they now enjoyed
a deepening of family ties. Couples who shared this active approach to


Introduction

growing and changing found new strength in their marital relationships

and greater peace and optimism. With such revitalization these families
could expand the circle of love to embrace others. For some, this meant
disclosing their child’s sexual orientation to extended family. For others,
it meant welcoming their lesbian daughter’s partner or gay son’s lover
and the families of those partners and lovers into their own family.
A number of the parents we interviewed also committed themselves
to challenging the very culture that stigmatizes them and their children.
Some became leaders in PFLAG in their effort to educate others. Other
parents spoke out in their own churches or synagogues, or challenged
friends who casually disparaged lesbians or gay men. Each such act of
outspokenness reinforced the integrity of the family and its members. In
effect, the parents in our study who sought integration have turned the
argument about “family values” on its head. To them, it is not homo-
sexuality that constitutes a “threat” to families but the shame and stigma
others associate with it. By integrating their gay or lesbian children
rather than rejecting them, these families found they functioned better
than they ever had before. Through the lessons of their experience, the
parents in our study call upon all parents of gays and lesbians to respect
their children as unique individuals; to treasure those qualities that make
them unique, including their homosexual orientation; to love actively; to
let go; to draw strength from their children and from each other; to
expand the circle of love; and hence to challenge a society that under-
mines the family by attaching shame and stigma to the gift of having a
child who happens to be lesbian or gay.
These parents’ call is made achievable by their example, which gives us
a model of faith in family that is more sure than any outmoded Myth and
that is as real as love itself. Parents who have done the work, who have
made the fabric whole, have learned that the experience of integrating a
gay or lesbian child into the family was like a special gift that came to them
in the second half of their lives. These parents likened the process to open-
ing a door on a world never discovered before. It is our hope that readers
of this book will find in it a similar process of discovery.


 ▼ 1

The Heterosexual
Family Myth
How It Can Be Harmful

This is just not the way it is [supposed] to be

. . . [My gay son] has interrupted my whole
life. It’s not in the plan. Kids have kids. . . . In
the time I was born, first you are someone’s
daughter, then you are someone’s wife, and
then mother, grandmother, and so on. Cra-
dle to grave.
—Margot, forty-one-year-old mother
of a gay son

I mean, we’re taught to think that’s not a nor-

mal way of life. We think in terms of procre-
ating—that’s normal. I said that to my son,
and he said, “It is a normal way of life—to
me.” Well, yes, it’s normal to him, but it isn’t
mainstream.
—Mary, sixty-two-year-old mother of a gay son
W H AT G O E S T H RO U G H A PA R E N T ’ S M I N D W H E N A C H I L D S AY S
“I have something to tell you”? Whether their offspring is nine or thirty-
nine, parents know that this moment of revelation will bring surprises—
and not all of them are wanted. Yet such a highly significant moment has
the potential to be very positive, since the parent has been taken into the
confidence of a loving child who is going to share a secret. In fact, for
many offspring, sharing in this way is truly a burst of brave love—a
breakthrough of self-confidence, a move toward maturity in the parent-
child relationship, a yearning to be accepted as unique and to be true to
the self. But when the shared secret concerns a child’s homosexuality, it
may have the effect of interrupting the life of the parent by disrupting
the myths and notions of the ideal family. What are the particular cul-
tural myths that provoke such uncomfortable reactions in parents? How
do those myths influence the ability of parents to integrate their gay and
lesbian children successfully into their families?

The Heterosexual Family Myth

“Myth,” as we mean the term in this chapter, does not necessarily con-
note a lie or a deception; nor do we mean to imply that heterosexual fam-
ilies don’t really exist. Rather, we use the term “Myth” in the anthropo-
logical sense: myths provide a powerful guiding image or a map—a cen-
tral tendency—for the organization of the individual lifecourse and the
goals and conduct of social life in the community. A myth, in this sense
of a cultural story, is thus a plan for what individuals should strive to
achieve in society. Rituals and ceremonies within the culture reinforce the
importance of the myth. In our society, we might regard engagement
parties, weddings, baby showers, and anniversary parties as rituals that
reinforce the cultural ideal of the heterosexual family. No society can sus-
tain itself without an appeal to myths of this kind. Ours is no different.
But what is the impact of this Myth on the lives of families of gays and
lesbians? We believe that the Myth as it is spun in the media and daily life


The Heterosexual Family Myth

excludes many people, and specifically we want to show how it has

excluded families of gays and lesbians along with gays and lesbians them-
selves. Our attention to what we call the Heterosexual Family Myth stems
from our effort to understand the stories of parents who have told us what
it is like to discover that their child is homosexual. To be heterosexual and
married with children is statistically normal. But it is a culturally pervasive
belief that only heterosexuals who are married and have children are “per-
fectly normal.” This is one of the most powerful myths in our lives and
our society. Indeed, most people grow up feeling that to be married and
have children is the cornerstone of their development throughout life.
Rearing their family with these same expectations, organizing their hopes
and dreams around seeing their children grow up and marry, parents look
forward to the day when they will be grandparents. This American cul-
tural ideal of the normal heterosexual family may work fine for the major-
ity of people. But those who deviate from the majority are condemned by
our society because they are deemed not “normal.”
While there is much to commend the Heterosexual Family Myth,
ultimately it fails to satisfy the desires and designs of many people in our
society, simply because they are different. They cannot abide by the
Myth, which has no power to make them happy. The Myth stigmatizes
their difference as “abnormal” or “flawed.” Many gays and lesbians thus
are made to feel abnormal or flawed in our society. Their parents, like-
wise, are made to feel abnormal or flawed since the way children are
(their nature and being) is often seen to reflect back upon their parents,
and the parents in turn may regard the differences in the child as short-
comings in themselves.
Roberta, a fifty-three-year-old mother of five, with a twenty-nine-
year-old gay son, is a case in point. She now expresses high admiration
for her son, and she and her husband of thirty-four years are in a solid
and affectionate relationship with him. In fact, she feels strongly that
dealing with her son’s homosexuality has made her a better person. But
she went through a great deal of grief before she was able to feel that
way. It seems that much of her grief had to do with the Heterosexual
Family Myth.
As she recalled in our interview, “I would have liked for [my son] to
get married and have a child because he was such a beautiful baby. Sure,
[I experienced] both disappointments and readjustments. It’s hard to
remember because it was such a nightmare. I had such a fear of telling


 The Heterosexual Family Myth

friends and family because I was such a perfect mother. Then this flaw
came into the picture. I was no longer the perfect mother.”
Roberta had believed that to be a “perfect mother” is to have a “per-
fect baby,” who should, of course, turn out to be heterosexual. The
“flaw” that Roberta spoke of is nothing but the absence of heterosexu-
ality in her son. How were Roberta and her husband able to transcend
this conviction that their son’s homosexuality was a “flaw”? The key to
their success had to do with their realization that their love for their son
was, indeed, unconditional.
Conditional affection is not love. Children who know that parental
affection is conditional may even come to feel that they will only be
loved if they contribute to the ideal of the perfect heterosexual family.
This presents a terrible dilemma for the gay son and lesbian daughter.
The developing gay or lesbian child assumes, “There is something
wrong with me,” or “I have a secret to hide.” As the child matures into
adolescence, she or he begins to think, “My parents don’t know who I
really am.” If children, rightly or wrongly, believe that their parents will
despise or reject them if they disclose their homoerotic feelings, then
they will do everything possible to hide those “bad” feelings. They have
difficulty shaking the conviction that “if they really did know me, they
wouldn’t love me anymore.” The sense of imperfect and conditional
love necessitates disintegration: hiding that part of the self believed to
be unlovable and disclosing only the lovable part. Throughout the many
years of hiding and fear of rejection, children may nourish a small hope
that somehow, someday, they will be able to come out to their parents
and still be loved. But they don’t count on it. Coming out is thus typi-
cally postponed until well into adulthood.
A commonly shared stereotype, the Heterosexual Family Myth acts
as a critical barrier to the formation of more realistic and loving relations
between parents and their gay and lesbian offspring. Our society’s pat
definition of “normality” leads to pervasive expectations concerning the
“normal heterosexual child.” But the gay or lesbian person simply can-
not fulfill the cultural expectations. As a consequence, family members
feel shame, fear, and failure. They are victimized by our modern theory
of “human nature,” which tells what is “normal” and what is “abnor-
mal.” It is the culture that inhibits the integration of gays and lesbians
into their families.
The Heterosexual Family Myth is a collective cultural myth that


The Heterosexual Family Myth

attempts to encompass everyone in the world. Like myths in many times

and places, this one functions to charter institutions—particularly mar-
riage, the nuclear family (a biological father, mother, and child), and
gender roles for men and women. The Myth also functions to explain the
necessity of conforming in order to be “normal.” It hints at apocalyptic
events and imposes sanctions should people break the norm—insanity,
criminality, the loss of love and family support, the denial of acceptance
and standing in the community, and a panoply of other dark outcomes.
The cultural ideal of heterosexuality purports that simply by being het-
erosexual, the child will be happy. The powerful norms and roles that
emerge from the cultural ideal bind people to the social fabric, captivat-
ing the energies and fantasies of the individual by turning social norms
into personal aspirations. Myths thus exert powerful social controls over
the development of us all, directing people along the same path, with the
same kinds of goals and aspirations.
All of us grow up, as many people we interviewed observed, with a
guiding image of what it means to be a normal and healthy human being.
As we suggested earlier, when we refer to that image as a “Myth,” we do
not mean to say that it is false or unreal; nor is it our intention to dispar-
age or dismiss this powerful and cherished dream around which many
people build their whole lives. But we do wish to point out injustices and
falsities: the Myth and the sanctions it imposes on differences are often
so grave and stigmatizing that families with gay or lesbian offspring
who, by definition, deviate from the Myth face public rejection and exile
from the larger community.
In addition, the Myth excludes from the table all of humanity
(whether straight or gay) that does not fulfill its inflexible demands: its
outcasts are heterosexuals who choose not to have children; gay men and
lesbians; those who are divorced and separated; blended families; and so
on. Regardless of contemporary realities that make such deviance com-
mon, this Myth is still the building block of socialization: it is taught in
families and schools, as well as through television, books, and the myr-
iad stories of our culture. The incessant message tells how by falling in
love with someone of the opposite sex and desiring to have children with
the beloved (the greatest expression of love) a person achieves normal
development and happiness. Something is abnormal or wrong with a
boy or girl who does not get married, stay married, and have children,
according to the formula of this sacred Myth.


 The Heterosexual Family Myth

And yet, it is impossible for anyone not to see that society has
changed in many ways that challenge the cultural stereotypes of the nor-
mal heterosexual family promoted by the media and our society. There
are now many different lifestyles that do not match the norms of the
past. Our postindustrial service-sector economy has made it economi-
cally difficult, even undesirable, for most individuals to have large fam-
ilies. The diversity of people and behavior in the United States has made
us aware that there is no single formula for successful adaptation or
development. What our liberal democracy holds dear is the ability to
accept and fold into its society divergent ways of life.
The popular television series of today reflect this pivotal historical
change. “Roseanne” discovers that her mother is a lesbian, and “Murphy
Brown” chooses to be a professional career woman and a single parent.
The significant media attention directed to the television show Ellen,
which depicted the coming out of the character played by Ellen
DeGeneres, strongly prodded the debate on exposure of children and
adolescents to such issues. Painful and funny as some of these media
images are, they represent quite powerful challenges to the old Myth.
But it is important to note that the cultural ideal for families and indi-
viduals remains intact even as it fades. Ironically, parents could have
once relied upon the bias of others to keep the secrets intact too, or to
reassure them that their own prejudices regarding their gay and lesbian
children were morally correct. That is no longer true.
What has happened is that the consensus in our society is breaking
down about the myth of heterosexuality, just as the concomitant nega-
tive stereotypes of homosexuality are changing. It is no longer the case
that people are necessarily ashamed to be gay or lesbian; they may in fact
be proud of it. Even celebrities and politicians may be openly gay.
Indeed, the social movement of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals celebrates
divergent sexuality as pride: it is simply another, equally valued form of
“diversity”—of human nature, albeit different in kind. The recent
debate in the country over gays and lesbians in the military is a serious
demonstration of a new kind of political and social force alive in the
United States. “Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue” is a policy that com-
prised a variety of positions and will surely not last, but the controversy
around it definitely represents a profound questioning of the cultural
ideal of the Myth that only heterosexuality is normal and that homosex-
uality is unworthy—even in the military.


The Heterosexual Family Myth

Simultaneously, other segments of our society have changed. It is no

longer unusual to find heterosexual couples who are living together but
who are unmarried; or divorced and separated couples, whose children
are being reared in single-parent households. Career women and their
husbands increasingly decide to postpone or delay the decision to have
children, or to adopt them, or not to have children at all. Often these
decisions are disappointments to their parents, but parents are learning
how to cope with them. Indeed, the idea of gender equality for women
in the workplace has made the whole issue of children and grandchildren
more complicated than before.
Nevertheless, there remains a strong tendency for our culture to
lean upon the legacy of the past, such as idealized images from the
nineteenth century and an earlier part of the twentieth century. Perhaps
the strongest images of heterosexism (i.e., the culturally conditioned
belief that heterosexuality is inherently superior to homosexuality)
were the ones on millions of television sets of the s and s—
the period in which today’s generation of parents and grandparents
either came of age or reared their children. The prevalent images on
the television serials of the day such as Father Knows Best, Leave it to
Beaver, and The Ozzie and Harriet Show are mythological in their por-
trayal of the “average happy family.” These television situation come-
dies, extraordinarily popular and powerfully normalizing, appealed to
the consensus ideal of the historical family transplanted to the city and
suburb: a working dad, a house mom, and the normative heterosexual
kids living and adapting, with growing pains and funny problems. Not
one out of thousands of these weekly shows ever challenged the fun-
damental principle that the children of these TV families must be het-
erosexually identified and presumably would marry, stay married, and
have children.
For many families at the time, such cultural images were satisfying
and reinforcing—because they guided and mirrored their lives, even if
family members were not able to live up to the stereotype in every sin-
gle respect. But for others, these images were exceedingly painful
because they portrayed a family life at odds with their own daily lives
and experiences. They represented a pressure to conform—and to keep
up with the Joneses in the middle-class. For several million people and
their families, these images were—and still remain—hurtful reminders
of their “failure” to meet societal expectations, either because they did


 The Heterosexual Family Myth

not have children, or because of divorce or separation, or because of a

“family secret.”

The Impact of the Myth

The subject of the expectation of grandchildren is particularly cen-
tral to understanding what is at stake in the Heterosexual Family Myth.
Being heterosexual enables people to marry, have children, and eventu-
ally enjoy grandchildren. Maybe these events of family life do not bring
automatic happiness, as the ideal of heterosexuality implies, but it is
pretty certain that having heterosexual children is regarded by most par-
ents as a better formula for happiness than having homosexual children.
It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the first reactions of
parents in our study to the discovery that their child was gay or lesbian
was, to varying degrees, negative. A few parents in our study even felt
traumatized. Some disguised their reactions. But one mother required a
psychiatric hospitalization after receiving her son’s letter to the family
saying that he was gay. Undoubtedly many parents today continue to be
disturbed by the news that their child is gay or lesbian—yet by-and-
large their reactions are less negative than parents’ reactions a generation
ago, when, as George Weinberg observed in , the alienation was so
great that parents felt their child to be a “member of another species.”1
When a child tells a parent that she is lesbian or he is gay, the very
foundation of the family, the myth of happiness through heterosexual
union, is shaken. The telling need not be as traumatic as it was in the case
of an eighteen year-old male in our study who could not wait any longer
and confessed in desperation on the morning of his sister’s wedding. He
had for months tried to tell his family. They were in denial and refused
to listen. On the wedding day he was of course ignored, and he could no
longer bear it. As his parents and sister assembled in the antechamber to
the church, with the extended family and a room full of guests waiting
in the church, the pressure grew intense, and he blurted out, “I have
something to tell you! I am gay!” His parents were furious and his sister
and the bridegroom were distraught. One could hardly imagine a worse
time to come out—or a more public way to “spill the news.” This story,
while certainly extreme, illustrates the desperation of gay offspring who
feel denied and who then rebel by disclosing their homosexuality at the
least opportune time.


The Heterosexual Family Myth

As we have learned from our interviews, the moment of disclosure is

seen from totally divergent perspectives by the parents and children.
Because parents remain invested in upholding the Myth through the life-
course of their family, they experience an immediate sense of loss, often
coupled with either fear, anger or grief. They have lost an image of who
their child was in their eyes and what he or she would become in their
fantasy of the future. They cannot imagine how they will cope with this
loss. Ironically, their offspring typically experience the moment of dis-
closure as one of immense gain and relief: of finally claiming freedom to
be who they really are. They feel exhilarated by the joy of finally relin-
quishing the disguises and hidden feelings that had prevented their par-
ents from knowing them.
It is also ironic that the parents may immediately experience the news
that their child is homosexual as a repudiation of themselves or their
parental role. The parents may feel rejected because they believe their
child is distancing or alienating herself from them. Yet, this is the
moment when many gay and lesbian offspring may feel closest to their
parents and most real. As a recent Israeli study observes, often “gay and
lesbian young adults disclose their homosexuality to their parents
because they want to get closer to them.”2 When the parent can under-
stand that the disclosure is the child’s attempt to be closer, it is highly
promising for the integration of the child into the family. The disinte-
gration accelerates when the parent misperceives the disclosure as an act
of betrayal.
The disclosure can also make the parents fearful. Growing up with all
the negative stereotypes of lesbians or gays, parents often worry about
their lesbian or gay child’s well-being and are more likely to project a
grim future for him or her. Will she live to become the “lonely spinster?”
Will he disappear into a dark underworld of furtive encounters? Will
their lives be sad and unfulfilling? Will they face discrimination and
abuse? As Mary, a sixty-two year-old mother, confessed:

I’m also afraid it will make his life hard. There ’s the discrimination
factor. I’m afraid other people will look down on him. I’ve heard
about homophobic “gay-bashing.” What would his neighbors think
if they knew? He’s active in the community associations—I don’t
know if they think about it. But what if suddenly they found out they
had a couple of homosexuals living there? I don’t know. . . . People


 The Heterosexual Family Myth

can be nasty. I’ve heard of cops stopping gays and beating them up.
Life is hard enough at best. I heard about one mother who just kicked
her son out. I could never do that. I love him dearly.

Parents also fear for themselves: While gay children may have exited
their “closet” by coming out to their parents, the parents suddenly find
themselves newly “closeted”—the parents of a gay child. Who can they
tell? What will others think of them as parents? Will they be blamed for
failing to raise so-called “normal” children, or pitied for being so
“afflicted?” Will they be rejected and shunned? Parents may be ashamed
to admit these worries to their children, but they were among the most
salient concerns articulated to our interviewers.
After a child’s disclosure, shame and anger come to be guests of the
family for a long time. These smoldering emotions get in the way of
family relationships. Anger may spontaneously disrupt discussions and
spoil family gatherings. The father or gay son, the mother or lesbian
daughter, may later want to reconcile, but they may continue to hold a
grudge against the others who are perceived to be rejecting. A morato-
rium may emerge; the family agrees to a new reign of cold, hard silence.
Andrew Boxer has referred to the process as creating a “demilitarized
zone” in which both sides agree to suspend conflict by avoiding the
topic. The avoidance, however, cannot resolve the problem. The post-
disclosure period is not like the formerly secret period before the child
came out. The family knows the situation and avoids it, and this becomes
a formula for alienation from those they most love. Ultimately, the exis-
tence of a demilitarized zone may lead to disintegration of the family. It
is as if someone places a sign on the way to a family gathering: “Do not
discuss homosexuality or gay and lesbian issues!” As long as this con-
spiracy of silence reigns, it will not be possible for the parents to find res-
olution with their lesbian or gay child. Disintegration is inevitable.
After disclosure the parents must make two immediate (and very dif-
ficult) steps: they have to deal with giving up their idealizations and
expectations, and they have to confront the negative stereotypes attrib-
uted to lesbians and gays by the dominant culture. Often, the parents
have internalized those negative stereotypes, and it is their own attitudes
they must confront. After all, they have been bearers of the dominant
culture. Consciously or unconsciously, they have transmitted society’s
attitudes to their own family.


The Heterosexual Family Myth

Parents’ difficulty in confronting the cultural myths as they impact on

their lesbian and gay children is revealed by Mary, the sixty-two-year-
old mother quoted in one of the epigraphs to this chapter:
It’s upsetting to think of sex between Mark and another man. I can’t
think of him with the opposite sex, either. I can’t quite think of sex
between two men or two women. . . . But I’m becoming adjusted. He
said, “Mother, I’m not going to take you into our bedroom!” Time
will heal it though. . . . I just want him to be happy. I try not to think
about that part. I mean, we’re taught to think that that’s not a normal
way of life. We think in terms of procreating—that’s normal. I said
that to my son, and he said, “It is a normal way of life—to me.” Well,
yes, it’s normal to him but it isn’t mainstream. But it could be so much
worse. I have to be grateful for what I have.
Parents such as Mary have had to cope with a new kind of social expe-
rience unknown in history and in our own culture until recently: being
the parent of an openly gay- or lesbian-identified child. And they have
to negotiate the experience against the stereotypes and without positive
rules or norms that might help to guide them toward integration. In the
s and s, parents of homosexual offspring were brought into
confrontation by the first wave of those who “came out.” In the s
and s, parents of a second and third wave have had new kinds of
concerns to deal with. Among these are the fact that the age of coming
out is getting younger and that the risk of contracting AIDS through
sexual relations is ever-present in the minds of parents. These waves of
parents share the problems and prospects of their children living their
entire lives as gay or lesbian in a society that does not honor them and—
what is worse—creates many obstacles to homosexual children leading
fulfilling and satisfying lives.
Parents often feel that they are alone or even unique in having a gay
son or a lesbian daughter. As Amy, a forty-six-year-old mother of three,
said about the discovery that her son was gay: “I felt that I was the only
one in the world with a gay son.” This reaction might surprise the
reader. Isn’t there so much publicity on television and in the newspapers
about these issues today? How could parents not see all the information
about anti-homosexual legislation, the military policy of “Don’t Ask,
Don’t Tell,” the coming out of “Ellen” in the television program, or the
talk show banter about lesbians being good mothers? Yet, the fact is,


 The Heterosexual Family Myth

people can ignore what seems to be irrelevant to their own lives, and
they will listen in a totally different way when the news concerns some-
one they love.
The parents in our study typically didn’t think of their children as
homosexual prior to the coming-out event. When the occasional parent
had suspicions, these were hidden from others, including their spouse.
Therefore, the parents had generally responded to media stories with a
grain of salt: those stories were removed from their own lives. “That’s
about somebody else, not me.” And many of the parents in their fifties
and older came of age in a time when these issues were never discussed
in public. “Sex” was private, a dirty subject, and one didn’t discuss it
with one’s parents except under extreme pressure. In fact, the feeling
that it is “unnatural” to discuss sexuality permeates many of the stories
that parents told about their homosexual children. The surprise that the
parents registered on learning of a child’s homosexuality also suggests
how deeply and well-hidden the secret was in the child. As long as it was
hidden, the parents could always feel, “homosexuality was someone
else’s problem, not ours.”
A few parents, however—more typically mothers—have told us that
they had long suspected or guessed that their child was gay or lesbian,
but they chose to wait for the child to bring it up, or they colluded with
the child to keep the secret hidden. In such cases, the shared problem of
hiding led to the shared task of how to come out of the closet.
Most parents experience a sort of cognitive dissonance as well.3 Hav-
ing been inculcated by the homophobic attitudes of the dominant cul-
ture, parents are jarred to find themselves suddenly wondering if these
same harsh judgments and painful stereotypes apply to the child they so
deeply love and admire.4 One of the mothers in our study, Flora, cap-
tured this feeling when she spoke of the discovery that her son was gay.
Kevin had dated but it was always a platonic sort of thing. I just
thought that he was studious, a late bloomer; that he was interested in
his school work. A friend of mine said, “He has plenty of time. It’s
better that way.” Girls liked him very much but he never gave
encouragement. . . . All the way along, I kept hoping but I kept won-
dering in the back of my mind. I wanted a grandchild; I looked for-
ward to him marrying. “What did I do?” I used to ask myself. I asked
him if it was a matter of choice and he said “No.” He said he ’d never
been interested in a girl sexually. . . . I wanted a grandchild. Kevin


The Heterosexual Family Myth

used to work at a nursery school—he ’d take care of forty or forty-

five kids. They loved him. I used to think what a wonderful father
he’d make.

Flora went on to tell how hard it had been for her to surrender these feel-
ings. Although she was successful in forming a new and more positive
relationship with her son, the nostalgia in her story suggests that a part
of her still clings to her past image of him.
Virtually all the parents in our study struggled with the inevitable
question: Why is my child gay? The very nature of this question derives
from negativity, from the way our culture bases its valuation of people
on their being heterosexual. If a person is not heterosexual, there must
be something wrong, and if there is something wrong, we need only to
find its source and fix it. And if we cannot fix it, then we are surely to
blame for it. Parents initially can become preoccupied with this issue of
blame, of finger-pointing. But laying the “blame” for a child’s homo-
sexuality on something or someone is both destructive and inconclusive.
In fact, the only “conclusion” that can be arrived at has less to do with
the facts of the matter than with what parents believe to be the facts.
Most of the parents in our study sought a biological explanation for their
child’s sexual orientation. Their search for this explanation is an under-
standable attempt to find a physical cause for a “problem,” a means of
alleviating the burden of guilt our culture places on parents of lesbians
and gay men.
In truth, it is the parents’ frame of mind that is most at issue. The
child was previously assumed to be straight; none of their other children
are lesbian or gay; they are not gay or lesbian themselves; and their soci-
ety says that somehow they as parents are responsible for this outcome.
An explanation in human development or biology is often sought when
something is perceived to go wrong.5 This explains the intense finger-
pointing that often surrounds the initial news that the child is gay or les-
bian. Who is to blame? If not the father, then the mother; if not her, then
a teacher, or sibling, or someone or something else. Yet, as the parents
come to accept their child for who he or she is, they come to accept them-
selves better. The blame game stops.
Children who come out to their family compel parents to reconsider
a whole range of attitudes and beliefs. What is right and wrong? How
can I go against long-held biases? As Amy, the forty-six-year-old


 The Heterosexual Family Myth

mother, admitted, “None of our friends had gay sons. It took me a long
time to tell my mother, because Jay is her only grandson.” Amy felt sin-
gled out and isolated as a result of learning that her son is gay. For some
parents, this is the first time in their lives that they have had to face prej-
udice or injustice. They certainly have never before felt shame, guilt,
and anger regarding the public perception of their own child. This over-
whelming sense of uniqueness and isolation, we suggest, stems from the
powerful antihomosexual social attitudes of our society. Some parents’
ability to understand the plight of their child is finally fostered by the
recognition that it is society’s homophobia that is isolating them, the
parents. The gay or lesbian child was, of course, attempting to cope and
master the snake pit of homophobia and hatred in society all along.
Paradoxically, only when the parents are able themselves to work
through the socially inculcated negative views of homosexuality and to
create their own way of acceptance of their child’s sexuality can they
cease to feel that they have been cast beyond the pale.


 ▼ 2

What Affects
a Family’s
Resilience?
A S W E I N T E RV I E W E D T H E FA M I L I E S I N O U R S T U DY , we came to
discern a path on which they all seemed to embark. Initially, families
encountered a period of disintegration characterized at various points
by guilt and recrimination, secrecy, impaired relations with others, and
shame. Some families moved on to a period of ambivalence involving
continued discomfort but with a modicum of hope, often informed by
successful disclosure to others. Finally, a number of families entered a
state of integration in which the relationships between family members
appeared enhanced, the bonds of family and friendship were strength-
ened, and the families displayed great confidence in themselves and the
future. While we will explore these states of experience—disintegra-
tion, ambivalence, and integration—in considerable depth in subse-
quent chapters, we want to consider at this point those factors that seem
to affect a family’s progress.
Our analysis is shaped in part by the emerging concept of
“resilience,” i.e., the capacity to emerge from a crisis with greater
strength. The renowned family therapist Froma Walsh describes it as
“an active process of endurance, self-righting, and growth”1 that is
“forged through adversity, not despite it.”2 Walsh and others have iden-
tified a number of important elements that contribute to a family’s
resilience, including their capacity to empathize with others and engage
in social activism,3 as well as the ability to find meaning, maintain a bal-
ance between stability and change, communicate clearly and effectively,
and engage in collaborative problem-solving.4
In our interviews, we encountered these qualities as well as other
aspects of family life that can enhance or inhibit a healthy response. We
discovered that certain experiences or conditions in parents’ lives seemed
to affect their willingness and ability to deal with their child’s coming out.
For example, some had successfully faced other crises in the past, particu-
larly experiences with illness, addiction, or death. These experiences gave
the families a “track record” of sorts. How they responded to previous
crises typically predicted how they would deal with this new challenge.


What Affects a Family’s Resilience?

Perhaps the most poignant example is demonstrated in our interview

with Phyllis Aaron, the mother of a lesbian daughter who has a chronic
and potentially life-threatening disability. (Phyllis also experienced the
horror of discovering that one of her children—not her daughter—had
been sexually abused by a trusted adult). Phyllis underlined how dealing
with her daughter’s disability helped temper the pain and sense of fail-
ure she felt when her daughter came out: She told us, “My husband and
I don’t always understand our grief, but we have a warmth and tender-
ness toward her not afforded our other kids. We both cry a lot. She needs
the love she doesn’t get from the world.” In response to our interview
question, “How has learning about your daughter’s sexual orientation
affected you as an adult and as a parent?” Phyllis responded, “It has
instilled in me a pride in my daughter and a recognition of her courage
to stand up for who she is—I have a cause to champion and a reason to
educate myself to become a more understanding and accepting woman.
I am enriched.”
The Aarons, by virtue of their past experiences with the crises of
their daughter’s disability and of another child’s victimization, have
learned to distinguish the desire to protect from the desire to love. Echo-
ing what perhaps every parent of a child harmed or disabled must even-
tually learn, Phyllis commented, “I need to be aware of why and what I
do for my daughter so I don’t overdo or overprotect. She doesn’t need
my protection–she needs my love.” The Aarons have learned to find
meaning in the challenge of difference. They were prepared to deal with
this new difference, their daughter’s sexual orientation, by applying the
lessons learned from one crisis to the challenges of another. We believe
that families who have faced serious challenges of this kind in their past
are, ironically, equipped to deal better with the challenge of their child’s
coming out.
Our findings suggest that whether or not parents were divorced also
made a difference in the their capacity to adjust to having a gay child.
Approximately  percent of the parents we placed in both the “Ambiva-
lent” and “Disintegrated” categories were divorced. One mother told us
that she and her husband separated shortly after she learned that both of
her sons were gay. “If there’s a weakness in the marriage,” she
remarked, “it can break its back!”
Regardless of their marital status, however, it mattered that the par-
ents communicated, cooperated, and remained cohesive during the


 What Affects a Family’s Resilience?

process of the child’s coming out. Those who maintained some sort of
sound parental partnership even when separated or divorced seemed to
adjust well to the knowledge that their child was gay or lesbian. For
example, Kathy O’Donnell, the divorced mother of a gay son, Jonathan,
told us that she and her ex-husband, Andrew, had worked out a com-
fortable joint custody arrangement and remained conveniently located
in proximity to each other to minimize the disruption to their children’s
lives. Notable throughout our interview with her was an absence of hos-
tility or resentment toward her ex-husband. She described how her ex-
husband provided some experiences to her teenage children that she
could not. “The children all travel with their father, who is a compulsive
traveler and takes them on lots of nice trips, which is lovely for them
since I can’t afford to be doing that.” She also described Andrew as “a
very loving father who cares profoundly for his children.” We look
more closely at the O’Donnell family in chapter , but suffice it to say at
this point that Jonathan’s coming out served as a catalyst for immense
positive change. The respectful relationship the parents maintained with
each other despite their divorce allowed the integrative process to pro-
ceed unimpeded. Divorce is, clearly, not in itself a barrier to the healthy
integration some families achieve.
Some of the parents we interviewed seemed to use other experiences
of being “different” to help them understand the importance of tolerat-
ing “difference” and to facilitate integration. Alicia Dawson, an
African-American mother of a lesbian daughter, told of the conflicts
with her daughter she had had over her daughter’s “negative attitude and
aggression toward men.” She declared, “I taught my children to let peo-
ple be what they are. I resent general hate!” One might reasonably spec-
ulate that Alicia’s own experiences with the effects of racism have sensi-
tized her to displays of such “general hate” in others, including her own
daughter. It should be no surprise, therefore, that Alicia regards herself
as “an activist for human rights” through her involvement in PFLAG.
Furthermore, despite the significant differences between mother and
daughter, their relationship is clearly within the “Integrated” category.
Several of the parents we interviewed had some previous exposure to
lesbian or gay people, which greatly affected their initial responses to
learning their child was homosexual. Perhaps the most striking example
was John Billings, a law enforcement officer and the father of a lesbian
daughter. At the time that his daughter came out to him, he recalled, “I


What Affects a Family’s Resilience?

was assigned to the gay squad and I had to arrest gays when they put a
hand on us to make sexual advances.” John ascribed his initial negative
response to his daughter’s disclosure to this fact: “I was arresting people
for that, and here my daughter was one!” John’s strong association of
homosexuality with criminality made his adjustment very difficult. He
was able to tell only one person outside of the family. He admitted hav-
ing felt “like a failure” as a parent because of his daughter’s sexual ori-
entation. Interestingly, however, after his daughter’s disclosure, John
found he would sometimes choose not to arrest people as part of his job
and eventually arranged to be transferred to a new position outside of
the “gay squad.” However gradual, John’s love for his daughter insti-
gated a change in his view of the homosexual.
Upon learning that his daughter was a lesbian, another father whom
we interviewed confided in a lesbian friend of his at his workplace. The
support and openness of this friend went a long way toward reassuring
him that he could cope with his lesbian daughter’s disclosure and accept
her. By learning especially that others, such as the parents of his friend,
could accept having a homosexual child, his own path to love and open-
ness was made easier.
Kathy O’Donnell, the divorced mother described earlier, had also
had positive experiences with gay men through her work in a retail store:
“That was my first real contact with gay men as groups, blatantly gay,
without any need to be ashamed or hide it, and rightfully so. When we
moved to this house, I had a friend, a young gay man, just a love, and he
helped me move here.”
Kathy noted that after her son came out, this friend (who subse-
quently moved abroad) and her gay son developed a helpful and sup-
portive correspondence.
In the Jeffers family, the father and mother had both experienced very
different interactions with gay people. Marcia Jeffers explained:
My husband used to live in San Francisco after high school. He lived
close to gay bathhouses and I think he formed negative impressions
because of the explicit sexual nature of the bathhouses. He found it
repugnant. It was Castro Street that he lived on. I think that he
thought that our son’s being gay meant he therefore would be
promiscuous and spend time at gay bathhouses, bars, and pick up
people in public toilets, etc. He just thought that was part of being
gay. He thought there would be lots of casual sexual contacts. Well,


 What Affects a Family’s Resilience?

as it’s turned out, our son hasn’t behaved that way—and my husband
is reassured. He understands more. He doesn’t reject that aspect of
our son.

Marcia’s own experience better prepared her for the news of her son’s
sexual orientation:
My best friend from high school is a lesbian, so I had a positive impres-
sion of at least lesbians. She was my best friend in high school; we
started sixth grade together. I was at their house lots. Her mom called
me their “other daughter.” I was really a part of the family. . . . I knew
nothing was wrong in the family to cause homosexuality. There was
no dominant or submissive mother or father. She had articulate and
assertive parents. They were close—she wasn’t rejected, nor was she
overly fussed about. . . . So whatever I might have thought, impres-
sions I got from society, didn’t fit.

As a result of this experience, Marica was less likely to blame herself and
felt more at ease with her son’s sexual orientation. In the context of the
silence or condemnation that usually greets the topic of homosexuality
in American culture, together with the relative invisibility of lesbians
and gay men until recently, these limited experiences become quite pow-
erful. If one lacks personal contact with gays and lesbians, the more neg-
ative stereotypes that are rampant in society often constitute one ’s sole
notion of gays or lesbians. Those stereotypes can trigger the same fear
and anxiety in parents as they do in society at large. Parents’ reactions to
their gay or lesbian children may be unduly shaped by the stereotypes
that are part and parcel of our culture. But through the increased visi-
bility of lesbians and gay men, parents can hope to learn more fully
about their homosexual offspring’s life. Only when large numbers of
gays and lesbians come out can parents and society in general begin to
discover the range of “normal people” like their own child who are
attracted to persons of the same sex. This is one of the many powerful
arguments for coming out.
In our study we looked at a number of other key factors that we
thought might affect a family’s capacity to integrate their gay or lesbian
child into their lives. These included the age of the child and of the par-
ents at the time the child came out, the religiosity of the family, the par-
ents’ education, the relationship between a parent’s first reactions and


What Affects a Family’s Resilience?

subsequent adjustment, and the gender of the parent and the child. We
will examine each of these in turn.
The parents we interviewed are typically more open than others. It is
important to acknowledge this point because the group we surveyed is
not representative of all parents of gay or lesbian offspring. As we said
earlier, many of the parents we interviewed were recruited through
PFLAG in Chicago and through the Gay and Lesbian Youth Program at
Horizons Community Services (the gay and lesbian social services
agency in Chicago). Consequently, we knew we were likely to obtain a
sample skewed toward the more integrated end of the continuum. Nev-
ertheless, the interviews are richly detailed accounts of the experiences
of these families, positive and negative. We are able to discern from
them some very significant factors that characterize and differentiate
experiences, and these have general implications for all families.
Certain factors seemed to have little or no bearing on the family’s
capacity to achieve a high level of integration. The average age of the
child at the point of coming out to parents was . years old, with ages
ranging from fifteen to thirty years old. The average age of the child’s
mother and father at the point of coming out was . years old and
. years old respectively, with mothers ranging in age from thirty-
seven to sixty-seven and fathers ranging in age from thirty-five to
sixty-eight (three fathers were deceased in our survey). Neither the age
of the child nor of the parents at the point of coming out seemed to
have significant effect on the family’s capacity to integrate the gay or
lesbian child.
Similarly, in our study it did not seem to matter how religious the par-
ents were. While other studies point to the role of religiosity in family
attitudes, we speculate that this is changing in society (though we must
acknowledge that fundamentalists were underrepresented in our sam-
ples).5 In any case, there was no significant correlation between how
often our parents attended religious services or how important they
regarded their religion to be and their response to their gay or lesbian
child. The “Disintegrated” families were only slightly more religious
than the “Integrated” families.
It did appear, however, that parents in the “Integrated” group had
generally achieved higher levels of education than those in the other two
categories. They were more likely to have completed college, and  per-
cent of the “Integrated” group had also completed advanced degrees


 What Affects a Family’s Resilience?

compared to  percent of the “Ambivalent” group and none of the

“Disintegrated” group.
We also found that parents who were more supportive at the time of
their gay or lesbian child’s disclosure were more likely to achieve high
levels of integration than those who were less supportive at the initial
point. Parents in the “Integrated” group were also less likely to have sus-
pected their child was gay prior to the disclosure. Somehow these par-
ents were better able to respond to the news even though they had no
idea it was coming, a trend illustrated in table  (see appendix ). We sus-
pect that at least some of this capacity to respond positively derives from
a history of crisis and coping, which had produced a pattern of con-
structive response.
But why should parents who had previous suspicions of their child’s
homosexuality generally have a more troubled response? Perhaps those
parents who had indeed suspected their child was gay or lesbian had
been resisting an actual acknowledgement for some time. The disclo-
sure, therefore, confirmed the worst fear of such parents and/or vio-
lated an implicit agreement to deny or conceal the obvious. Their
response might thus have been more of an attempt to reinstate secrecy—
to deny and conceal again, accompanied by a deep sense of hurt and
betrayal when this failed. Here we see one of the many sources of disin-
tegration—a failure to deal with the reality that the child is gay.
The one aspect of parental reaction that mattered greatly was the
gender of the child. Our study confirmed what previous studies have
also found: families are better able to integrate gay sons than lesbian
daughters. Table  (see appendix ) illustrates this phenomenon by
showing the percentages in our study of each type of family with gay
sons or lesbian daughters. Approximately  percent of the families in
the integration phase had gay sons, compared to only  percent of those
in the disintegration phase. More starkly, only . percent of the inte-
grated families had lesbian daughters compared to . percent of the
disintegrated families. It is hard to know how typical these results are,
but our study, and stories in the culture, imply a general pattern.
Everyone knows, of course, that traditionally men and women have
different roles in our society. Also the status, resources, and power of the
genders are not equal, as illustrated by the fact that men and women in
the same positions in the same job often have different salary levels, with
women typically making less money than men. Perhaps a possible expla-


What Affects a Family’s Resilience?

nation of the greater perceived difficulty of integrating a lesbian daugh-

ter into the family has to do with the gender role expectations our cul-
ture places on men and women. Men are valued for their capacity to
work, provide, compete, achieve, and succeed. Male status is thus based
on such personality attributes as independence, work and income, self-
reliance and individualism. By contrast, our traditional culture values
women for their roles as mothers and moral guardians, emphasizing the
ability to nurture and love, have children and take care of them, and sub-
ordinate their feelings and needs if necessary to keep relationships
together and provide a safe, warm place for family.6 Of course these are
cultural ideals. Many men and women do not fit into them and have dif-
ferent aspirations. In fact, it is well known that the nature of our econ-
omy today generally requires a two-income family, with both women
and men working outside the home and thus making their lives ever
more complex. Nonetheless, these economic changes have not yet
altered the cultural ideals of gender roles, especially for women.
Families may more readily integrate the gay son because he can still
fulfill the key role expectations of being male in spite of his homosexu-
ality. He can succeed at a career, achieve status through higher income,
and gain respect for being self-reliant and becoming a separate individ-
ual. Those same achievements by a lesbian daughter, however, conflict
with the family’s role expectations for females. They typically desire to
see her marry and have children. She may not get the family recognition
she deserves for having a successful career. The older she gets, the more
she may be disparaged for not being married and for lacking the affilia-
tive status of a husband who is established and successful in the commu-
nity. Because she does not enter into a heterosexual marriage, she will
never have children sanctified by church and/or society in the tradi-
tional way. (It should be noted, of course, that lesbians and gay men are
increasingly choosing to have children by means of surrogate preg-
nancy, donor insemination, or adoption). Since she does not have a hus-
band and children from a man, her feminine status is always compro-
mised. Thus, she remains a kind of outlaw to her own gender, for it is
assumed that she cannot serve as the maker and guardian of the family
like her own mother.
While stereotypes are changing and in some quarters are no longer
salient, we found that many mothers and fathers still react in horror to
the announcement of their lesbian daughter’s sexual orientation. But it


 What Affects a Family’s Resilience?

is fathers that seem most resentful of their lesbian daughters. Perhaps

that resentment is often related to the feeling that their daughters have
“rejected them” by refusing to have a husband and heterosexual mar-
riage. Both mothers and fathers also feel that their lesbian daughter will
never serve the function of keeping the family together and fulfilling the
more traditional role of producing grandchildren.
Indeed, the fear that the daughter will never provide the grandchil-
dren that parents need in order to achieve their own feeling of having
succeeded as parents is profound. We have reviewed this point previ-
ously but need to stress here what this anxiety does to thwart the inte-
gration of the lesbian daughter into the family. Most parents feel a deep
sense of fulfillment when they are presented with grandchildren. They
feel deeply affirmed that the sacrifices and choices they made in their
lives are now valued, even emulated, by their children. Grandparent-
hood also bestows on the grandparents generativity: the opportunity to
enter into a new role with a grandchild—to be a source of wisdom, his-
tory, and connection to one’s ancestry. As any doting grandparent will
tell you, toward their grandchildren they can feel unconditional love.
The birth of grandchildren therefore constitutes a major milestone, if
not a capstone, to a life of labor and sacrifice. Thus it is no surprise that
almost all of the parents we interviewed harbored strong feelings about
the issue of grandchildren. Many felt deeply disappointed by this loss,
especially if they were parents of daughters. Because the lesbian daugh-
ter does not emulate the life of her mother in the most culturally and per-
sonally significant way—bearing and raising children in a heterosexual
marriage—it simply becomes more difficult for some parents to take
pride in a lesbian daughter, as they might in a gay son. No doubt as the
number of lesbian mothers grows this reaction will change.7 Some day
all of these changes may create a wider range of appreciation of the
daughter’s achievements other than motherhood.
Ann Muller (herself the mother of a gay son) believes that because
lesbians are more likely than gay men to enter into heterosexual relation-
ships episodically, parents may long continue to hope that their lesbian
daughter will “change.” They may also regard their daughter’s same-sex
orientation as a “phase.” In the past daughters may have themselves rein-
forced this hope of change by initially defining themselves as bisexual.
Even today younger lesbians have more experiences with the opposite sex
due to gender role pressures on females to date and marry.8 The family,


What Affects a Family’s Resilience?

therefore, may continue to hope and to resist making the necessary

accommodations for integrating the lesbian identity of their daughter.
Gay sons, on the other hand, tend to remain unequivocally gay: to con-
sistently define themselves as gay and relate romantically only to other
men. The family grows more certain about their son’s sexual orientation,
therefore, and its reactions are less ambiguous, more final.
Parents also tend to think of a gay son’s homosexuality as having
been caused by a “biological force,” whereas they are more conflicted
about the origins of a daughter’s homosexuality. Some parents think
their lesbian offspring have “chosen” a different “lifestyle.” Therefore,
they may blame daughters more than sons. Fathers in particular
encounter more difficulty accepting a daughter’s lesbian identity. Ann
Muller reported from her study that the mothers of lesbians complained
of hurt and loss, while the fathers were more likely to express anger and
to break off ties. There are thus many disrupted father/daughter bonds
in families with lesbian daughters.
Additionally, we found that a family with a lesbian daughter was less
likely to achieve a high level of integration if she was their only daugh-
ter. This suggests that having a lesbian daughter was less disruptive to
the family if another daughter was present who could fulfill the more
traditional role expectations for daughters.
As the following chapters will illustrate, parents who want to inte-
grate their gay sons or lesbian daughters into their families openly are
compelled to deal with societal attitudes and beliefs about homosexual-
ity in a whole new way. They must struggle to cope effectively with a
range of feelings brought about by profound social forces. They are
constrained to battle the cultural image of the heterosexual family, the
constructed mythology left over from our past, the cultural survivals of
the Golden Age of Father Knows Best. The pressure imposed by the het-
erosexist “Myth” encourages the family to continue to hide “family
secrets,” to pretend that everything is “normal,” while discord and
unhappiness are building and the family risks the disruption and even the
loss of precious ties. Integrated families face these challenges too, but
they also manage to undergo a process of change that enables them to
see past the stereotypes and create a new image of the family, based upon
the reality that their child is lesbian or gay. They have lost a myth but
they have grown into a better family. That is the lesson of the stories that
follow.


 ▼ 3

When a Family
Loses Its Way
Disintegration

When he came out, we told [our son] Rick

that we didn’t understand; that we were hurt
and disappointed, but that we accepted him
and we were sure we would come to terms
with it. Those were the things we said in his
presence. But behind his back, we were in a
state of hysteria. I really think I went into the
closest thing to a nervous breakdown I’ve
ever experienced. I was hating Rick for what
he was doing to himself and to the family. I
felt humiliation—what if others find out, such
as members of the family! I thought he was
destroying our entire family.
—Betty Stein, sixty-one -year-old mother
of a gay son
BETTY EXPRESSED A COMMON REACTION to a child’s initial disclosure that
he is gay. She feared he would destroy the family—a family she had
regarded as perfectly normal and stable until now. Yet, to a considerable
extent, her son’s disclosure revealed a previously hidden breach in the
family and offered that family an opportunity to mend it. That hidden
breach lay in the pain and alienation of her son who concealed a core
aspect of his personality from his parents for several years.
The illusion of the Stein family as “perfect” was obtained only
through this concealment. What appeared integrated rested on a state of
fragmentation—the son was only partly known to his family. He had felt
constrained in all of his interactions with them to pretend to preserve
and support the cultural ideal of heterosexuality.
As we have been suggesting, families seem to fall into three broad
categories of response and organization after a gay or lesbian child’s dis-
closure: Disintegration, Ambivalence, or Integration. The chapters to
follow will describe and profile families in each of these categories or
stages. But first we will describe in some detail the factors involved in
these designations. In our study we identified fourteen separate criteria
that reflect growth and change (see appendix ). We used these criteria
to assess levels of integration within a family (which can, of course,
change as the family learns to become more accepting). We then classi-
fied those levels into the following six categories of change.

Overcoming Shame
The first category relates to the degree to which families have over-
come shame. Most parents seem to experience profound shame when
they learn that their offspring is gay or lesbian. They express that shame
perhaps as a fear of being diminished in the eyes of others, or a sense of
having failed as a parent. Conversely, they may seek to blame others—
the school, the culture, or, in the case of some parents, each other. The
conflict is destructive, and the resentment such feelings breed is stifling.
Shame is a disintegrating force.


When a Family Loses Its Way: Disintegration

Families who are in the ambivalent phase struggle more internally

with the sense of shame. Their public behavior may suggest tolerance
and acceptance of their gay child, but feelings of embarrassment or
shame persist quietly within.
Families that have achieved integration experience more congruence
between their public behavior and their private thoughts. They blame no
one because they see nothing bad or wrong. There are no recriminations
or accusations; no one is uttering, “You should have paid more attention
to him!” or “You shouldn’t have doted on her!” The gay aspect of their
child’s identity is genuinely thought to be unique and at least of some
value, if not “a gift.”

The Family’s Disclosure to Others

A second dimension by which we assessed the quality of integration
involved the extent to which families disclosed the child’s sexual orien-
tation to others. In correlating this dimension with “integration,” we
assumed that those families with a greater level of shame, discomfort, or
embarrassment about the matter will be less likely to disclose to others.
Non-disclosure, especially to close relatives, friends, or colleagues, may
necessitate varying levels of deception or obfuscation that preclude suc-
cessful integration. For example, the lesbian daughter may “know” not
to bring her partner with her to an event involving the extended family,
because “it will raise too many questions.”

Impact on Family Relations

The third category involves self-reported changes in family relation-
ships. Here we found that the more integrated families reported some pos-
itive change in either the marital relationship, the parents’ relationships
with their gay or lesbian offspring, or the general level of family func-
tioning. The latter may include improved communication among mem-
bers of the family, or a change in the role that members play in the family
that enhances their ability to respond to problems. For example, the gay
son who becomes more confident and assertive in the family may even
begin to function as a role model for a younger sibling; or a nonexpressive
father may become more forthcoming and loving in the marital relation-
ship. We observed, of course, that some of the families who displayed the


 When a Family Loses Its Way: Disintegration

most progress toward integration did not report much change in family
relationships because these relationships were already quite good.

Appreciation of Child’s Sexual Orientation

Another category that indicated growth and change to us was sug-
gested by the degree to which parents acknowledged an appreciation of
the gay or lesbian offspring’s sexual orientation. In our interviews with
parents, this sometimes took the form of commenting positively on the
increased maturity, happiness, or contentment of the child, or respect or
pride in the child’s manner of handling the coming out process. Some
parents also noted the positive contribution that the child’s disclosure
made to their own lives.
We do recognize, however, that families in some cultural communi-
ties achieve a certain level of integration without explicit disclosure or
discussion within the family. In the Asian-American community, for
example, there may be no equivalent word or concept for a “gay” iden-
tity, and yet the Asian family, by virtue of strong familial loyalty, may
make great efforts to integrate this aspect of a child’s life into ongoing
relationships. In other cases, it is as if a rule of quid pro quo applies: if
the gay or lesbian child agrees not to discuss the matter explicitly, the
parents will agree to accommodate to key aspects of the child’s life.

Inclusion
This dimension, which we call inclusion, constitutes an additional
category of change we sought to assess in determining a family’s
progress toward integration. We noted that, whereas some families
could not imagine incorporating their son’s or daughter’s lover into fam-
ily events, others not only did so but even became quite friendly with the
entire “in-law” constellation. This may seem startling to some, yet we
saw numerous examples of this change. More important, the new family
constellation became a web of genuine support to all.

Community Involvement
Another indicator that we used to assess levels of integration in a
family concerned the parent’s involvement with nonfamily lesbians and


When a Family Loses Its Way: Disintegration

gay men or their parents. Families that appeared the most integrated felt
their experience had been significantly affirmed or “normalized” by such
contacts. Some had joined the organization Parents, Families, and
Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). Some became acquainted with
the gay or lesbian friends of their children. Others volunteered to work
in service organizations within the gay or lesbian community. Many par-
ents cited these experiences as contributing significantly to their own
sense of well-being and accomplishment.

Future Time
Finally, we looked at the degree to which parents could project major
life events for their gay or lesbian offspring over the lifespan. We estab-
lished this criterion because of the evidence that parents might initially
have difficulty envisioning a gay or lesbian child’s future, and it is criti-
cal that families be able to envision milestones in the lives of their chil-
dren in order to progress toward shared goals and to feel confident about
their children’s future.1 The challenge, of course, is that parents, like
their gay and lesbian children, are bereft of role models and examples of
what these milestones might be. The silence and condemnation sur-
rounding homosexuality in our society leaves a disturbing void. Lacking
accurate and in-depth information, families and their gay or lesbian chil-
dren are left to fill the gap only with false myths or negative stereotypes.
For example, parents may assume that being gay or lesbian means grow-
ing old in a context of isolation and bitterness, working only in stereo-
typical “gay” careers, or (for males especially) seeking sex furtively and
promiscuously. Younger gay males, witnessing the numbers of gay men
in their forties succumbing to AIDS, may conclude that the deadly virus
is all that awaits them, and they despair.
They do not know or see the countless men beyond middle age who
lead vital, contented lives, both as individuals and as couples. Nor do
young lesbians or gay men always see the extensive social and friendship
networks in which so many of their older counterparts thrive. Parents
lack such information as well. They are familiar only with the mile-
stones we associate with a heterosexual lifecourse: first dates, engage-
ment, wedding, child-rearing, career advancement, second careers,
grandchildren, retirement, and so forth. With no clear compass by
which to gauge a life trajectory for lesbians and gay men, parents can-
not function fully as “guides” for their gay children, nor can they ade-


 When a Family Loses Its Way: Disintegration

quately provide the support and reassurance that young adults so des-
perately require as they advance into full adulthood. In contrast, when
both parent and child are accurately informed, the more desirable and
traditional problem-solving alliances upon which parents and children
rely can function effectively.
The following table summarizes these contrasts between Disintegra-
tion, Ambivalence, and Integration.

Table  Summary of How Families Differ

Disintegration Ambivalence Integration

Expressions of Considerable guilt; Mixed; internal Little if any shame
shame or guilt sense of embarrass- reaction more or recrimination;
ment or failure shame-based public appreciation
than what is pre- congruent with
sented publicly internal reactions

The family’s Limited; “Don’t ask, Ambivalence Secrecy regarded as

disclosure to don’t tell,” fears about the need to a burden; costs of
others of damaging others tell versus the dis- being “closeted”
or destroying comfort of telling; acknowledged; most
relationships. Few some extended family and friends
if any disclosures family or friends have been told
outside of family have been told

Impact on Same or greater Positive change Sense of enhance-

relationships degrees of distance in some relation- ment in relationships;
in the family or conflict than ships; increased conflicts generate
prior to disclosure communication closeness rather
but lack of than distance
resolution

Appreciation of None Acknowledgment Able to identify

sexual orienta- of incresed under- unique positive
tion of offspring standing; contribution of gay
sensitivity or lesbian offspring

Involvement with Little or no contact Contact may be Often report

gay/lesbian with parents of involvement with
community or gays, but rarely PFLAG; contact
parents of lesbians with lesbians or with lesbians or gay
or “in-laws” gay men men who may or
not be friends of
gay offspring


When a Family Loses Its Way: Disintegration

Table  (continued)

Disintegration Ambivalence Integration

Inclusion of Little or no contact Variable. Conflict Marked inclusion;
friends, lovers of within family contact which, if not
gay offspring about including frequent, is usually
or “in-laws” lover positive

Ability to pro- Rarely More able to do Generally able to

ject a future for so; sense of project positive
lesbian or gay uncertainity or events for at least
offspring fear next 10 years

Disintegration
To the extent that gay or lesbian offspring have overcome within
themselves the effects of the stigma associated with homosexuality, the
disclosure to family may represent an act of love and healing. The child
is acting in a state of integrity and is therefore taking a courageous step.
It is as if he or she is saying: “I am no longer ashamed. Rather, I am wor-
thy of the love of my family and will lay claim to it now by disclosing to
them who I really am. As I love them, so I invite them to love me.”
As we noted earlier, some parents reported in our interviews that they
had a notion that their child was gay or lesbian even before disclosure.
Often, those parents performed their own dance of denial in the hope
that the child’s homosexuality could disappear. The creation of a
“demilitarized zone” of avoidance was not uncommon. For some, it
brought about pseudo-intimacy in the family, along with a sense of des-
peration conditioned by an agreement to ignore the unmentionable. For
others, this denial created a set of rigid alliances in the family wherein
anger and fear were displaced in order to avoid disclosure of the massive
secret. The fact that some parents truly had no idea that their child was
gay or lesbian testifies, sadly, to the child’s uncanny ability to fragment
his or her life and conceal its parts.
The child who voluntarily discloses his or her sexual orientation is
challenging a powerful family secret that up to now has maintained itself
by fragmentation. Fragmentation is by definition a fragile system. The
child’s disclosure has immense power, for in that very moment of reve-
lation, the weakness of the system is revealed. The disclosure causes


 When a Family Loses Its Way: Disintegration

people to feel naked and vulnerable. That vulnerability is an aspect of

the phase we call Disintegration that most families with a gay or lesbian
child must move through—and, it is to be hoped, will learn from.
Though many families move out of the Disintegration phase, others,
unfortunately, do not. In the latter case, the child’s pursuit of a healthy
and integrated life is substantially thwarted.

The Disintegrating Effects of Shame

In order for a cultural ideal to survive, deviation from that ideal must
be stigmatized, i.e., branded as disgraceful. There are numerous exam-
ples of this in our daily lives. The cultural ideal of “work,” for example,
is a powerful force in modern American society. We call it the “work
ethic” and view someone who does not work as “weak” or “undeserv-
ing.” Unemployment or underemployment is stigmatized and, of
course, that stigma is internalized by those who are unemployed or
underemployed. In periods of high unemployment, it is no surprise that
the incidence of depression and suicide rises due, in large part, to the
shame of being out of work, even when the unemployment is a product
of events the individual could never be expected to control, e.g., a plant
closing, or a major recession or depression.
Similarly, the cultural ideal of heterosexual marriage and parenting is
reinforced by the shaming of those who do not conform. That shame is
just as toxic in its effects on lesbians, gay men, and their families as the
shame of unemployment is on the unemployed. Shame is even far more
powerful than simple guilt—a word we all too easily associate with
shame. Guilt is a feeling of remorse for having done something wrong. It
is best addressed through acknowledgement of wrongdoing and an effort
to correct its effects, to make amends. Shame, on the other hand, involves
a profound negation or devaluing of oneself—by society and by the self
that has internalized society’s values. The shamed individual feels, “I am
bad, a failure, worthless, wholly without meaning or value.” No acknowl-
edgement of wrongdoing can heal a soul of shame; acknowledgement can
only reinforce the sense of unworthiness. To be ashamed is to be exiled—
as cast out from the community as Adam and Eve were from the Garden
of Eden. The fall from grace is so painful and heartrending that it is no
wonder gay and lesbian offspring go to such great lengths at times to pro-
tect their parents and themselves from shame and social rejection.


When a Family Loses Its Way: Disintegration

Sometimes members of the family blame themselves for a child’s

homosexuality. This internalization of blame produces the feelings of
guilt so many parents initially experience when they discover that their
child is lesbian or gay. In an effort to manage guilt, sometimes parents
resort to blaming others or each other. They mistakenly believe that if
they can just assign blame or expurgate guilt, all will be well.
Unfortunately, when the source of such guilt is the intense shame
associated with homosexuality in our culture, the guilt cannot be so eas-
ily resolved. It becomes a “complicated guilt,”—that is, complicated by
the shame with which it is infused. By contrast, “simple guilt” is more
easily resolved. For example, if we feel guilty for not inviting a friend to
a party, we can apologize, make amends, and attempt to restore a dam-
aged friendship. But when parents learn their child is gay or lesbian, the
shame-based nature of guilt and blame complicates the picture immea-
surably, so that no apology or amends can alleviate the pain, much less
restore relationships. Rather, the parents and child must reach a totally
new understanding of life and love—a complex task not so easily
accomplished. Yet only such a new understanding can provide a real
antidote to shame.

The Spauldings—Disintegration Takes Hold

Shame is the central issue in those families we viewed as being disin-
tegrated. Its effects are manifest in nearly every thought, action, and
decision the family makes in response to learning their child is lesbian or
gay. The Spauldings represent a family in just such a distressed state.
Hank and Margot Spaulding are a lower-middle-class working couple in
the suburbs of Chicago. When we first interviewed them, Hank was
forty-six years old and Margot was forty-one. They had been married
for twenty-two years. They had a daughter, who lived on the east coast,
and a son, Jamie, who was twenty and who had recently come out as gay.
The parents had a binational marriage: Hank was American and Margot
from Southern Europe, where they met when Hank was in the service.
Jamie started going to the Horizons youth group at the end of his
high school years. It was not long afterward that Margot found out that
he was gay. The family’s reaction was immediately negative, though
the depth of their feelings came out only with the passing weeks and
months. Jamie and his father had always had a rocky relationship. After


 When a Family Loses Its Way: Disintegration

Jamie ’s sexual orientation was discovered, the family disintegrated sig-

nificantly. When we first spoke with Margot Spaulding, she conveyed
the deep anger and frustration with Jamie that she had felt over many
years. The cause of her feeling was not his sexuality, though that
became part of it; rather, it had more to do with his personality and her
conviction that they had long been at odds. The degree of her emotion
was remarkable in the initial interview, because two years had already
passed since she learned of her son’s homosexuality. So much negative
feeling, so long after the triggering events, already marked this family
as atypical compared to other parents we interviewed. The Spauldings’s
extraordinarily negative response was illustrated by Margot’s remark in
the initial interview that she wished Jamie had “remained in denial,”
and her lament, “When finally I had to face facts, I wanted to kill
myself. I went from anger, to pity, to wanting to kill myself again. It
hurt so much.”
Margot admitted that she felt that Jamie was “different” from the
start, when he was born. But she did not immediately label the difference
as “homosexual”:
I already knew it when he was about six years old. I would think, “If
I didn’t know better, I would say [that he is gay].” . . . But I thought
it could not happen to me!—That only happens to other people
[laugh]! As he grew older, he had a lot of difficulty in school. On Hal-
loween when he was in sixth or seventh grade, some kids smeared
“little gay boy” on the garage. I wiped it off before he saw it.
During the course of the interview, she reiterated her shock and
despair at finding out that Jamie was gay:
There is a plan to things—cradle to grave. I’m very methodological.
I have all my life planned out. Everything has its place. He inter-
rupted my little boxes. I had been gradually, for fifteen years, finding
out. I had battled with him from kindergarten through graduation. It
had been one battle after another . . . and now I thought, “What can
I do? What’s left for me to do?” I felt helpless because there ’s noth-
ing I can do about this, I would be fighting his nature. I felt defeated.
Margot had some perspective about her feelings, but it did not allevi-
ate her despair: “When you hear programs of things on television, a
mother with two sons, one of them gay—I thought that it was nice that


When a Family Loses Its Way: Disintegration

they can admit it so openly and were coping; no,—not coping, they had
accepted it! I thought to myself, I could never do that!”
Margot’s ambivalence was palpable. She often expressed affection
toward Jamie and wanted him to be close, but at other times she resented
his dependence and especially the new burdens imposed upon her by
having to deal with his homosexuality.
Jamie and his father had seldom been close, and their relationship
worsened over the years. Jamie’s disclosure aggravated Hank’s antipa-
thy toward his son, as if Hank was trying to manage his shame for hav-
ing a gay son by blaming and shaming the son. Margot reported:
His father used to put Jamie down. When the three of us were
together, I would always sit there . . . and wonder what would come
out of [Hank’s] mouth next! I would always take Jamie ’s side. . . . I
do have to protect Jamie. My husband doesn’t need protection. As of
last summer, he was always wanting me to choose him over Jamie. He
didn’t want Jamie around, he would much rather have seen him dead.
I told him, “No.” But then we had it out last summer. I had to choose
between him and Jamie. I told him he’d better pack his bags. He will
never accept Jamie being gay.

Through words such as these we came to understand that not only was
Jamie’s relationship with his father and his mother very troubled but
also their own relationship had gotten very tangled up in the issue of
Jamie’s homosexuality. The marriage deteriorated. Margot often
resorted to cynicism and irony about the situation, while Hank engaged
in outright put-downs, abusive language, and threats directed toward his
son and, sometimes, by innuendo, to Jamie ’s protector, Margot.
Her account of Hank’s behavior was tinged with her anger and sor-
row. “I told my husband the only thing I expect of him is to leave Jamie
alone. I let him know, ‘I’m tired of your stupid remarks about Jamie that
you say to him, or that you say when he’s not around,’ ” she recalled in
the first interview. “Once Hank knew Jamie was gay, when he admitted
it to himself last summer, when he couldn’t fool himself anymore, he
had to face the fact. Then he started making negative comments, drop-
ping snotty remarks here, there, and everywhere.” One day Jamie
brought some of his gay friends home. His father threw a fit, and the
boys had to leave the house. Margot noted, “After that Hank was snotty
for three or four weeks and finally we had the big fight.” She warned her


 When a Family Loses Its Way: Disintegration

husband to stop the abusive behavior or it would force her to leave him
or end the marriage. Thus things continued for months.
Then Jamie went away to college. But the events of the past months
left a bad and tense feeling in the home—there was only separation, not
resolution. Margot remarked, “It didn’t stop until we went to see Jamie
at school. But for a couple, three months, we were close to a divorce. I
did not want to sit between two chairs and be confronted with his and
Jamie’s stupid remarks because Jamie would come right back with
something stupid.”
Instead of a direct confrontation, father and son exchanged snide
remarks, which Margot saw as cowardly: “Neither one was man enough
to stand up for what he thinks and talk about it. I guess they have—what
is the word?—a truce.” A demilitarized zone had been established—a
frequent pattern in disintegrated families that fail to communicate and
lose their dignity and their respect for each other.
Margot remembered the “truce” and where it left the family:
Now we don’t talk about [Jamie being gay] anymore. When Jamie
was home for Christmas, we went out to dinner, we talked about
school, we totally ignored the fact that Jamie is gay. [Jamie and his
father] tolerate each other but that’s all. They never really had a rela-
tionship. . . . But his father doesn’t want him around anymore. I told
him, “Don’t push me into taking sides.” . . . His relationship with
Mona, our daughter, is very different. He used to spend lots of time
with her. He got along better with the girl than the boy. He likes girls.
. . . But with Jamie it is different. They have no relationship.
During the time of the initial interview, Mona and Jamie were close
and they enjoyed each other’s company and support. These alliances of
some family members in the face of conflict may provide the only thing
a gay or lesbian child can hang on to at times. Although Jamie and Mona
were able to create an adult and genuinely integrated relationship, as sis-
ter and brother, their parents were in a very different state.
Margot talked in the initial interview of the efforts of the family at the
beginning to seek help from outside. They went to a psychologist
briefly. “My husband said Jamie would wind up like Rock Hudson.
Dead.” Soon the therapy was aborted, as Hank refused to go back.
Margot felt that whatever change developed after Jamie came out
was all negative and continued to deteriorate. One evening, when


When a Family Loses Its Way: Disintegration

Jamie was home for the weekend, he and Hank got into “a bad fight.”
Her husband had had too much to drink, Margot said. Now they
became confrontational: “They screamed and shouted at each other,
about Jamie ’s being gay. He said that he would rather see Jamie dead.
I told Jamie to shut up. But I’ll defend my child against anyone.” After
that fight, communication between the parents and their child skidded
even lower.
As she talked of this change, Margot was clear that Jamie ’s coming
out affected the relationship she had with her husband negatively. She
told us that she could see nothing positive about Jamie ’s being gay. As
an afterthought, she commented: “At least now I don’t have to guess
anymore.” She worried that Jamie was not taking suitable precautions
against AIDS. She said that she spoke in a caring way to Jamie and he
reassured her that he did take precautions.
The resentment between Jamie and his father would not heal. As the
years went by, and Jamie graduated from college, he returned to
Chicago and got a job. Though there was no closeness between them,
father and son tolerated each other. However, on occasion the family
would blow up, and the cycle would start again. Jamie ’s parents would
not accept his gay friends or the man who eventually became his lover.
As a postscript, we were able to do several subsequent interviews
with the Spauldings almost a decade later. We found that the family had
calmed down and, gradually, the truce struck between father and son
had congealed into a permanent silence. Occasionally, sarcasm or
ridicule would erupt, but there were no longer open fights. All the years
he was with his partner in Chicago, Jamie ’s parents never once visited
their home nor invited Jamie’s partner to their home. Holidays necessi-
tated splitting. At first Jamie accepted this, but gradually he came to
despise it. When Jamie’s partner became ill and eventually died from
AIDS, his sister gave staunch support throughout the hard times. But
Jamie kept the crisis hidden from his parents, and he did not reach out to
them for support even at the time of his lover’s death and his own grief.
The bitterness this created has still not left. When Jamie ’s father died
soon after, following a brief illness, his mother, alone for the first time in
her life, became increasingly demanding. First her daughter and then her
son were alienated from her. The family could not seem to support each
other in grief. Today, the Spaulding family, without Hank, remains dis-
jointed, and the sense of fragmentation communicated so strongly by


 When a Family Loses Its Way: Disintegration

Margot in the initial interview has continued over the years, without rec-
onciliation.
The Spauldings managed shame by blaming each other. From the
beginning Hank demeaned Jamie for failing to live up to his expectations
and Margot for protecting him. Margot faulted Jamie for not remaining
“in denial” and blamed both her son and her husband for not being “man
enough.” Margot and Hank both sought to seal off Jamie ’s homosexu-
ality. Eventually they ceased even to discuss it, and all elements of
Jamie’s life as a gay man were excluded from the life of the family.
This attempt to contain and encapsulate the child’s same-sex orienta-
tion is a typical response of families in the disintegrated state. In our
study, none of the families in this category had included in any signifi-
cant way the lovers or friends of the gay child. In contrast, . percent
of the ambivalent families and  percent of the integrated families
included in their constellation their gay child’s lovers or friends. Friends
and lovers are typically shunned in families who are in the disintegration
phase, their existence voided, because to acknowledge their place in the
heart of the gay or lesbian child is to provoke the negative feelings that
would violate the truce.
A gay man may be forced to pretend that his lover is a “friend,” or his
lover may be asked by his family to stay away on the holidays. The les-
bian couple may be forced to choose between celebrating Thanksgiving
separately or going to one partner’s family’s house and feeling lonely
and unwanted. Unless there is a healthy reconciliation, the gay or lesbian
adult child will in time withdraw from family get-togethers and holiday
gatherings, in favor of their own “family of choice,” where they feel
more wanted and accepted.2

The flip side of externalizing shame by faulting others, as the Spauldings

did, is to internalize it by faulting oneself. Many of the parents in the dis-
integrated phase revealed their internalized struggle with shame, as did
Flora, talking about how her son, Kevin, first came out to her.

In the beginning I wondered if there was anything I had done to make

him [gay]. But you can have kids brought up in the same home, the
same way, and one grows up to be a murderer. My son assured me
that it was nothing I had done. [But] if he was retarded or a gay child
it would all be something in my background or my husband’s genetic


When a Family Loses Its Way: Disintegration

background that made him that way. So even though it wasn’t the
way I was with him, I still conceived—my poor little kid, it’s still all
my fault. I understand mothers who have deformed kids.

Flora’s pain reveals so much about the effects of shame and stigma. She
struggled with blaming herself and equating her son’s sexual orientation
with other heavily stigmatized identities: a murderer, or someone who is
retarded or deformed. She saw herself or her husband as a genetic failure!
Bill, the father of a lesbian daughter, demonstrated other ways that
shame could generate self-blame. A white, middle-class father of three,
aged forty-three at the time of the interview, Bill had divorced his first
wife and then remarried. A daughter from his first marriage, Jenny,
twenty-three, had recently come out to him as a lesbian. He was shaken
up by the news—obviously far more than he had anticipated. He felt
ashamed of what his daughter had become and believed that his failed
marriage had led to this outcome.
Bill was a successful businessman who had always devoted a lot of time
to his work. Like many men of his generation, his work was his identity,
and he sacrificed a great deal to achieve success, including his marriage.
When Jenny was ten years old, he and his first wife separated and then,
after an acrimonious period of blame, were divorced. The original family
split apart. Bill withdrew from his children, feeling somewhat angry and
guilty over the divorce. Later he regretted his withdrawal, but much of the
damage had been done. The relationships with his children never recov-
ered from this loss. The original family remained disintegrated.
In our interview Bill remembered Jenny’s childhood fondly. She was
“very athletic, very attractive, very intelligent, an all-American girl. She
played sports and loved baseball. She was a good football player and an
excellent runner. She qualified for all the best athletic teams.” Bill was
obviously proud of these things. However, he expressed guilt about his
handling of Jenny. Years later, at the time of the interview, even though
the divorce was seemingly completely separate from his daughter’s com-
ing out, Bill connected the events in his mind. Had he caused her les-
bianism, he wondered? Guilty anxiety such as his was common to the
narratives of parents in our study. Such feeling reflect the internalization
of shame that comes from failing to live up to the Heterosexual Family
Myth, as well as a desperate attempt to understand the reasons for the
disruption of the Myth.


 When a Family Loses Its Way: Disintegration

Bill recalled that he had wondered for a long time about Jenny’s sex-
ual orientation and had been suspicious. Was she “normal”? He had had
strong negative feelings about homosexuals long before his daughter
came out to him. They were filled with “stereotypes,” Bill said, none of
them positive.
At the time of the interview he experienced guilt about Jenny, com-
plicated by shame. He believed that he had not been attentive enough to
her, “not enough of a father.” He described himself as having been “dis-
connected” from his daughter when she was growing up. Maybe he
worked too much, he worried. He had liked Jenny to be in athletics but
did not encourage her closeness to him. He wondered if he had favored
his son over Jenny and she had felt “cheated by this.” His suspicions that
she might have felt “cheated” contributed to his sense that he had failed
in his duties as a father.
His self-blame was persistent: perhaps he should have spent more
time with her. Perhaps he made her a homosexual. Perhaps he should
have discouraged her interest in sports—as if Jenny’s athleticism some-
how promoted her homosexuality. Perhaps he was “too hard on her.”
Yet he felt that even if he did “something to cause” her homosexuality,
“it is too late to change it anyway; she is grown up.”
But he never stopped loving her, Bill insisted. He reported that a
long gap followed after the divorce when he and Jenny were out of
touch. At the time of the interview their relationship was improving
but, Bill said, “there is a long way to go” in gaining trust. He was work-
ing on changing his thinking about lesbians and gays, largely by going
to PFLAG meetings and reading recommended literature. He was not
so ashamed of Jenny’s homosexuality as he had been at first, but he con-
tinued to search for causes in the past. He blamed his failed marriage as
well as himself for his daughter’s lesbianism. He fused the old guilt of a
broken marriage with the newer sense of failure: perhaps if he had done
things differently, he speculated, Jenny might have turned out hetero-
sexual.
Richard and Betty Stein offer still another example of how shame can
color a parent’s response to a gay child’s disclosure. The Steins were a
Chicago suburban couple, married for many years. Richard was retired
from the plumbing business, and Betty was a retired social worker. It was
several years prior to our interview that they had first become aware of
their youngest son acting “odd,” as they described it. Rick had always


When a Family Loses Its Way: Disintegration

been the most “sensitive” and “creative” of their three sons. But it was a
shock when he came out to them. Betty recalled:
I went through periods of guilt. I really felt like I was a total failure,
that I had failed as a mother. I thought we fit the description of a dom-
ineering mother and weak or absent father. My husband was away
from home much of the time and when he was home, he was so busy
with the older boys, taking them to football games. They’d leave Rick
with me, and since I enjoy the arts, I’d take him with me to art
exhibits, sometimes even to fashion shows, to lunch with my lady
friends. So I thought I had made a little girl out of my third son,
because I never had a daughter and he was with me so much. So that
whole Freudian concept gnawed at me, harassed me, punished me,
and almost did me in, because I thought I had created a monster.
The emotional amphitheater is further complicated when negative
feelings about a child’s homosexuality exist within the context of guilt
and blame toward oneself and one’s spouse. Richard Stein admitted,
“We were each blaming the other for causing Rick’s condition. I was
stunned, hysterical, bewildered. I wondered, ‘Where did we go wrong?
Who went wrong? What did we do?’ We weren’t sure whether it was a
choice on his part or whether he was trying to hurt us.” Clearly, one of
the early common responses to the “monster” rearing its ugly head is to
find the culprit. Every perceived failing of oneself, one ’s spouse, and
one’s child becomes suspect.
Another manifestation of shame is the fear some parents have of dis-
closing the sexual orientation of the child to others. The inability to
share the information effectively deprives the family of sources of sup-
port, education, and encouragement. Among families that fell into the
Disintegrated category in our study, only . percent had disclosed the
information to at least one member of the extended family, and none had
disclosed the information to two or more extended family members.
Similarly, fewer families in the Disintegrated category than in the
Ambivalent or Integrated categories had disclosed their child’s homo-
sexuality to a coworker or friend (although it appears that it was gener-
ally easier for families to disclose being the parent of a lesbian or gay
child to friends and coworkers than to extended family).
Ralph, the policeman father we referred to earlier, described vividly
his inhibitions about telling others. He did not seek help out of the fam-


 When a Family Loses Its Way: Disintegration

ily. When asked if he went to PFLAG, he responded, “I have never

heard of it,” and insisted, “I just don’t want to be involved.” He was
very fearful that any of his fellow police officers might discover that he
had a lesbian daughter. “It would be a shock if I were to go to a group
and see someone else I knew. I’d die.”
The mother of a gay son told us: “At the beginning I thought, ‘What
are people going to think?’ It’s my nature to not care whether people
think one way or another. But it’s strange: When it knocks on your own
front door, suddenly you do see a stigma attached.”
On occasion, parents were constrained from disclosing not because
of their own fears or shame but because of those of the gay or lesbian
child. One parent reported that although she would have liked to dis-
close her child’s sexual orientation to other family members, her lesbian
daughter’s reluctance kept her from doing so. She made a pledge of
secrecy to her daughter. Another father of a gay son told us that his son
was afraid to come out to his older sister for fear that she would deprive
him of a relationship to her children, his nieces and nephews.
Of course, the fear of disclosure is reinforced by the potential for
negative consequences. Richard told us how he was interviewed by
the local newspaper regarding his gay son and his support of gay
human rights. The reporter, an older experienced man, was pleased
with the interview. However, at the close he pondered for a moment
and then said that he would not use Richard’s real name in the story.
When Richard was surprised, the Chicago reporter bluntly told him,
“If I publish your real name, you might lose customers in your busi-
ness.” Long afterward, Richard recalled his shock and anger at realiz-
ing this. His situation was not unusual. To come out as the parent of a
gay or lesbian is to deal with the same bigotry that meets the gay or
lesbian person. It is that prejudice that produces shame in disinte-
grated families.
The shame or fear that parents may feel about a child’s homosexual-
ity leads them all too often to call upon inappropriate resources for help.
Among the more heinous of these resources is the psychotherapist who
holds out hope of “changing” a child’s sexual orientation rather than
showing the way to the process of integration. As one mother of a gay
son confessed to us: “When I found out, I dumped on him. . . . I was ter-
rible. I told him he was sick and that we needed to cure him. . . . I thought
that he had chosen this and that his actions were sick. He said, ‘whatever


When a Family Loses Its Way: Disintegration

you want me to do, I’ll do.’ I subjected him to a lot—seeing psychia-

trists—I dumped on him.”
Attempts to change sexual orientation through certain kinds of ther-
apy, sometimes called “reparative therapy,” are potentially dangerous.
The promises of “reparative therapy” are unproved. Most professional
mental health organizations consider reparative therapy to be highly
unethical. The American Psychiatric Association, which declassified
homosexuality as a mental illness in , stated as recently as :
There is no published scientific evidence supporting the efficacy of
“reparative therapy” as a treatment to change one ’s sexual orienta-
tion. . . . There is no evidence that treatment can change a homosex-
ual’s deep-seated sexual feelings for others of the same sex. Clinical
experience suggests that any person who seeks conversion therapy
may be doing so because of social bias that has resulted in internal-
ized homophobia, and that gay men and lesbians who have accepted
their sexual orientation positively are better adjusted than those who
have not done so.3

The American Academy of Pediatrics also stated in : “Therapy

directed specifically at changing sexual orientation is contraindicated,
since it can provoke guilt and anxiety while having little or no potential
for achieving changes in orientation.”4
None of this is meant to discourage families from seeking counseling
or psychotherapy as an additional tool to help them integrate their gay
or lesbian child. Therapists who are truly knowledgeable can provide
guidance and offer resources, and clarify any misconceptions the family
may have. The skilled psychotherapist can also help the family to iden-
tify and utilize its own strengths to address the challenges inherent in
integrating the lesbian or gay child into the family. The psychotherapist
can provide a safe place for parents to express more fully all of their
reactions. We have known several families who have successfully pur-
sued just such a course.

The Notion of Sexual Orientation as a Phase

Unfortunately, families in a “Disintegrated” state may continue to
deny the reality of having a gay child by insisting that his or her homo-


 When a Family Loses Its Way: Disintegration

sexuality is a “phase.” The ploy is understandable because it is still

widely held in our society, even by so-called experts, that homosexuality
is just a phase in development to be passed through on the royal road to
heterosexuality.5 Such thinking derives from earlier notions that many
adolescents pass through a stage of “sexual confusion” that may be char-
acterized by sexual experimentation or unusually close relationships
with the same sex. One mother said of her son’s disclosure: “I thought
it was a phase. Like being a Hare Krishna. ‘So that’s why we sent you
away to college—so you could do these things!’ I told him.” The mother
was not enlightened when she called a counselor to cope with the news.
“I explained the situation to her. . . . She told me it was probably a
phase.”
Some of the parents we interviewed also described a period during
which they believed that their child might be “bisexual.” It is important
to note here that true bisexuality, the experience of having quite equal
attractions to both men and women, is a very real outcome of sexual ori-
entation development for some. Others, however, may identify as bisex-
ual on the way to developing a more consistent sexual orientation, gay
or straight. Nonetheless, the fact that bisexuality has become more
acceptable and prominent in our culture may pose a potential difficulty
for parents struggling to accept their child’s homosexuality. They may
cling to a hope that their child will ultimately “cross over” to the het-
erosexual side. This may be a false hope and create more problems by
delaying any efforts to integrate the homosexual child into the family.6
These strategies—blaming others or blaming oneself, avoiding dis-
closure, excluding the gay or lesbian child or their friends, denying real-
ity, rationalizing the child’s homosexuality as a phase—all have a disin-
tegrating effect. They fragment relationships in the family, stultify per-
sonal growth, and make it increasingly difficult for the family to move
toward integration.
We opened this chapter by quoting Betty Stein, who claimed she was
close to “a nervous breakdown” when her son told her he was gay. We
would like to close with Betty, by way of showing how much change is
possible: Betty started with terrible fear and anger, but she gradually
became accepting and found ways to integrate her son fully into the life
of her family. Though it took several years, eventually—through sup-
port from the family and friends, by attending PFLAG and learning
truths that are not included in the stereotypes about homosexuals, by


When a Family Loses Its Way: Disintegration

meeting lesbians and gays for the first time—Betty and her husband,
Richard, allowed themselves to take pride in their gay son, Rick. They
were happy for what made him happy—his ability to live life as an
openly gay man, his good relationship with his partner, his success in his
career, his friends (gay, lesbian, and straight) by whom he is surrounded.
Rick and his partner share their holidays and special time with each
other’s parents and siblings. The two men are valued members of both
their families now. The Stein’s story started in fragmentation but moved
past disintegration and ambivalence to achieve what we can clearly call
successful integration of their gay son into the family.
As the Steins discovered, disintegration need not be the end, but
rather the beginning of a process of change, growth, and new develop-
ment in parents. Betty and Richard have gone on to help other parents
like themselves through their local PFLAG organization. They talk
about how they came to deal with the “death” of their heterosexual son
and his “rebirth” as a gay man. By their example, they teach other par-
ents to do the same.


 ▼ 4

Somewhere in
the Middle
Ambivalence

I wanted to see her with a family, the children,

you know how parents feel. Then I began to
realize that she is so capable—she’ll be what-
ever she wants to be in life. Being gay doesn’t
faze her one way or the other—she’s comfort-
able with it. That makes me feel good.
—Ilene, fifty-eight-year-old mother
of a lesbian daughter
I L E N E , W H E N W E I N T E RV I E W E D H E R , was at a point of a transition
away from disintegration and the shame associated with not achieving
heterosexual milestones. She was beginning to appreciate something
deeper in her child, a quality that she respected and admired. From what
she told us, it was clear to us that she was letting go of pre-conceived
notions about what her daughter should be and was beginning to see and
value who her daughter really was.
Ilene seemed to us to be in the phase we call “ambivalence.” We
placed parents in this category who were beginning to attempt to inte-
grate their openly lesbian or gay children into their lives. These parents
could, for example, see some positive aspects to learning that their child
was gay. Their general attitude toward lesbians and gays was becoming
more open. Several parents characterized their metamorphosis at this
point:
[Having a lesbian child] has made me understand that homosexuals
are as human as heterosexuals and they have the same basic needs for
survival as anyone else. And it has changed me in that I try to read
and listen whenever I have the opportunity to find out what homo-
sexuality is all about.
I’ve became much more supportive to gay and lesbian activities,
organizations, rights. It has helped me become a better parent.
However, the movement toward full integration of those parents we
placed in the ambivalent category had met with only partial success.
Some remained burdened by the stigma of having a gay or lesbian child:
It’s bothered me that I’m unable to relate this information to my
brothers and sisters. I wonder what they think about gays in general
and about [my son] in particular. The question comes up occasionally
about him getting married. We just pass it off. I often feel if the ques-
tion ever comes up about him being gay, I would say “yes,” but I’m
not going to volunteer this information.


Somewhere in the Middle: Ambivalence

It sure matured me fast. It changed my views. I’m much more toler-

ant. Still, I worry that I caused it. I have lots of guilt, even though . . .
I know all the right answers. I tell everyone they didn’t do anything to
cause it. But deep down I feel like I’m this rotten mother.

Others expressed an awful fear for their child’s future. When asked what
has been the greatest burden regarding their child’s coming out, for
example, one father of a lesbian daughter remarked:
Thinking about all the crap she’s going to have to deal with for the
rest of her life. She doesn’t really deserve it because she ’s a neat per-
son [tearful]. I feel so sad. She’s very sensitive; obviously she ’s got
strength—coming out in high school—but I tend to think of her as
very vulnerable.

Still others described the struggle within the family to accept their gay
or lesbian child’s same-sex partner. One mother recalled:
Joanne [my daughter] wanted to bring her partner, Maureen, for din-
ner. I had to tell the family that they could come, but no one else
wanted them to come. I was caught in the middle, but I stuck to my
decision. . . . Dinner was strained but we got through it okay.
More mothers than fathers in this group accepted their gay or les-
bian offspring. One mother of a gay son reflected on her frustration
about her husband’s progress toward greater acceptance: “My hus-
band is having a difficult time with it. He ’s sad about his son, that he
isn’t going to get married or have a child. I can fluff things off but my
husband is more serious. He keeps things inside. I wish he would be
more accepting.”
Compared to most of the families discussed in the preceding
chapter, the parents in the category we call “ambivalent” were
betwixt and between—feeling less shame and more appreciation, but
only beginning to manifest this progress in their relationships with
others. Their voyage was still in process; they remained at sea in a
storm. They remained ambivalent about what to do and how far to
go in trying to make things better for themselves and their gay or les-
bian children. In this way, they reflected the ambivalence of our pre-
sent culture.


 Somewhere in the Middle: Ambivalence

The Lowensteins: Portrait of an Ambivalent Family

Martin was a fifty-five year old father of four, a small businessman,
who resided in a lower-middle-class suburban area of Chicago. He was
a kind, gentle man, who suffered from several serious medical problems
and was dismayed by the degree of conflict in his extended family. He
had been married to his wife, Greta, for thirty years and had a daughter,
Joan, and a son, Alec. Alec was twenty-four when he disclosed his
homosexuality to to his parents. At the time of the interview, seven
months had passed since the disclosure.
Martin and Greta had a good marriage, and it was a source of great
support to Martin. Respect and care were evident in their interactions.
They were Jewish, and Martin reported that religion and family were
important values in his neighborhood. Simultaneously, negative atti-
tudes about homosexuality, including open expressions of disgust, were
also a part of their community. Alec lived at home and was working in
Chicago at the time of his disclosure. The extended family had a history
of conflict that preceded the difficulties it had in dealing with Alec’s
homosexuality. Martin’s father, now quite elderly, did not approve of
Martin’s wife, Greta, and he had no relationship with Martin or Greta.
Also, Martin and his sister no longer spoke because of family quarrels.
In growing up, Alec was not close to his father, according to Martin.
He described their relationship as “not very strong” and said that they
“took each other for granted.” “Love is there,” he commented, “but not
expressed.” They did not spend much time together. “I don’t think I
went out of my way to maintain a strong relationship.” At best, they
shared an interest in sports and went to baseball games together. “Look-
ing back, there were times I could have extended myself more,” But he
noted that Alec was “always running, always going out. So we never got
to see him much. He did his thing and we did our thing.”
By contrast, he told us, Greta was close to Alec. Martin observed that
Alec was “very special to her.”
“She feels very good when he’s around . . . they confide in each other
a lot; he tells her much more than with me. I’ve turned him off as a lis-
tener. To me, it sounds like a bunch of nonsense, a bunch of jibber jab-
ber.” There was some resentment and hostility in this statement, but
Martin also seemed aware of his feelings. “The problem” Martin said, is
that “Alec was a loner,” elusive; and while he lived at home, he hid “his


Somewhere in the Middle: Ambivalence

problem,” as Martin refers to Alec’s homosexuality. The tendency in

Martin that we could see at the time of the interview—to single out
Alec’s “problem”—reflected the ambivalence in the family.
Martin described a state of disintegration out of which his family had
slowly begun to move. However, they seemed, at that point, not yet to
operate as a strong and vital system. Alec, perhaps aware of his differ-
ence and fearful of rejection by his family, had learned early to avoid
intimacy and be “elusive.” The distance between father and son was pal-
pable but not addressed. Greta seemed to provide the closeness and
emotional support for Alec, and he confided in her. This fragile structure
was sorely tested by Alec’s coming out.
Within such a context, Alec chose a less direct means of communi-
cating about his gay identity: he wrote a letter to his parents and gave it
to them just before he left for the airport, on his way to San Francisco
where he was going to join his lover.
According to Martin, the world caved in when he and his wife
received the letter. Greta “completely fell apart.” Nothing like this had
ever happened to them before. “She was suicidal at the time,” Martin
recalled. “She couldn’t stop crying.” Greta was admitted to the local
psychiatric hospital for ten days’ observation and rest—on the orders of
her family’s personal physician. “She didn’t really know how bad she
felt. She was really destroyed,” Martin reiterated.
After they got to the emergency room, Martin called the airline and
had Alec paged in order to tell him to come to the hospital immediately.
Instead of worrying about the shape she was in, Martin said, “My wife
wanted the doctors to change Alec, to change his homosexuality.” This
was, in fact, the first thing Greta demanded of her own doctor. When the
doctor said he could not “fix” Alec, Greta was overcome with grief.
Martin recalled that she went into a “complete panic, brow-beating her-
self because of her guilt.” Martin, by contrast, had to remain cool in
order to help his wife and get through the crisis. But by doing so, he bot-
tled up his own feelings, which were painfully slow to come out.
Alec did come to the hospital from the airport. His father described
the drama that ensued as “a tough scene”:

My wife was trying to get Alec fixed back [to being heterosexual]. So
Alec left us at the hospital, and she was then placed on antidepressants
and remained in the psychiatric ward, because they were afraid that


 Somewhere in the Middle: Ambivalence

she might harm herself. After she was released, we went to a private
psychiatrist for four sessions. It really was a waste, because he could
offer nothing but consolation. He said also they couldn’t “fix” Alec.
The dirty deed was done . . . and then Alec just left us feeling very
sad. A very deep wound was inflicted.

From his intonation it was clear that Martin was still angry about his
son’s revelation. He seemed to be blaming Alec still for the family tur-
moil—not a very auspicious development if the family was to be healed.
Alec, feeling burdened with guilt and distraught over the dramatic
turn of events, felt compelled to move out of his parents’ home precipi-
tously, for the first time in his life. “After that hospital scene, we didn’t
hear from him again,” Martin recalled. The degree of avoidance, anxi-
ety, and guilt was great on both sides. To pick up his mail, Alec would
come to the house when everyone else was gone in order to escape direct
confrontation. All communication ceased, and it appeared that the frag-
ile structure of the family had nearly collapsed. Perhaps the saving grace
was that Alec and his sister, Joan, stayed in contact and she was support-
ive of him.
Martin’s account of the next period, though, indicated a perceptible
(if slight) change in his attitude:
It was a bad scene when he did this. . . . There was just a natural
buildup of anxiety, and guilt. He was full of guilt. He knew he had
hurt us badly. Me and my wife talked after the initial shock . . . we dis-
cussed the hurt that Alec must have felt. And society, they don’t take
it kindly.

Martin’s ambivalence was wavering toward consolation and support.

Yet he and his son avoided each other for three months. Then, Martin
and Greta called Alec. Perhaps, given the history of their previous con-
flicts with extended family, Martin and Greta were particularly moti-
vated to do all they could to keep their own nuclear family together;
they did not wish to suffer the same alienation from their son as they
had from other family members. Martin described the first attempt at
reconciliation:
My wife spoke to him, and then I did. We set up a dinner appoint-
ment. I was very fearful about this meeting. He later called us that


Somewhere in the Middle: Ambivalence

very morning, reconfirming the appointment. The meeting was very

positive. I set the tone for the meeting. I told him about the feeling of
me and my wife. . . . I expressed our feeling for him, and that we
wouldn’t reject him. Things got better, tolerable. There were tele-
phone calls on a weekly basis.
Yet, though Martin was willing to make some move toward integra-
tion, he could not fully reconcile himself to his son’s homosexuality. He
claimed that he feared that bad things would happen to Alec because he
was gay—AIDS was uppermost in his mind, though he tried not to
express his anxiety too often: “I’m still fearful of saying something that
will ruffle his feathers . . . that can ruin our relationship again,” Martin
told us. He also feared homophobia: “When society eventually finds
out,” Martin lamented, “it could hurt him.”
At that point, Martin and Greta had not come out to their friends or
family. The extent of their isolation was painful to him. “I am troubled
by my loneliness about it. It’s something you have to deal with yourself,
to make yourself happy.” Martin was so fearful of the opinions and reac-
tions of others that he felt compelled to bear the burden alone. Such
silence is characteristic among families in both the disintegration and
ambivalence phases. Communication is cautious, and “dead zones”
emerge where topics or feelings are taboo.
Martin continued to feel some shame over his son’s homosexuality. At
times he was so overcome by strong emotions in the interview that he
would mumble and be incoherent. We would have to ask him to repeat
what he said. He was unable to utter the word “gay” during an entire
two-hour interview. He also expressed muted anger by saying, paradox-
icically, that his son “betrayed the family all those years” by not telling
them of his homosexuality. This laying of blame on a gay child, charac-
teristic of families in the disintegrated phase who are also struggling
with shame, was tempered by Martin’s nascent awareness that it is soci-
ety, the cultural milieu, that may be culpable. He remarked that he was
not sure “how to handle people in society when they find out about my
son” and acknowledged how difficult it must be for Alec because “soci-
ety looks down on [his homosexuality] as so bad.”
When asked how Alec’s disclosure had affected Martin’s relationship
with Greta, Martin said that they want the best for their son but have a
hard time dealing with his homosexuality. “We ’re not enthralled by it.
We’re not in favor of it. We’d do anything to alter it. We ’d love to have


 Somewhere in the Middle: Ambivalence

more grandchildren.” Their daughter Joan’s children, he said “take

away some of the pain of Alec’s condition.”
But Martin also observed: “I can see nothing but positiveness coming
out of this whole thing. We’re novices to this . . . as we mature, within
this thing, it will make it easier on Alec with parents who love him.”
Martin’s capacity to project himself to a time of greater peace was a
hopeful sign. His determination, however, was still more intellectual
than emotional. “We’re not the happiest people in the world. Who the
hell can be happy about it?” he said with a tinge of anger. But then he
added, almost in reaction to his own thoughts: “Alec seems more at
peace now. The load has been taken off his back. We ’re delighted that
he seems to be at peace and that we have a relationship with our son. It
could have gotten much worse, and it could have made us lose our son,
due to our ignorance.”
Clearly, although the Lowensteins came to the brink of a rupture,
they found their way back. In spite of Greta’s extreme reaction and hos-
pitalization, the parents’ pain and shame, their repudiation of their son
and his subsequent withdrawal from the family household, these people
managed to come back together. Greta recovered, and the couple
reached out to their son, beginning with their invitation to dinner. Mar-
tin reasserted his paternal role by expressing his love and affection for
Alec. Martin and Greta sought support outside of the family by becom-
ing members of PFLAG, the support group for parents and friends of
lesbians and gays. Most important, they expressed in the interview their
hope that their progress would continue.

Some Differences Between the Responses of Fathers and Mothers

in Ambivalent Families
Progress toward integration may be impeded by the fact that, in many
American families, fathers exercise power through setting boundaries
and rules governing interactions both within the family and between the
family and the external world. In this sense, perhaps, fathers internalize
the ideal norms of the culture and feel obliged to uphold the rules within
their own families. By setting more restrictive boundaries in dealing with
a gay or lesbian child, fathers may be more likely than mothers to inhibit
integration. We observed particularly adamant restrictions in fathers
who were upset about their daughter’s lesbianism. As one father


Somewhere in the Middle: Ambivalence

remarked of his lesbian daughter, “If she’s gay, she’s gay. I don’t
approve of this stuff. We kind of have this understanding. Don’t throw
this stuff in my face. I don’t want her to bring her gay friends over.”
A significant difference between the response of the father to a child’s
lesbianism and that of the mother was illustrated for us in our interview
with Gladys and James, an African-American couple whose daughter,
Cathy, had fallen in love with Dionne, her first significant romantic rela-
tionship. While James was hostile to Cathy’s partner, Gladys com-
plained not about Cathy and Dionne but about James:
Discussions are usually triggered if Dionne comes to visit. His com-
ments aren’t very nice. I can’t understand why he blames Dionne,
and that causes disagreement. It just doesn’t go away. The person
Cathy loves is scapegoated. That’s unfair. So we get into it. Yes, in
the beginning there were rough times, negative energies. He seemed
to have shameful, guilty, negative feelings about it, and no coping
abilities. He thought I should’ve been feeling the same way. Even
now, the problem is still about Dionne!
We also found that fathers in the ambivalent phase were more likely
than mothers to draw a line by preventing disclosure to people outside
the immediate family, including grandparents, aunts, or uncles. Gener-
ally, we discovered that fathers were reluctant to seek any help or sup-
port outside the family. The fact that it was typically harder to coax
fathers into disclosing their story to us in this study may well derive
from the same motivation.
We were especially curious about why fathers seemed to have so much
more difficulty with lesbian daughters than the mothers did. In our study,
mother/daughter relationships were almost twice as “integrated” as
father/daughter relationships. While it is risky to draw conclusions from
so small a sample, themes emerge from our interviews that provide clues.
On a psychological level, we wonder if a father may regard a daugh-
ter’s attraction to other women as a rejection of himself as a man. In this
sense the father feels he has failed to establish the “desirability” of men
as objects or sources of mature love and affection. A father may deter-
mine he has failed in his role if his daughter does not aspire to marry a
man “like my father.” But as Ann Muller reported with regard to par-
ents’ response to a child’s homosexuality in general, mothers typically
experienced hurt and loss, while fathers became angry, broke off com-


 Somewhere in the Middle: Ambivalence

munication, and sometimes severed all bonds.1 It is likely that this

extreme reaction is driven ultimately by the profound role pressures
exerted upon fathers by society.
Fathers’ reactions to gay sons may play out differently from their
reactions to lesbian daughters. Fathers of gay sons seem more likely to
ascribe the label of “failure” to both themselves and their sons. If a boy
did not aspire to share activities with his father or aspired to share in his
mother’s culture, the child’s gayness may be interpreted in retrospect as
being the result of a failure by the father who feels that he was an inad-
equate role model. The father may also charge his son with having failed
to aspire to his proper gender role. Many gay sons, consequently, strug-
gle initially to overcome a profound sense of inadequacy or failure as
men. Such themes, which revolve around anxieties concerning proper
gender behavior, are strongly reinforced by the culture and are often
reiterated in family stories about who is “to blame.”
Mothers, in contrast, tend to focus more on relational features, such as
how they must now interact with their children. They struggle more to
keep the family together. They feel the need to overcome differences in the
family and to maintain the bonds of love and devotion regardless of dis-
appointments. In this sense the mother may bury her own feelings, take on
the task of being the Great Mediator, or try to deflect blame from others
on to herself. Mothers, we have found, are less likely to reject out of hand
their gay and lesbian offspring, even if that child fails to fulfill their most
heartfelt hopes and dreams, as illustrated earlier by Greta Lowenstein.
As we discovered in our interviews, while a number of mothers spoke
of being disappointed in their lesbian daughters or gay sons, their full
rejection was rare. Indeed, we had no example of it among the mothers
we studied. However, the issues of grandchildren and of general disap-
pointment in the gay or lesbian child continued to compromise the reac-
tions of mothers in the ambivalent phase. They had not yet fully recon-
sidered the Heterosexual Family Myth, and they suffered because their
gay or lesbian children were not adhering to the cultural ideal that the
Myth demanded.

A Word About Gender Roles and “The Cause”

It is not unusual for some fathers to enjoy periods of great closeness
in their early relationships with daughters. The closeness is sometimes


Somewhere in the Middle: Ambivalence

pursued through typically “male” interests, such as sports. If the daugh-

ter comes out as a lesbian, a father sometimes worries that there is a con-
nection between her sexuality and their early closeness and activities.
Ralph could not hide that fear when he spoke to us of his lesbian daugh-
ter, Janie:
I wanted a daughter very bad. She was my little girl. She still is. For
the first six months of her life, I don’t think my wife ever had to
change the diapers. I did it all. Later we took walks, went shooting,
fishing, played sports. My wife thinks that Janie ’s being a lesbian may
be because me and Janie participated in everything that was male. If
that close contact has anything to do with her sexual orientation in
relating to male figures . . . maybe I should have been more distant.

While we found a variety of instances in which lesbian daughters like

Janie or gay sons like Rick Stein exhibited nonconforming gender
behavior, we believe that the relationships the parents formed with them
were more in response to these differences, which were at least partly
inherent and which the parents perceived when the child was young.
Both mothers and fathers in our interviews appeared confused about
the “cause” of homosexuality. Several of them feared that it was related
to the child’s learning inappropriate gender behaviors when young.
Mothers sometimes expressed dismay when they recalled their daugh-
ter’s aspirations to share in “men’s activities”—which the mothers saw
as “a problem” once the girl entered adolescence. Several fathers falsely
concluded, as did Ralph, that the moments of great fun and intimacy that
they shared with their young daughter somehow caused her to become
lesbian. With regard to their gay sons, mothers similarly expressed guilt
or remorse for having shared with them gender non-conforming inter-
ests (shopping, arts, music, fashion), as we saw from Betty Stein’s testi-
mony in chapter . They too concluded wrongly that these experiences
somehow “caused” their sons to “turn out gay.”
From our observations and research, we believe it is safe to say
unequivocally that parents’ behavior (e.g., Ralph taking Janie fishing) in
no way promotes or causes the development of same-sex sexual orienta-
tion. A child’s gender and sexual development are not just “planted” in
the child by the parent or the culture. Sexual and gender development do
not begin with a blank slate. Development is multidetermined and mul-
tidirectional. It involves what comes from the child and how the child


 Somewhere in the Middle: Ambivalence

responds to the cues in the world (including what the parents do, but also
what peers do and the meanings ascribed to various patterns and behav-
iors by the culture).2
While we cannot know the complex unconscious patterns that occur
in families, nevertheless, lesbian daughters and gay sons—like all chil-
dren—express their own feelings, interests, likes, dislikes, and subjective
desires all the time in growing up. These do not completely, or perhaps
even primarily, depend upon what their parents do or do not do. Indeed,
it is likely that parents react to intrinsic qualities within their children.3
In effect, some fathers may reject sons (consciously or unconsciously)
who do not indicate strong interest in traditional male-identified activi-
ties, such as sports. Mothers may quite naturally feel more drawn to
these sons because of common interests. Similarly, mothers may have
difficulty relating to daughters who do not conform to more old-fash-
ioned female gender role behavior, whereas fathers may initially delight
in such relationships with their daughters. Clearly, the culture is chang-
ing in this area. But there is no hard evidence whatsoever that such par-
ent/child relationships cause homosexuality. Nor should this discussion
suggest that all gay men or lesbians were gender nonconforming in
childhood. In fact, many were gender typical. But the point we wish to
reiterate and emphasize is that there is nothing to suggest that
father/daughter or mother/son bonding ever causes a particular sexual
orientation—gay, straight, or bisexual.

Disclosure
Ambivalent families demonstrate tremendous conflict regarding dis-
closure to others about their child’s homosexuality. Because accessing
support from others is so critical, the inability to disclose that a child is
lesbian or gay can seriously inhibit the family’s advance toward integra-
tion. Shame, fear and embarrassment unfortunately prevent families
from taking this necessary step, as seen from the example of the Lowen-
steins.
A particularly poignant aspect of avoidance is the parents’ concern
about disclosing to their own parents and to other members of their
extended family. Like all other elements of society, the larger family,
including the grandparents, can be positive or negative about the gay or
lesbian child. Parents often feel trepidation, however, that their own par-


Somewhere in the Middle: Ambivalence

ents (the child’s grandparents) will judge them and find them unworthy
as parents. The extended family may be a source of grief and anger for
parents, since relatives outside the nuclear family have less knowledge of
the gay child, less of a stake in understanding the situation, and less com-
mitment to integrating the child back into the family.
But sometimes a parent’s reluctance to disclose can be based more in
fear than in reality. For example, we noted that grandparents were able
in some cases to be more accepting than their own children! Grandpar-
ents can be agents of integration—if they are allowed to know the truth.
After all, they have little to gain by rejecting their grandchildren, and
they stand to lose the very thing—grandchildren—that provides such
meaning to their lives.
Cynthia, who is forty, and her husband Bill, forty-two, were inter-
viewed separately in our study, at about the same time that we inter-
viewed their nineteen-year-old son, David. They are professional peo-
ple who live in Chicago. They had always had a very positive relation-
ship to their son. The couple did not suspect that David was gay prior to
his coming out. Cynthia’s family was not very religious, but her hus-
band’s family was religiously conservative.
David had come out to his parents the year before the interview and,
in general, their response was positive but guarded. He was their only
son and was much loved and admired by his parents. The family always
had experienced warm, intimate relations, without interruption. When
David went off to college he soon formed a significant romantic rela-
tionship with another man at his school. But Cynthia could not accept
this development so quickly: “When David wanted to pierce his ears, for
example, I thought it was okay at first, but then I became afraid people
would see and think something was wrong with him.” His maternal
grandparents were long unaware of any of these events. But eventually
they discovered that David was living with a man, and they began to
draw their own conclusions. Cynthia recalled:
Initially I thought my parents would think it is a terrible thing to have
a gay son, like at one time it was a mental illness; you had to keep it
secret, it was shameful. Shocking. I didn’t want them to suffer! Yes,
when it involved my own parents, it seemed more shameful.

In fact, however, they took the news in their stride and were quite
accepting of David, who was very appreciative of their support.


 Somewhere in the Middle: Ambivalence

But not everyone in Cynthia’s family was positive, she noted: “I even
found out about a year ago, that my sister, whom I previously thought
was on my son’s side, let it be known that she thought two men or two
women together sexually was disgusting.” Cynthia drifted away from a
close relationship with her sister. That was the “fall out” of David’s
coming out. But neither Cynthia or her husband seemed perturbed by it.
Cynthia revealed far more ambivalence about her in-laws, the other side
of the family. At one point in our interview with her, she said:

We still haven’t told Bill’s parents [David’s other set of grandpar-

ents]. They will probably never know. I’m leaving it up to Bill. He
doesn’t want them to know and neither does David, primarily for
religious reasons. You see, Bill’s parents are Southern Baptists. I’ve
never heard them say homosexuality is a bad thing, but it’s believed
by many in the Southern Baptist church and David went to Church
camp there. The first speech he heard at camp was a tirade against
homosexuality, saying they are sinners and go to hell. I don’t care
whether they know or not. My fear is that instead of rejecting David,
they would be hassling us to take him to a psychiatrist or to pray for
him—get him into religious groups that purport to convert people to
heterosexuality. Bill thinks [his parents] would be very hurt by it and
he doesn’t want them to experience that. He’s not ready yet to deal
with their questions and anxiety.

Cynthia and Bill were thus in a situation parallel to that of gay chil-
dren—fearful of failing to fulfill their own parents expectations! But then
the secret got out anyway—the cycle was interrupted—as typically hap-
pens. Cynthia subsequently told us, “Dealing with my husband’s part of
the family has been hard. They were brutal. My husband’s brother wrote
a letter to my gay son saying our son was a ‘disgrace’ to the family. My
mother-in-law turned against [my son] then. My husbands’ sister told our
son that by telling his grandmother about his sexual orientation, he has
hastened her death.” Such cruel responses are sometimes inevitable.
Even close friends can become the source of ambivalence. As Gladys
related, “I have a friend who I think wants to ask me about my [lesbian]
daughter. Our children were raised together. I think the word’s gotten
back to her but she doesn’t say anything. One time I think she remarked,
‘I don’t know why you let Cathy go to the University—people are crazy
over there!’ I think she was trying to say something indirectly.”


Somewhere in the Middle: Ambivalence

Gladys implied that her friend believed that simply being in the Uni-
versity might cause her daughter to become a lesbian. “I responded,
‘Cathy went to school where she wanted to go.’ I almost retaliated with
words about my friend’s bad marriage and her problems with her own
children, but I held my tongue. Right then I was feeling angry.” Gladys’s
angry response to her friend suggests that her ambivalence is changing
into unqualified support.

Grief and Loss

It is in the phase of ambivalence that parents of gay and lesbian off-
spring can begin to grieve over what they cannot help but feel is their
loss. Families in the disintegrated phase, entrenched in an array of
defenses, are unable to do so because they refuse to acknowledge the
reality. Families in the ambivalent phase, because they make that
acknowledgement and continue to communicate with each other and
those beyond the family, take the first steps. The experience of loss is
indeed profound for most families, since most are invested in supporting
and living out the cultural ideals of being heterosexual. These families
must acknowledge that life will be different. And even now, when gay
men and lesbians are having children through adoption, surrogacy, or
donor insemination, or when same-sex couples are having commitment
ceremonies, and gay marriage may even be legalized, for many parents
homosexual relationships will still be stigmatized.4 Parents need time to
acclimate to this new reality and grieve for the loss of the realization of
those heterosexual ideals in which they have so greatly invested. The
ambivalence phase affords them that time and, with appropriate support,
families can progress.
Equally important, we have found that this progress is greatly
affected by the progress of the gay or lesbian child. Many parents told us
how they could not help but be reassured by seeing their child in a posi-
tive emotional state at the point of disclosure, despite the parents’ own
fears and misgivings. In our study, almost  percent of the ambivalent
families could acknowledge their child’s improved state and sense of
happiness, compared to only  percent of the disintegrated families
The comfort that a child displays with regard to his/her own sexual ori-
entation can inspire confidence, for the child will in many ways lead the
parents out of the thicket of dread and confusion.


 Somewhere in the Middle: Ambivalence

It also appears critical that offspring who are “out” to their families
remain “out.” By continuing to integrate their same-sex orientation into
their lives, by developing friendships with other lesbians and gay men,
by pursuing positive activities in the gay or lesbian community, by con-
tinuing to address the effects of homophobia on their lives and on their
relationships, and by including these elements in their relationships with
family members, gay and lesbian offspring ensure that their families are
less likely to return to a disintegrated state of silence, secrecy and shame.
Rather, families are then challenged to continue the work and foster
greater dialogue. Moreover, although some parents may initially balk at
having their child’s sexual orientation “thrown in our faces,” the more
resilient among them regard the challenge as an opportunity for further
growth and differentiation. Indeed, they come to see that their gay or
lesbian offspring aren’t “flaunting” anything per se, but simply laying
claim to the same right as heterosexuals to incorporate key elements of
their lives.
Families overcome their ambivalence through this willingness on the
part of both the child and the parents to be honest with each other, to
respect differences, to be uncomfortable even for long periods of time,
and, ultimately, to construct new meanings of sexuality, love, adversity,
and family.


 ▼ 5

The Family Renewed

Integration

I think that he is more himself now. It’s like,

will the real Jonathan stand up? And he has!
And there is something wonderful about that!
—Joan, mother of a gay son

The best thing about having a gay child is, if

you have accepted your gay child, you find an
outpouring of love from the child and his
friends and the gay community. You get back
a hundredfold what you give your child.
—Belinda, mother of a gay son
I N T H E P R E V I O U S C H A P T E R S we described the disintegrating impact
of the shame that some parents of gay and lesbian children told us they
felt. As we discussed, it is clear that old cultural ideals have not yet
caught up with the realities of contemporary society. We also looked at
families betwixt and between, struggling to stay intact and overcome the
damage wrought by secrecy and alienation. Despite the sadness and dis-
appointment inherent in some of their stories, we found much to learn
from them, often in the way of “cautionary tales.”
While the stories of disintegration illustrate the difficulties that par-
ents of gay and lesbian children face, those of integration, which we will
discuss in this chapter, provide a beacon of hope. As the parents we
placed in the integrated category understood, despite the cultural ideal
of heterosexuality, you do not have a choice regarding the sexual orien-
tation of your child; you do, however, have a momentous choice about
how to respond to his or her orientation.
Before parents can replace negative responses with understanding and
acceptance of their child’s homosexuality, they must cope with their feel-
ing of loss when they discover that one of the family members is gay or
lesbian. It is not unusual that their immediate reaction is one of unhappi-
ness. They fear what the extended family and friends will say; they fear
that society will impose reprisals against their child; they may anticipate
trouble with their church; they are very unhappy and even angry over the
feeling that they may never have the grandchildren they had hoped for.
These reactions are inevitable as long as one continues to be imprisoned
by the cultural image of the heterosexual family, a particular mythology
more suited to the s than to today’s era of diversity and individual-
ity. The pressures imposed by this Myth forces parents to feel they must
continue to hide “family secrets” from the outside world. They are con-
strained to pretend that everything is “normal.” The price they pay is
fragmentation, alienation, and the loss of meaningful family ties.
But the challenge they must undertake, for the sake of their children
and for their own sake, is to create a supportive and more loving family,


The Family Renewed: Integration

based upon reality and the acceptance of people as they are. In our inter-
view with her, Louise demonstrated how parents can, and do, undertake
that challenge. When she discovered her son David’s homosexuality, the
jolt was great, but ultimately she found ways to react that differed dra-
matically from those of the ambivalent parents of our last chapter.
Louise did not hide from us the shock she felt when she first learned
about David’s sexuality:
I found out at Thanksgiving. He called and told us he was gay. He had
strong feelings then and they had lasted the longest. It was like he was
a different person; he wasn’t the son I had known and raised. It was
almost as if a gypsy came and took away my real son and brought this
one. He seemed so strange to me. I felt guilty.

She also did not hide from us the difficult struggle that she went through
to find ways to accept David’s disclosure:
I was pretty well educated about homosexuality. I figured if no one
knows what causes it, why should I blame myself? Maybe I did do
something, but then that means I would have had to have raised him
differently. But how could I do that being who I am? So those
thoughts lasted maybe a day. But the feeling that he was a stranger
lasted for months. I even thought about maybe having had another
[person’s] baby [laugh], a cuckoo bird lays its egg in another bird’s
nest. So he hatched out into something totally unexpected.

Yet it was her ability to listen to David that ultimately permitted her to
see the situation as he saw it—in a way that was often more rational than
her perceptions had permitted her to be. Through listening to him with
love and openness, she was able to overcome her anachronistic cultural
ideal in coming to terms with his understanding of himself:
He was the one who helped me get over [my first bad feelings]. At
Christmas, whenever I needed him to be there, he was. I told him how
I felt. He was very kind. I said something to him about some moms
having sorrow about not having grandchildren, and David said,
“Mom, I’m only eighteen. I’m too young to be a parent!” The guilt
went away pretty quick. I didn’t really feel there was anything to feel
guilty about. If scientists said you did one thing and that caused it,
then maybe I’d feel guilty. My thinking has changed. More and more

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 The Family Renewed: Integration

I’ve come to accept that it’s okay, so there is nothing to feel guilty
about. That’s how I feel now. If I could wave a magic wand and make
him straight, I don’t know if I would. Then he really would be dif-
ferent, and I like him the way he is.

Louise concluded with a rationality that mirrored the truth and also per-
mitted her growth and happy reconciliation with her son:
I had to accept it—there’s nothing I can do about it. I even came to
look on it as a positive thing. There’s nothing wrong with it. When
he first came out, in a balance between straight and gay, I would have
preferred straight. But through getting more involved in gay issues
and knowing more gay people, that’s changed.

How Parents Can Make a Difference

Louise was not unique in her acceptance of her gay son. Integrated
families are those who have been able to find ways to transcend the
“issue” of having a lesbian or gay child so that they can get on with life.
The families may continue to have difficulties and conflicts, of course,
because that’s the nature of family life. Yet problems are no more likely
to be related to having gay or lesbian offspring than to any other dimen-
sion of family life. Integrated families have enhanced communication
both within the family and beyond. They can be open with others about
having a gay or lesbian child. They take risks in disclosing their experi-
ences to others. Integration of the gay child promotes this growth.
Marital and sibling relationships also appeared stronger in those fam-
ilies we placed in the “integrated” category. It seemed to us that often the
family was strong not so much in spite of the conflicts posed by the
homosexual child’s disclosure but because of them. Even in those mar-
riages that displayed the greatest strength prior to disclosure, parents
often spoke of a new-found respect for each other—as if they had redis-
covered their reasons for liking one another. Integrated families also
reported significant improvement in the relationships between the gay
child and the parents. The family wounds brought about by prior frag-
mentation and disintegration healed.
In particular, the integration process restarted the normal process of
maturation and growth that is so crucial to the child’s development into
a fully functioning adult. Experts in the field of developmental psychol-

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The Family Renewed: Integration

ogy now recognize the significance of a child’s ability, primarily during

adolescence and young adulthood, to separate successfully from his or
her parents and to individuate—that is, to become an autonomous, self-
directed person with a substantially defined identity that has matured
beyond the child’s earlier role in the family. This complex set of tasks is
marked initially by the child’s identification with his or her family and
parents. He or she subsequently shifts these allegiances to the norms and
beliefs of his or her peers, constructing a personal passage toward a
more distinct self-identity. Particularly at the entry into adolescence,
acceptance by peers carries a profound sense of belonging and identifi-
cation with a new society. This process of friendship and peership gen-
erates a new sense of self—of being separate from the familial identity
of son or daughter, brother or sister. As the child matures, he or she
claims new-found confidence, pride, and growth from the emerging
sense of self in society.
The peer-group identity is reinforced by teen preferences for certain
tastes, styles of clothing or jewelry, particular fads in music or art, the
choice of particular words and idiomatic expressions. As silly and super-
ficial as these things may seem, they generate a strong sense of belong-
ing that paradoxically ensures psychological safety for adolescents as
they separate from the attachment to parents. Each new peer-group
identity constitutes a bridge of confidence toward an autonomous and
more richly defined self. This new sense of self may cause young peo-
ple to begin to reclaim from the family what was previously set aside.
Ultimately, as adolescents become young adults, they can synthesize
from both the peer-group identity and their familial identity a unique set
of values, beliefs, and interests. They make choices more freely and
develop a capacity for intimacy and commitment in both friendship and
romantic relationships.
In the normative process of adolescence in Western culture, the par-
ent-child relationship is transformed as well. It expands in order to rec-
ognize and incorporate the emergent young adult. It becomes increas-
ingly a relationship between equals. Parent and child distribute power
more evenly and accept and respect their differences more readily. The
parent relinquishes authority as the adult child now exercises a greater
range of choices and, ideally, accepts greater responsibility. Ultimately,
parents “let go” and accept the reality of having “launched” their child
into the world. Hoping they have given the child both the wisdom and the

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 The Family Renewed: Integration

psychological resources necessary for a good life, parents acknowledge

the limits of their control over the destiny of their child. In response, the
adult child charts his or her own path of career, lifestyle, and attachments.
Ultimately, the family incorporates the adult child’s new identity into
itself, including the child’s romantic partner and family.
For lesbians and gay men, this normal process is too often thwarted
due to the rejection, isolation, and stigma they so often experience dur-
ing childhood and adolescence. Due to the taboos of society, lesbian and
gay teens are unlikely to disclose their sexual orientation to peers or fam-
ily, at least not until late adolescence. Many learn to create for themselves
a variety of masks, images, or “false selves” in order to communicate
with others. Their inner desires remain concealed, however, to avoid
suspicion. The peer group, that bridge of psychological security
described earlier, may be extremely hostile to homosexuality and is
treacherous at best for the gay or lesbian teen. Whatever acceptance
comes from peers has strings attached and is often at great cost to the
self. Usually, acceptance can be gained only through deceit, denial, con-
cealment, and the construction of this mask and false self. In short,
struggling gay or lesbian teens must reject their own self in order to
avoid rejection by others. The need to conceal the self becomes even
more critical in the face of violence and harassment—so common in
high school—especially for those labeled “dyke” or “fag.”
Immobilized by fear, few gay and lesbian adolescents can engage in
the more normative functions of adolescent socialization, except per-
haps for those fortunate enough to access gay and lesbian youth pro-
grams in larger cities. But even in major metropolises, that is rare: only
one out of forty-five homosexual teens in Chicago are that fortunate.
What lesbian and gay teens are generally deprived of, therefore, are
those normative functions that help adolescents to become socialized:
discussing their feelings with friends for long hours on the phone; trad-
ing confidences with steady dates; learning the subtleties of dating, and
so on. Most gay and lesbian youth—deprived by society, forced to hide
who they are, feeling and being isolated—thus fail to develop the cru-
cial skills of partner selection, communication, intimacy, and commit-
ment by the end of their teenage years.
Equally important, many lesbian and gay young adults may have
immense difficulty accomplishing the necessary psychological separa-
tion from their parents. Lacking the peer group bridge, some may

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The Family Renewed: Integration

remain excessively dependent on their parents for emotional support and

comfort. Others may feel guilty and may experience a burdensome need
to compensate their parents for failing to fulfill the heterosexual role
expectations of marriage and children. These gay men and lesbians
become and remain “best little boys” and “best little girls.” Parents may
rely on them unduly. This reliance denies that the parent must recede in
a child’s life. All this prolonged (sometimes mutual) dependence typi-
cally occurs in the context of hiding the self, of keeping the family
secret.
Robb Forman Dew, the author of the autobiographical work, The
Family Heart: A Memoir of When Our Son Came Out, has described—in
terms all too familiar to us because it echoed what we often heard in our
interviews—her own family’s experiences with a gay son’s assumption
of the “best little boy” role. To assume that role he had to repress and
deny himself, at considerable cost:
Stephen has always had astonishing social radar, and I can see now
with horrified clarity that he absorbed the idea of responsibility for
the happiness of his own parents like a sponge. I think that it must
have been at a huge cost to himself that he made it so easy for us to
be pleased to be his parents. . . . He became what he thought he
needed to be in order to ensure our satisfaction with ourselves as par-
ents. He is, though, who he is; he never compromised his integrity or
his character; instead he denied himself freedom of affection, the
euphoria of early crushes, the experimentation of early emotional
attachments. (150)

Some gay or lesbian teens, in a misguided effort to overcome their

unresolved dependency on parents, may leave home prematurely. The
gay or lesbian adolescent who runs away in order to achieve a sense of
independence before garnering the necessary skills and resources to do
so is rendered vulnerable to exploitation, crime, and sexually transmit-
ted disease. Research into youth homelessness in one metropolitan city,
Chicago, indicates that as many as  percent of homeless youth are gay-
identified or homosexually active (often engaging in prostitution for
economic survival).
How do parents in integrated families manage to overcome the vari-
ous potential dangers and pitfalls to which families of young lesbians
and gays are subject? Many of those who have been the most successful


 The Family Renewed: Integration

not only accept their child’s same-sex orientation but also articulate an
appreciation of it. We have no reason to think that this positive reaction
derives from some special affection for homosexuality. Rather, we think
that it is the result of the parents’ willingness to go the extra step. They
want to attend to the things that the child loves and appreciates in his or
her own life. Thus, for example, they may include the partner of their
gay or lesbian offspring into their family, or they may develop relation-
ships with the partner’s family. They may make efforts to learn more
about lesbians and gay people in history, or about gay and lesbian com-
munities.
What can we expect of such attempts at integration? Results that are
surely happier than what we can observe in disintegrated or ambivalent
families. As a consequence of taking active steps to learn more about
the lives of lesbian and gay people, for example, it became easier for
parents in integrated families to project a hopeful future for their gay
or lesbian children. Among our interviewees, almost  percent of par-
ents in the integrated category could project major life events for their
gay children for at least ten years into the future. This contrasts with
 percent of the “ambivalent” parents and none of the parents in the
“disintegrated” category. Integrated parents could, therefore, more
readily engage with their children in shared problem-solving and plan-
ning for life.
The narratives of these parents were striking. Many expressed a sort
of gratitude for the gift of compassion that having a gay child afforded
them. One mother of a gay son said with pride:
This broadened my world. It’s made me a better person. We do help
other people that are coming out—you’re much more sensitive to
other people’s concerns. I feel lucky compared to some other parents.

The father of a gay son told us:

It has made me more human because I’ve become aware of a segment
of society that’s been treated very badly by government and the
majority of the population. It’s made me more compassionate toward
those who’ve been persecuted. It’s been very humanizing.

Another mother of a gay son completed the phrase: “The best thing
about having a gay child is . . .” by saying:


The Family Renewed: Integration

You have accepted your gay child, [and] you find an outpouring of
love from the child, his friends and the gay community. You get back
a hundredfold what you give your child.

“Disintegrated” or “ambivalent” families more typically limited

their exposure to, or involvement with, key aspects of the lives of their
gay children. The parents were generally reluctant to include the child’s
gay or lesbian friends in family activities, or they did not want to
encounter their adult child’s partner. In contrast, parents in integrated
families spoke positively of including into their lives those who were
important in their child’s life. Such inclusion rewarded the parents by
fostering their feelings of closeness to their homosexual children.
As one mother of a gay son, Daniel, voiced it: “When I look ahead I
see a good life for me and I look forward to closeness with Daniel and a
continued relationship with Joey [his lover] or new people Daniel might
bring into his life.” The mother of a lesbian told us: “I like the commu-
nity she lives in. I like her friends and enjoy them thoroughly. I enjoy
being with them and doing things together.” A father, discussing the
relationship between his gay son and his wife, laughingly remarked: “It
always was excellent. The only thing that’s changed is that now she ’s
trying to get him boyfriends instead of girlfriends. My wife has intro-
duced him to nice people she had become friends with in the gay com-
munity.” It is undeniable that these parents in integrated families were
far happier than the father of the lesbian daughter that we discussed ear-
lier who complained, “I don’t approve of this stuff. . . . Don’t throw this
stuff in my face. I don’t want her to bring her gay friends over.”
The parents in integrated families that we interviewed believed it was
important to weave a lesbian or gay child into the fabric of extended
family relationships. They were less willing to hide or conceal from peo-
ple who were important to them the fact of their child’s homosexuality.
Daniel’s mother remarked with relief: “I’m glad we told my parents;
Daniel is not drifting from them anymore; he can talk to them.” Parents
in integrated families believed it was vital to claim their child, not to let
the possible prejudices of the extended family, neighborhood, church or
even close friends wedge their child apart from them.
Of course, such openness on the part of these parents sometimes cre-
ated conflicts with others outside their nuclear family. Yet integrated
parents took the risks and held firm to their position. Though in some


 The Family Renewed: Integration

cases their defense of their child even caused them to be alienated from
members of their extended family, it was not unusual for them to find
that their courage paid off. Betty Stein, who moved from the ambivalent
state described in chapter  to integration, recalled for us a potentially
painful situation she and Richard, her husband, faced when they insisted
on the inclusion of the lover of her gay son, Rick, at a family event:
My brother was planning a wedding for his daughter and my husband
announced to my brother that he wanted a young man placed on the
invitation list. My brother said he was not inviting any friends of
guests, only husbands and wives. My husband then told him that this
man was like a husband to my son; that Rick was gay and that he
would not attend the wedding unless his lover was invited. My hus-
band also told my brother that our entire family would not attend
unless Rick attended. My brother agreed and said it was perfectly all
right with him.
Richard stressed in his interview with us how important it has been to
incorporate Rick’s lover, Stuart, into the family and to show members of
the extended family the way. “Rick’s commitment to Stuart is the under-
lying reason for our adjusting so well. We truly are a family—all of
us—my married sons and their wives and children and Rick and Stuart,
in a way that I’m sure has to be unique.” Demonstrating how well the
family has integrated Rick’s lover, Richard noted that both Rick and
Stuart baby-sit for the grandchildren. He characterized their integrated
familial situation as “strictly utopia,” but it was clear that the Steins
worked hard to arrive at such a utopia. “I show a love and affection for
Stuart as well as for Rick,” Richard told us. “They both get a kiss and a
hug from me whether there are others around or not.”
The case of the Steins, who had initially reacted to Rick’s disclosure
“in a state of hysteria,” demonstrates that parents can change. The ben-
efits of the high level of integration achieved by the Steins are quite
remarkable. In contrast to ambivalent and disintegrated families, the
lives of parents and their gay or lesbian children in integrated families
are as interconnected and vital as they would be if the child were het-
erosexual. In such families meaning and purpose are no longer derived
from conformity to a socially constructed Myth of heterosexual bliss.
The parents understand the importance of letting go of that exclusive
ideal. The narratives of parents in integrated families described how


The Family Renewed: Integration

courage overcame fear, pride replaced disgrace, and affiliation sup-

planted alienation. These families learned to live and love maturely.
They rightly looked forward to a shared future of rich and diverse-but-
interconnected selves.

The Insidiousness of Disintegration

As we have been suggesting, because homosexuality is stigmatized by
our culture, it becomes a source of shame that promotes fragmentation.
When a child recognizes that he or she is different and understands that
this difference is stigmatized by the society at large and within his or her
own family, the process of disintegration within the family begins. The
child will decide, at least at first, to conceal rather than reveal this differ-
ence. Driven largely by fear, the strategies of secrecy, obfuscation, dis-
sembling, distance, and deceit subsequently become tools and devices by
which the inner workings of a family are dismantled. Collusion on the
part of parents and siblings, as we have seen, may further exacerbate the
difficulty of disclosure. As time passes, the shame grows and the silence
of the demilitarized zone is deafening, until one day people give up in
despair, feeling it is “too late” to change the situation.
The parents may not even be aware of what is happening when a gay
or lesbian child gives up on the possibility of family intimacy. Where the
child adopts a strategy of people-pleasing and accommodation, parents
might actually delight in the child’s successes as a reflection of the fam-
ily’s “strength.” The disintegration of the family actually occurs secretly,
automatically, from within, long before its outward signs are visible. The
child fears that disclosure will disrupt family life and relationships, that
being open is so threatening that he or she may be attacked or even
destroyed. Experiences of harassment, violence, gay-bashing, and
related manifestations of homophobia and heterosexism serve to rein-
force these anxieties. Indeed, such fears are not unrealistic, especially in
families in which there is a risk of violence or abandonment.
Regardless, lesbian or gay children conceal not just their sexual ori-
entation but also the feelings associated with this concealment: loneli-
ness, isolation, a desperate desire for support and acceptance restrained
by an equally desperate fear of disappointing others or of being
rejected, humiliated, or abused. They have given up on the development
of the self in the context of the family. Often, by the time parents learn


 The Family Renewed: Integration

that their child is gay, many years may have passed—along with missed
opportunities and increased alienation. The fragmentation progresses
even if the parents fail to recognize it as such. The path toward reinte-
gration is more difficult to discern.

The O’Donnells: A Beautiful Beginning

When parents choose to integrate their child’s sexual orientation into
their lives, to love and to act, they invariably strengthen the bonds of
family and enhance its capacity to respond in healthy and effective ways
for all of its members. How does a family get there? How do families of
gay and lesbian children address the myriad dilemmas they must face?
What does the process of integration look like? We offer the stories of
two families from our study that illustrate this process most clearly.
The story of the O’Donnell family is particularly compelling, for it
illustrates this process rather dramatically and demonstrates how a
child’s coming out may not only restore full functioning to a family but
also enhance and transform the family. Kathy O’Donnell speaks lov-
ingly of the birth of her son, Jonathan:
When he was born, I had the easiest time delivering him of the three,
and I was awake for the delivery. When they showed him to me, he
was smiling and all the nurses said, “What a beautiful baby!” And it
was as if he were saying, “Look world, I’m here! Glad to be here!”
He was just the sweetest little baby. He would smile and eat and he
was precocious; at age three he took an interest in learning to read and
I wasn’t pushing him. I’m not that kind of mother. . . . He could
always entertain himself. He was amazing right off!

Jonathan was distinctly sociable with most people and very outgoing. He
excelled in music and dance. Kathy and her husband, Andrew, encour-
aged Jonathan to develop his gifts. Jonathan became proficient in piano,
violin, and dance, and his teachers praised him. He also performed
exceptionally well academically.

F R AG M E N TAT I ON

Kathy and Andrew’s son Michael was two years older than Jonathan,
Another son, Steven, was four years younger. The O’Donnell children

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The Family Renewed: Integration

grew up in a comfortable middle-class suburb of Chicago. Andrew

O’Donnell progressed in his career as an accountant, and Kathy focused
on the challenge of rearing three boys.
As the years progressed, however, Kathy and Andrew experienced
increasing conflict. Slowly, somewhat imperceptibly, their marriage
began to deteriorate. Andrew seemed preoccupied and inattentive, and
Kathy felt drained and unsupported. Jonathan seemed outwardly
unfazed by the trouble that was brewing. At the age of ten he was diag-
nosed with a congenital heart problem that was treated with moderate
success. Steven was subsequently diagnosed with a similar problem that
was also successfully treated. When Jonathan was thirteen years old,
Kathy’s parents and brother all died in the same year. The stress of these
events, combined with the Jonathan’s medical problems, overwhelmed
the family. The various unhappy events all seemed to contribute to the
demise of the marriage. By the time Jonathan was fourteen, Kathy and
Andrew had separated.
One year later they amicably divorced. Andrew and Kathy agreed to
a joint custody arrangement for their offspring and remained in close
proximity to each other to minimize the disruption to their children’s
lives. Michael, seventeen at the time, seemed to have been affected most
deeply by the change. Resentful and rebellious, he chafed at his mother’s
attempts to discipline him and seemed to blame her for the divorce.
Finally, Kathy and Andrew agreed that Michael should live with his
father and that the two younger boys would continue to live with Kathy.
Kathy described the closeness of her new subunit of the family: “When
I moved here, the divorce was over and it was the three of us—
Jonathan, Steven, and I—and it was really pretty harmonious, and I was
so happy we got along so well.”
Jonathan remained popular and involved in high school, winning
numerous awards for service and performance. Kathy recalled in our
interview Jonathan’s remarkable ability to adapt to many different types
of people, both in school and outside: “He was able to cross over into
different age groups and types. . . . He chose friends for a lot of reasons.”
But he was also perplexing at times, a bit secretive. Kathy explains that
he was something of a chameleon, “trying to be what everyone wanted
him to be or what he thought everyone wanted him to be.”
As for romance in his life, Kathy remarked, “He didn’t date. Now
mind you, he never missed a prom or a dance; he was often asked as a


 The Family Renewed: Integration

girl’s choice, but it was . . . always pretty platonic. He never wanted to

go to any of the mixed parties: he’d shy away from that. You know, in a
sense he was almost too good. He was home a lot, studying, writing
papers.”
Kathy subsequently began a new romantic relationship of her own
with Warren, whose presence Jonathan resented. Kathy wondered if
Jonathan felt threatened, as if Warren might usurp him in some way.
Still, nothing interfered with Jonathan’s academic performance. He
graduated with a rank of tenth in his class of  students. Both Andrew
and Kathy were exceedingly proud of their ideal child. He seemed to be
quintessentially low-maintenance and trouble-free.

C O L LA P S E

Andrew and Kathy felt supremely confident in sending Jonathan off

to college. Jonathan had always succeeded. He made friends easily and
invariably became quite popular. The ensuing events, therefore, shocked
everyone. As Kathy described this stunning turn:

He left for college in August. . . . I didn’t hear from him a lot and
when I did, it was weird and he was upset. I called him because he was
just strange, even when he came home for weekends, which was rare.
. . . He was saying he wasn’t sure he could stick it out and maybe he
wanted to leave. . . . I felt real panicked inside—like he had to get out
of there. . . . Then he just broke down sobbing and crying and telling
me he was afraid to leave his room. That was when he said he was gay
and . . . said he was in a dorm filled with jocks and he knew as he
walked down the halls that they looked at him and knew he wasn’t
right. He was real homophobic, internalizing it all. I think he could
no longer contain the facade of being straight and he really had some-
thing of a breakdown there, an emotional upheaval. At any rate, he
came home. I find it interesting that he chose to live in the dorm that
was all sports jocks there. I think that maybe he wanted to believe he
was straight; no maybe about it—I know he did. So I really encour-
aged him to come home. He tried therapy and support while he was
at school but I don’t think he was in any shape to stay in school. He
was very frightened and talked about suicide. He came home the first
of November.

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The Family Renewed: Integration

What explains this radical turn of events? How could a model child
like Jonathan collapse so precipitously?
As we suggested earlier, adolescent development can be different for
lesbian and gay teens than it is for heterosexual teens. It is common, for
example, for younger lesbians and gay men to develop a repertoire of
what may be called “compensatory” and “people-pleasing” behaviors in
order to manage and avoid stigmatization. Jonathan’s academic and
artistic achievements may have served to compensate during high school
for an inner sense of failure or inadequacy in areas pertaining to sexual
development. His likability and capacity to find camaraderie with so
many different types of people may have provided him with a way to
overcome the inherent alienation and fear of rejection common to many
lesbians and gay males, particularly in adolescence. Perhaps he con-
structed an array of “false selves,” i.e., facades, images, and appearances
that served more to conceal than reveal his identity. It is possible that
Jonathan even hid his feelings from himself.
Jonathan’s compensatory, people-pleasing behavior apparently
helped him survive by avoiding the pain of rejection and alienation from
peers in high school. Yet the cost to him was the utter rejection of his
own self. When he went away to college and found himself in what he
believed to be an alien and inhospitable environment, among sports
jocks, where his earlier people-pleasing behavior was not effective, he
found that he had no “self ” to fall back on.
It is difficult for any gay adolescent to come out. The pressures to
conform to heterosexual peer culture, replete with heterosexual mile-
stones (first crush, first date, first high school dance, first prom, first het-
erosexual experience, etc.), are very intense. It takes immense courage to
withstand the pressures and keep faith with one ’s own inner being. Many
cannot do it. Additionally, when Jonathan’s parents’ marriage was dete-
riorating and his mother was beset with a variety of crises involving
sickness and death, the family was burdened. Perhaps in light of these
burdens, Jonathan sought to avoid placing still more weight on his par-
ents or disappointing them any further. Kathy hinted at this when she
described her relationship with Jonathan: “It’s real loving but he feels
real responsible and doesn’t want to disappoint anyone. He feels maybe
too responsible.”
We hypothesize that Jonathan long remained the “best little boy,”
unable to develop and deepen his identity through the complex process


 The Family Renewed: Integration

of integrating one of the most fundamental aspects of that identity: sex-

ual orientation. His strategy for dealing with his life appears to have left
him vulnerable to internal pressures to conform. Like other gay men and
lesbians, he may have compromised himself through his desires to
please others. While his reaction is understandable, it also short-cir-
cuited the more normative adolescent developmental experiences of
individuation often characterized by some degree of unpleasantness,
rebelliousness, or oppositional behavior.
At college, his strategy shattered, unleashing an explosive mix of
Jonathan’s pent-up frustrations and his fear of rejection, alienation, and
loss. Kathy’s account of Jonathan’s first months in college depicted a
young man desperately struggling to convince himself and others that
he is the quintessential heterosexual, sports-oriented male. If others are
convinced of this, he seems to have reasoned, perhaps it will in fact be
so! Yet it was not long before he felt he could neither convince others nor
himself. Jonathan’s lack of successful separation and individuation from
his familial role apparently exacerbated the problem, rendering him ill-
equipped for the experience of being away from home among strangers.

R E S P ON S E A N D I N T E G R AT I ON

When Jonathan finally came out, the immediate response from his
family was one that will by now be familiar to the reader: a sense of loss,
anger, guilt, shame, inadequacy. “You know what my first feeling was?”
Kathy remembered, “That he’d never have children; that that is just not
going to be, is real hard. And that I just feel like . . . I know the world is
a hard place but I won’t understand the dangers he ’ll face.” But,
Jonathan’s coming out also provided the entire family with an opportu-
nity to realign itself in a way that could significantly enhance the well-
being of each of its members. His act of disclosure set into motion a
series of changes in relationship patterns between family members that
allowed the family to move beyond the “closed ranks” arrangement that
followed the divorce, to one characterized by differentiation and “letting
go.”
Despite Kathy’s initial response to Jonathan, she offered love and
support, just as she had in all the previous family crises: “I told him that
I loved him and that whatever I could do for him I would do for him, and
that it really didn’t matter as long as he was all right and that if he really


The Family Renewed: Integration

couldn’t deal with it he should come home and get therapy and what-
ever.” This contrast to the scenes of disintegrated families who attached
strings to their love and support is striking. Kathy, despite her first feel-
ings, understood that she must not turn away from her child at the
moment of his greatest need for renewed affirmation of the bonds of
love.
Kathy described Jonathan’s reentry into her home as anything but
harmonious. In fact, it appears that Jonathan’s nascent integration of his
sexual orientation required the reworking of those adolescent develop-
mental tasks that were truncated by his earlier fearful response to stigma.
At the age of eighteen he assumed the typical adolescent role:
I was seeing a part of him that I didn’t see or know before, or allow
myself to see before. Instead of a loving, pretty well-balanced, stable
child, I was seeing a mixed-up, scared, irritable person. He was real
reckless for a couple of months and I was really very, very angry. He
started at Horizons [the program for lesbian and gay youth in
Chicago]. He’d be gone all night or two days in a row and I didn’t
know where he was. I was at the end of my rope and I said to him “I
know you think you’re worldly-wise and want to find out who you
are but we live in a dangerous world and it isn’t as easy as in litera-
ture.” And I really did confront him with that if he kept living this
way and didn’t respect my feelings and worrying about him, that he
couldn’t live here. . . . So, it was a real roller coaster!
How were she and Jonathan able to work through that difficult
phase? Most of all, Kathy recounted her own process of “letting go.”
Through Jonathan’s coming out, she faced the limits of her ability to
secure the well-being of her children. She recognized that she could not
control their destiny. Equally important, she confronted the possibility
that her own sense of meaning and purpose in life could not be derived
solely from the accomplishments of her children. This admission to her-
self was especially critical to her relationship with Jonathan, from whose
accomplishments she had derived such great satisfaction. At various
points in the interview Kathy amply demonstrated this process of real-
ization and change:
Jonathan felt maybe it was given to him by me and his father that he ’s
the star and now he ’s fallen. . . . I’ve told him that’s my problem and
that’s not his problem. You know the old adage, “You live through


 The Family Renewed: Integration

your children”? Well, I’ve had to learn to let go. I kind of basked in
the light of his achievements before. Now, I just want him to be
happy and okay. We’ve all had to learn to separate. And that’s
painful. Obviously, I’ve had trouble with separation myself. . . . Their
father may have as great or greater problem with separation. I feel as
though I have to come to terms with the dangers he faces, but they’re
his, not mine. I think that’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. It’s
hard to think I can’t protect him from all these hurts . . . nor can I pro-
tect my straight children either.
It was not easy for Kathy to deal with her own ambivalent feelings
toward Jonathan’s new-found independence. But now she compared
Jonathan’s behavior and her reactions before his coming out and since,
realizing:
When I would come home from work [then], every night he ’d be sit-
ting there doing work, and there are times now when I come home
and he’s not sitting there and I think, well, that’s good, he should be
out! I think that he’s more himself now. It’s like, “Will the real
Jonathan stand up?!” and he has, and there’s something wonderful
about that!
The effect of Jonathan’s coming out on Steven, the younger brother,
was not uncomplicated. Steven, as the brother of a gay man, felt himself
victimized by society’s homophobia, and he was not happy about that.
He saw Jonathan as culpable. Because Jonathan came out not just to fam-
ily but also to neighborhood friends, Steven complained that he had to
contend at school with taunting from peers, not because of anything he
did or who he was but solely because he had a gay brother. Steven, at the
point of the interview, could not see the injustice of blaming the victim.
Kathy said that Steven became distraught and demanded of her: “I want
him to be out of here, gone, get rid of him!” Kathy was clearly upset by
Steven’s distress, yet she was hopeful that eventually Steven would come
to appreciate his brother’s bravery and honesty, and out of that appreci-
ation a new and more mature sibling relationship could form.
Kathy found it difficult to describe her ex-husband’s reactions to
Jonathan’s disclosure. Within one week of Jonathan’s coming out to her,
she had called Andrew to convey the information to him. Interestingly,
she regretted having done this, thinking soon after she did it that the
decision should have been Jonathan’s. She believed, however, that


The Family Renewed: Integration

Jonathan was “far more afraid of his father’s reaction,” and so, perhaps,
she sought to intervene and thereby protect him.
Andrew expressed to Kathy some fear of “losing” Jonathan; he also
appeared to regard Jonathan’s homosexuality as just “a phase.” Perhaps
he blamed himself, as well. In any case, Kathy observed that Jonathan
and his father had never been very close, but despite Andrew’s ambiva-
lence, they now—once Jonathan’s “secret” was out—“tried” to under-
stand and accept each other better. She felt that there was at least some
promise in this effort toward a closer bond between them.
The reaction of Warren, Kathy’s boyfriend, was helpful to both
Kathy and the rest of the family. Warren may have had some notion
prior to Jonathan’s coming out that Jonathan might be gay. Kathy con-
fided the news to Warren a day or two after Jonathan had told her. His
reaction “was real wonderful, you know? It was so nice. He said, ‘That
kid’s got a lot of guts. It takes a lot to get it out.’ ”
There was thus a shift in Jonathan’s relationship to Warren. Kathy
recalled: “Jonathan’s reaction at first [on meeting Warren] was like he
couldn’t even be in the same room with him, but he was polite. And from
that has grown a real genuine caring. I can see that Jonathan is happy that
I have someone in my life that I love, and he likes Warren.”
Perhaps Warren’s new-found respect for Jonathan has earned
Jonathan’s warm response. However, one might also speculate that
Jonathan has “let go” as well. He has relinquished his own internalized
sense of excessive responsibility for his mother’s well-being, allowing
Warren to fulfill his appropriate role in Kathy’s life.
As a result of Jonathan’s coming out, the postdivorce alignments
that, like a logjam, had blocked the flow of change and growth for the
whole family, were dislodged. As difficult as the situation was at the
time, the “Kathy-Jonathan-Steven” axis became more differentiated.
Kathy commented, “This has created new ways of looking at things and
adjusting. We’ve all had to learn to separate, and that’s painful.”
Jonathan and his older brother, Michael, began to form a new relation-
ship as well: “Jonathan isn’t passive anymore. Michael has always been
sort of the brute and Jonathan isn’t allowing it anymore,” Kathy
observed. Once Jonathan claimed himself, a more equal distribution of
power between siblings began to become possible.
The transformative and “corrective” power of coming out is evident
in the lives of the O’Donnells, who had been frozen in a postdivorce

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 The Family Renewed: Integration

configuration. The adolescent developmental process was unleashed for

Jonathan. His personality became more integrated both internally and
(in relationship to his family, neighbors, and friends) externally.
Jonathan’s coming out also allowed the rest of the family to redefine
itself. Jonathan, his mother, and his brother Michael were all freed from
a constrictive set of expectations and roles. While it remained to be seen
how Steven would handle the homophobia that he learned from his
peers, and while we had no way of anticipating the O’Donnells’ future,
at the time of the interview much that was constructive had already been
engendered by Jonathan’s act of self-disclosure. Progress, while not cer-
tain, was likely. As Kathy O’Donnell concluded, “Seeing my children as
separate from me, people who make their own choices, that’s been a
tremendously positive thing here; on the positive side, that’s probably
been the greatest.”

The Jarrett Family—Finding the Missing Piece

The Jarretts too came a long distance in a short time. At the time of
our interview they had arrived at a place where they accepted their son’s
homosexuality and felt that they could also appreciate that it made some
contribution to their own lives. Matt Jarrett, a minister, and his wife,
Susan, had felt that they had reason to worry about their younger son,
Kurt, from his early childhood. Born with a birth defect that, while not
disfiguring, mildly affected his coordination and his speech, Kurt faced
numerous difficulties throughout childhood. Matt and Susan could cope
with the medical aspects. What they found much more difficult to cope
with, however, was Kurt’s unhappy relationships with his peers. The
speech and coordination problems became a focus of taunting from
other children. Matt and Susan tried always to encourage Kurt and instill
in him pride and self-esteem, along with their own strong faith that their
religion afforded them. But they felt frustrated and helpless as they
watched him isolate himself.
The Jarretts had another son, Eric, five years older than Kurt, who,
according to Susan, had always made friends easily. He was something
of a “golden boy”—easy-going, successful, and affable. As Susan
described Eric: “Maybe if our first son hadn’t been so popular, the con-
trast between him and Kurt wouldn’t have been so great; but it was like
night and day!” Kurt was always wary of children his own age. As Susan

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The Family Renewed: Integration

explained, “He really did not bond well with his peers. So for a lot of
years it was really just the three of us [Matt, Susan, and Kurt].” In fact,
Kurt’s dependence on his parents and inability to separate became so
problematic that at one point they sought counseling, which Susan
recalled as being only moderately helpful. Kurt did fairly well academi-
cally in high school, but he continued to insulate himself from rejection
by closely involving himself with his parents. Matt and Susan, in the
meantime, prided themselves on the open communication and closeness
in their family, which continued until Kurt completed high school.
Kurt chose to live at home while going to a nearby college. College
precipitated a crisis for him, just as it had for the O’Donnell’s son
Jonathan. Kurt’s grades plummeted, and he changed schools. His par-
ents were perplexed about this sudden academic nosedive. It was then
that Kurt confided to his father that he thought he might be gay. Matt
dismissed the confidence, responding, “Well, we all fall somewhere on a
scale, but don’t label yourself until you know for sure.” However, he
was also quick to add, “I don’t think you’re gay,” and as Kurt requested,
he told no one about their discussion.
When Kurt was a college junior, Matt took a position in another
city—which meant that for the first time, Kurt would be on his own.
Matt and Susan moved away. Kurt began to live in a dorm. Susan com-
mented, “I think before he kind of used us as his social contact. Our
move forced Kurt to get out of it more and take care of himself.”
So he did. Kurt began to acknowledge his sexual orientation more
fully and sought out the campus gay group for support. Susan observed:
I don’t think he would have done this if we ’d been there. I think it
forced him to look at himself. We were kind of his basic support sys-
tem and when that was gone, he tried to look into himself more and
figure himself out. In May he came down on the train and we went
out to dinner to a Mexican restaurant—I’ll never forget it. He just
kind of blurted it out over the meal. I don’t know why but it didn’t
particularly surprise me. He felt so proud of himself: it was like he
was telling us something wonderful had happened, so I couldn’t feel
bad. And then he pulled out a picture of a young man. On the back
this man had written a very touching statement of friendship for
Kurt. All through the years I had just waited for him to show me a pic-
ture of a young woman. I just gave him a big hug and said, “I’m so
happy for you,” and I was because he had finally found someone he

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 The Family Renewed: Integration

could care about, who cared about him. It wasn’t a young lady, which
I had secretly hoped for all these years, but because he seemed so gen-
erally pleased and happy, my initial reaction—it was okay. So that
was just last May—not very long ago. Obviously, he had done his
homework in that group. He told us they had spent a lot of time talk-
ing about how to come out to your parents.
Susan revealed in the interview not only her relief that her son had
finally found some joy and comfort in his life but also her relief that what
had perplexed her before was now clear:
It was like it was the missing piece of a puzzle for me. It answered a
lot of questions for me about Kurt’s inability to form close relation-
ships with young girls, and with boys, too. These feelings must have
been within him for a long time and made him awkward and unnat-
ural with his peers. It was kind of that missing piece of the puzzle; it
kind of told me why he was with us so much. We were safe and
accepting and obviously he’d been wrestling with this for years and I
could sense within him that relief. He too had found that missing
piece of his life. He seemed so happy and he does to this day seem so
much happier.
Susan emphasized that she felt a sense of genuine hope about her son
for perhaps the first time:
I’ve always been so concerned about him because of his medical
problems and his inability to form close relationships with his
peers. It’s almost like now I could feel, “Okay, he can go and live
now.” It was almost a celebration, although I know that’s naive. I
know it’s going to be hard for him, but at least everything is out on
the table.

Her relief and hope were tinged with anguish, at least in part because of
her realization of the difficulties that a homophobic society would be
likely to impose on her son. She knew she must find support to help her
deal with this anguish.
Her husband, Matt, also needed support. Matt was able to work his
way out of the panic he had felt at Kurt’s first disclosure, when Kurt was
a freshman. But Matt, like his wife, was not yet entirely comfortable
about his son’s homosexuality because of his fears about the reactions

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The Family Renewed: Integration

from a homophobic world. However, he too felt that Kurt’s honesty and
self-assertion could only be for the good:
I’m a little more comfortable accepting Kurt the way he is now. As a
father, I always wanted him to fit the ideal male image. I was a little
uncomfortable with Kurt in public because he didn’t act as appropri-
ately as, let’s say, Eric. But my discomfort has diminished in recent
years, although it’s not completely gone. I guess I still have in the back
of my mind some ideal for him—which isn’t reality. He has really
matured. His telling us he’s gay has been better for our relationship.
He’s not so guarded . . . he can be more real. His telling us represents
his knowing himself better. My hopes for Kurt’s future are brighter
now. He’s doing very much better academically. He’s back on track.
Matt’s adjustment did not come easily. Through a counselor he and
Susan were referred to Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and
Gays (PFLAG). Their willingness to attend a PFLAG meeting demon-
strated the kind of “active love” described earlier, which has the poten-
tial of generating immense growth. Susan recalled the drama of her first
PFLAG meeting:
It was very difficult sitting in a large circle, going around introducing
ourselves, and I just couldn’t talk. I said our name and then I started
to say “Our son is gay” and then I just broke down and wept—
because I had never said that out loud, let alone to a group of
strangers—that was really hard.
Despite the initial discomfort that both Matt and Susan experienced,
they declared in our interview that they derived immense benefit from
their PFLAG experience. For Susan, the best aspect of it was “the under-
standing of that community of what I’m going through as the parent of
a gay child and everything that means. The common bond. . . . So far,
it’s all just been positive. As we get on in all of this, I suppose there ’ll be
some things lacking, but right now it’s all still so new that we ’re just lap-
ping it up, so to speak.”
They continued to worry about their son, but the worry focused on a
set of milestones that they could anticipate. As Susan explained:
We talk about what it means for Kurt and his life and what it will mean
for us as he becomes more open with other people, and things we’re
afraid of—what will people think in the church? We’re just barely

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 The Family Renewed: Integration

able to talk about what it will mean for Kurt when he gets into a rela-
tionship, and how that will affect us. It’s one thing saying we accept it
and another now to actually live that out. But I trust that will happen.
We are trying to become more comfortable with the fact of it our-
selves personally, by reading, by getting to know the gay community
better. By becoming more familiar with what all this means, so that
when we are open as parents, we’ll be open out of strength, not weepy
or wishy-washy, so that we’ll be well-grounded emotionally and
intellectually. I don’t know if that will ever happen, but I hope it will.

Susan agreed also that Kurt’s coming out has brought her and her hus-
band closer together. As she described it, “I feel more intimacy. I guess
it’s because it’s another thing we’ve gone through together.”
Susan had always been puzzled by the differences between her two
sons, but she now saw those differences in a new light. She was grateful
that Eric responded well to Kurt’s disclosure, that he had always stood
solidly in life and the news did not shake him. But she was especially
touched that Kurt had finally come in to his own, and that he now
claimed his strength in a very real sense, even becoming her teacher:
Kurt seems just years ahead of his older brother in terms of self-
understanding because he’s had to do some work that other young
people haven’t had to do. Eric is kind of the perfect kid, so I don’t feel
like I’ve learned so much from him. I love him, but it’s kind of
through Kurt’s struggles the I’ve become a more complete person. As
a young parent, when Kurt was having so many problems with rela-
tionships (which I had never had), it sort of perked my awareness of
the “loner,” the isolated person, people who aren’t part of the “in”
group. It’s made me a more tolerant person. I’ve been learning from
Kurt my whole adult life and this is kind of just another opportunity.
She concluded with a metaphor in which we found wisdom and love:
“Eric was always a flower and Kurt was like a seed that turned into a
flower garden. Eric was always fine, but Kurt was always up for grabs
because of this physical problem. And then he just transcended it. He
became a flower garden. He just really blossomed!”


 ▼ 6

You Have Something

to Hear
New Cultural Ideals
When parents choose to integrate their gay or lesbian child fully into
their lives, they commit an act of love and heroism. For the love of their
child, they challenge their friends, family, and neighbors. They confront
an array of cultural institutions and centuries of social history that
would consign them and their child to ignominy. Each step toward inte-
gration helps to move our culture away from the universal imperative of
an ideal that oppresses lesbians, gay men, and their families because it
shames them.

A Brief History of the Stigmatizing of Homosexuality

The social history of homosexuality can be traced now due to the
efforts of a new generation of historians, sociologists, and anthropolo-
gists who have discovered a complex story about same-sex relations in
culture and society.1 As these scholars have shown, homophobia evolved
through the ages. Homosexuality was deemed at some points in time a
sin, at other points “moral degeneracy,” at others a “disease,” and now,
more recently, a “destructive lifestyle” or a “genetic flaw.” Each classifi-
cation or attribution continued to promote the stigmatization of same-
sex love. But all these negative terms reflect more myth than science or
moral profundity. They are the signs of a shame culture and a history
that assigns blame for being lesbian or gay. The historical attempts to
classify, categorize, morbidify, criminalize, and condemn love between
women or love between men also reflect a culture ’s wish to validate a
central organizing principle for all human relationships. But that princi-
ple is no longer relevant to everyone, nor is it necessary in order for soci-
ety to thrive that the principle be universally followed.
The Church’s aim to stigmatize homosexuality, as scholars have
argued, grew out of the politics and ascetic movements of its early his-
tory and an over-riding emphasis on the promotion of procreation.
With the Enlightenment, medical science began to supplant religion in
Western culture. Though the Enlightenment valorized rationality, sex-

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You Have Something to Hear

ual deviance continued to be treated harshly, even by execution. It is

within the context of scientific study and the classification of sexual dif-
ferences that the identity of “the homosexual” eventually emerged, dur-
ing the second half of the nineteenth century.
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medical men, such as
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, and Sigmund Freud,
attempted to lessen antihomosexual prejudices by explaining homosex-
uality as a medical rather than a moral problem. But their well-inten-
tioned efforts were in the end very destructive. This line of thinking was
to allow the Nazis, later in the twentieth century, to condemn and mur-
der homosexuals as “diseased.” And for a very long time in the twenti-
eth century, many authorities, including those who were compassionate
and did not believe that homosexuality merited imprisonment or pun-
ishment, nevertheless continued to view it as an innate sickness that
required treatment.2
Scientific sexology was divided over these theories in the first half of
the twentieth century. Freud, for instance, early in his career, developed
a “degeneration” theory about homosexuality. More than thirty years
later, however, in his famous  letter to an American mother, Freud
suggested that homosexuality was “no vice, no degradation [and] cannot
be classified as an illness.” Freud argued that homosexuality, like left-
handedness, could probably not be changed and should be accepted by
the homosexual and his family.
However, by the s a number of American psychiatrists sought to
reinstate the “disease model,” arguing that homosexuality was caused by
bad parenting. For many years, psychoanalytic study continued to per-
petuate this false idea.3 Homosexuality was labeled a mental illness, a
point of view that flourished in mid-twentieth-century America, partic-
ularly during the s when the pressure of Cold War toward confor-
mity was at its height. The homosexual became a key target for black-
mail and arrest, an object of scorn, and was even associated with com-
munism and traitorous conduct. Raids on gay bars and even gay
people’s private parties were common. Scandal was frequent, since peo-
ple arrested as homosexuals often had their names published in the
newspapers. Mistrust was high and secrecy seemed tantamount to sur-
vival.
It is against this backdrop that the first real challenges to heterosexual
orthodoxy and homosexual secrecy emerged. First came the Kinsey

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 You Have Something to Hear

Reports, which documented that homosexual behavior was far more

common in the United States than had previously been believed. In addi-
tion, anthropological studies began to reveal that many societies permit
the expression of same-sex desire, often in childhood and adolescence,
and that some extend the approval of same-sex relations into adult-
hood.4 In the early s, for example, sociologist Clelland Ford and
biologist Frank Beach5 showed that sexual practice varied enormously
across a sample of many societies around the world. Homosexual prac-
tice was approved and permitted for some persons in more than  per-
cent of the groups they surveyed. Shortly thereafter, the great American
psychologist Evelyn Hooker6 offered a critique of existing research on
homosexuality as a disease. Hooker interviewed numerous self-identi-
fied homosexual men and showed that homosexuals who were not in
clinical treatment for emotional problems had no greater incidence of
psychological impairment or disturbed relations than their heterosexual
counterparts. She also suggested that the stigmatizing of homosexuality
was far more harmful to the psychological well-being of gay men than
any aspect of homosexuality itself.
In addition, with the introduction of widespread birth control and the
emergence of the sexual liberation movement in the s, the absolute
link between sex and procreation was broken. If sex between a man and
a woman could be viewed primarily as a form of human expression and
source of pleasure rather than being exclusively the means to reproduc-
tion of the species, then justice demanded that the prejudice against
same-sex relationships be questioned. The civil rights struggles and the
women’s liberation movement in the s also influenced a new and
more humanistic psychology that looked seriously at the problems of
power, oppression, discrimination, and abuse in society. Gays and les-
bians in the s and s increasingly came to see themselves as an
oppressed group and began to challenge actively the notion of homo-
sexuality as a mental illness, a sin, or a crime.
The famous Stonewall Inn riots in New York in, now celebrated
every June through the commemoration of the Gay and Lesbian Pride
Day Parade, was a watershed. The riots took place on a sultry summer
evening, when a typical police raid on a homosexual tavern did not lead
to the usual intimidation or slinking away: instead, homosexuals fought
back. The Stonewall riots marked the symbolic beginning of a long
movement to end discrimination based upon sexual orientation.

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You Have Something to Hear

A new American culture-formation of individual development began

to distinguish between the identity constructs of “homosexual” and
those of “gay” or “lesbian.”7 The gay and lesbian rights movement
largely rejected the term “homosexual,” which was created in the nine-
teenth century under the influence of the disease model and (s mil-
itants argued) resulted in feelings of secrecy and shame. The terms
“gay” and “lesbian” were more widely adopted and fostered pride and
dignity. David Leavitt’s novel The Lost Language of Cranes eloquently
captures the difference between the pre- and post-Stonewall genera-
tions. Leavitt presents a closeted homosexual father, who fears the
shame of his desires and blames himself for the failure of his marriage,
and his openly gay son, who takes pride in his aspirations, including the
desire to have a lover and be open to his parents.
Sweeping cultural change and more empirically sound research soon
made it apparent that the notion of homosexuality as “illness” has no
basis in science, and that the notion’s only purpose was to perpetuate
stigmatizing myths. In  the American Psychiatric Association offi-
cially declassified homosexuality as a mental illness. Since then scholars
and mental health professionals have, by-and-large, understood lesbian
and gay lifeways as alternative paths of human development.8 Many
religious groups are trying to overcome homosexuality’s stigmatized
history in a variety of ways, such as the sanctioning of same-sex mar-
riage and the ordination of gay and lesbian clergy. In spite of this
progress, however, discrimination against homosexuals remains legal in
many places in the land. Indeed, about twenty states of the United States
continue to sanction “sodomy” laws and other forms of legal prohibi-
tion of homosexuality.

Eliminating Shame-Based Thinking

In light of the history of homophobia, it is perhaps easy to under-
stand why the vestiges of what we call the “shame-based” approaches to
homosexuality continue to permeate our culture in general, and the
thinking of many parents in particular. In her book, Parents Matter, Ann
Muller speaks cogently of the shame that many parents still feel upon
hearing the news that their child is gay. She has tried to analyze why par-
ents often feel blamed—by society, by their families, and by themselves.
Her insight reminds us of the negative effects of antiquated notions

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 You Have Something to Hear

about homosexuality on parents who are grappling with accepting the

news of their child’s sexual orientation:
The pathologic view of parents as the cause of homosexuality is still
widely believed. Freud’s dominant mother and weak father have
become a pervasive part of our culture, the trolls of psychiatry. The
very imprecision of the Freudian and neo-Freudian categories of
parental guilt encourages their continued application. The theory
allows the unsophisticated to feel smug, to play doctor. It makes the
parents of young children nervous and self-conscious. How much
love is enough love? It allows lesbian daughters and gay sons to
blame their parents. It creates massive guilt, emotional pain, and self-
imposed isolation from parents.
The “reparative therapy” approaches, which claim to convert homo-
sexual people into heterosexuals, represent another attempt of pseudo-
science, under the cloak of medical authority, to demean lesbians, gay
men, and their families. As researcher Timothy Murphy concludes in his
review of attempts to redirect sexual orientation, “there would be no
reorientation techniques where there was no interpretation that homo-
eroticism is an inferior state.”9 Clearly the heroic struggle that parents
and their gay and lesbian children face is to confront these remnants of
an earlier era, acknowledge their destructive impact, and develop a new
set of cultural ideals more suitable to the reality of who they are and
what they require to build meaningful lives.

Loving Through Action: The Carlsons

In our study we were fortunate to encounter parents who committed
themselves to just such heroic labors. In one case, through a series of
courageous steps, a family confronted and perhaps transformed the cen-
tral institution in their lives—their church. Ann and Joseph Carlson,
who were seventy-one and seventy-three years old respectively, had
been married for more than forty-seven years. They had six children,
and their son Mark, the third child, was thirty-nine years old and gay. In
Ann’s eyes her marriage was a blessing, as she told us, and she and her
husband continued to feel blessed, even in their retirement years.
When Mark disclosed to his parents some ten years before our inter-
view that he was gay, the reaction of his father, according to Ann, was

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You Have Something to Hear

“positive and relieved.” Joseph had long wondered if his son was homo-
sexual but he did not want to pry into his life. They “did not want to
probe,” Ann said, because they are “not the kind of people to ask about
sexuality.” Both Joseph and Ann believed that it was a hopeful sign that
Mark would bring up the issue at last, since for many years they had har-
bored worry and speculation about the hidden areas of Mark’s life. Mark
chose to disclose his homosexuality by writing a letter to his parents.
“That night I read the letter and then Joseph did. We had none of that
attitude, ‘I don’t know but he’s not our son’ stuff. Some children even
swear one parent to secrecy. I couldn’t live like that,” Ann told us.
At the time Ann and Joseph were both very active in the United
Methodist Church, where they were lay ministers. Ann remembered:
We needed to share [the news of Mark’s coming out] with somebody.
We needed information. Because of our connection with the church, it
seemed the logical place to go. We’d been told all our lives that pastors
do that. He responded lovingly. Not judgmental. He listened. Assured
us we weren’t the only people in the world with a gay son. I think he
himself still has trouble with the subject. It’s such a political football in
the Methodist Church. He doesn’t have any problem with homosexu-
als, but he doesn’t want them ordained. . . . We were in the mood for
telling people anyway. We were not about to keep our child hidden.
Talking to our pastor reinforced our ability to tell others. After we got
Mark’s letter, the next Sunday, Joseph was supposed to lead our church
study group in a discussion of homosexuality. [This was coincidence,
she said.] But we decided not to tell the group about Mark’s letter.
However, at that next meeting, a woman who’d been at the previous
meeting said if her son was gay, she’d pray about him, and love him—
until he changed! I said, “Now—Mona, he won’t change.” Then I told
the group that Joseph had something to say. [Ann said that she did this
spontaneously, and Joseph was surprised but agreed to go on.] We told
them, and you could hear a pin drop. Total silence. One dear old
woman, she’s ninety now, said it did not matter, she still loved Mark.
Another man squeezed me on the shoulder . . . his son had all the ear-
marks of being gay—lived with another man for years.

This was the beginning of many discussions about homosexuality in the

congregation, as Ann told us:


 You Have Something to Hear

A year later, Joseph was a delegate to the Methodist conference, and

there was a family resolution that would be very detrimental to les-
bians and gays. He stood up and said he had children and that the
motion would hurt them. He was very emotional. It was very early in
our coming out process. Other people were sympathetic and got to
the microphone and the motion was tabled. People told Joseph he did
more good by putting family and faces to the gay issue.
When Ann told the last part of her story, it was clear how proud she
was of her husband and the role he had played in opposing prejudice.
Indeed, she had reason to be proud. Not only had they successfully nego-
tiated the difficult process of accepting their son’s homosexuality, but they
had made use of their church as a means of support and a means to come
out themselves. And they were taking a part in changing society through
the church. Ann also noted how these pursuits and others involving advo-
cacy for their gay son “deepened” her relationship with her spouse.
It is not our intention to argue here that the only approach to inte-
grating a gay or lesbian child successfully is to take public stands at every
opportunity. But we do maintain that, as families become more inte-
grated, it becomes increasingly difficult for them not to want to confront
displays of homophobia and heterosexism. One’s consciousness of the
effects of homophobia is heightened by having to deal with them in per-
sonal ways: therefore, when the child one loves is hurt by ignorant cul-
tural prejudices, it is hard not to want to combat homophobia. Parents
who can do this find new and positive meaning in their child’s disclosure.
To challenge homophobia is to challenge the forces that make a social
and cultural exile of the beloved gay or lesbian child and endanger the
relationship between lesbian and gay children and their parents. The
loving parents of a gay or lesbian child may even find it impossible to
keep silent when encountering the dehumanizing forces that are
unleashed by homophobia, whether they be manifested in discrimina-
tory religious policies that fail to uphold “the family”—their family—or
discriminatory laws that threaten to harm their gay or lesbian child.

Something to Hear
We, the authors of this book (two gay men) are not parents of lesbian
or gay children, but our research entailed our talking to scores of such


You Have Something to Hear

parents. We wish to end this book with a discussion about what we

believe those parents who have successfully integrated their lesbian or
gay children into their families would want you, our readers, to hear.
Our “advice” to you for achieving successful integration derives first
and foremost from what these parents have observed and reported to us.
If your child has recently disclosed his or her sexual orientation to
you, try to understand the motivation. More often than not, your child
wants to include you in his or her life more fully than before. He or she
has acted courageously in telling you what has been secret and very dif-
ficult to reveal. That act alone is worthy of your respect. Your child’s
disclosure to you may well be a sign that he or she is feeling more confi-
dent, as well as more loving, than ever. Take comfort in such positive
development.
Though you may have the wisdom of years regarding many life
experiences, understand that your child knows more than you do about
what it means to be lesbian or gay. He or she has probably already met
or become friends with many more lesbian or gay people, read more,
been exposed to more information and become more involved in the gay
and lesbian community than you have had either the opportunity or the
desire to do. Lesbians and gays have generally had a chance to separate
myth from reality and have a fuller understanding of the process of
coming to terms with all of this. A gay or lesbian child can be a vital
resource to you now, especially as you weigh the impact of disclosing to
others that you are the parent of a gay or lesbian child.
The issues you face after the child’s disclosure are quite new, to be
sure, but consider how you have faced other challenges in the past. What
principles guided you in the past toward a successful outcome? Who was
there for you? How did you and others in your family operate to ensure
that the crisis could be met? You may find in those experiences a way of
approaching this challenge and clues for taking positive action.
Find and access the most useful resources for both information and
support. Surely the best resource is Parents, Families and Friends of Les-
bians and Gays (PFLAG), whose website, (www.pflag.org) can guide
you to your local PFLAG chapters, as well as to articles, books, pam-
phlets, and even other relevant websites. Consider also local gay news-
papers, gay groups on nearby college campuses, local gay helplines, and
other gay organizations in your community as possible sources of infor-
mation. (See also appendix .)


 You Have Something to Hear

In a society that is condemning of homosexuality and gay and lesbian

people, it can be particularly useful to access family counselors, psy-
chotherapists, or clergy who are knowledgeable about these issues and
sympathetic to your needs. Helping professionals who understand the
issues that have been presented here can assist your family in progress-
ing through these phases with greater comfort. They can also help to
guide you to additional resources and to facilitate dialogue within your
family. While psychotherapy and counseling involve significant time,
money, and effort, and cannot solve all problems, many have found these
sources of support from sympathetic and informed mental health pro-
fessionals extremely valuable, and we endorse them too.
Talking with other parents of lesbians and gay men is invaluable.
Though there were some parents in our study who were too fearful to do
so, many of them found talking with other parents to be particularly
rewarding in helping them to feel that they are not alone, that they have
no reason to feel shame or guilt, and that there are others who under-
stand them. Some parents who are too embarrassed by their confused
reactions to share them fully with their children can find great comfort
in sharing them with other parents who “have been there.” Those other
parents, who have gone through similar experiences, can also help the
floundering parent address problems that emerge along the way and
serve as role models. Again, PFLAG meetings can be the best place to
start, though other supports can also be critical.
In fact, it appeared to be particularly important for families to iden-
tify a “first tier” of individuals in their lives who were likely to be sup-
portive. Brothers and sisters, friends at work, even grandparents, can
sometimes be a source of comfort and reassurance. Disclosure (whether
by the gay or lesbian child to the parents or by the parents to others) is
best when it represents an invitation to another to become more a part of
your life. Consider those you would like to have closer to you now and
bring them into your circle of support and confidence.
Collaborate in determining who should be told, when, and how. The
families we interviewed who were the most successfully integrated
shared a common understanding of the value of “coming out,” but they
didn’t necessarily start out that way. Rather, parents spoke with each
other and with their children about the various choices surrounding dis-
closure and arrived at an understanding over time.
At all times consider the costs of secrecy to you, your gay or lesbian


You Have Something to Hear

child, and to your relationship with them. Any time you—or your
spouse or your child—choose to conceal sexual orientation, you may be
setting a pattern that prohibits further integration. When you choose to
conceal your child’s sexual orientation from those closest to you, you
may preclude the integration of other vital aspects of your child’s life,
such as his or her primary relationship. Should you still choose not to
disclose, whether it be out of fear, discomfort, or unpreparedness, be
sure to discuss with others that you trust the potential effects of this deci-
sion and acknowledge the feelings associated with it. In time you might
also want to review your decisions on this matter, much as you would
check from time to time the wisdom of other major decisions in your
life. Perhaps the reasons that once made secrecy seem so necessary to
you have ceased to exist.
Get to know other lesbian and gay people. As you move beyond your
own stereotypes, you can see your own child more clearly and love her or
him more fully. As you see the variety of lesbians and gay men and the
lives they lead, you can begin to envision a good future for your own child
and to provide support toward its attainment. But, as the most integrated
families learned, you can also begin to let go—to allow your role as par-
ent to recede a bit as you see another child successfully launched into a
rapidly changing world. You can make a commitment to be there when
needed, but you are free to pursue other aspects of your own identity. In
so doing, you can form a new connection with your child as two adults
experiencing the excitement and pleasure of learning and growing anew.
Integration is a process, not an event. It will take time. To borrow the
words of the great civil rights motto, “Keep your eyes on the prize!” The
goal in this entire endeavor of integrating your lesbian or gay child into
the family is to strengthen the family and make it whole.
One way that a family manifests its strength is by manifesting
through action the love they have for one another. That action may be
merely personal (e.g., advocating for your child with other family mem-
bers so that his or her life partner will be included in extended family
events, acknowledging their anniversaries, speaking up when a col-
league makes a disparaging remark, welcoming the family of your
child’s partner). Or it may be more political (e.g., promoting change in
the policies of your school or church, or contributing time or money to
PFLAG or other worthwhile organizations). In all of these ways you
manifest your willingness to act on you love for your child.


 You Have Something to Hear

Based on what we learned from the interviews, we also offer a series

of questions to ask yourself as you become more conscious of the
choices that you may have before you as a parent. These are the ques-
tions we believe the most integrated of families have, in one form or
another, learned to ask themselves. Central to them is the question, How
are my actions regarding my gay or lesbian child different from what
they would be if he or she were heterosexual?
• Am I less inclined to share information about my child with friends
and family for fear of having to disclose the child’s sexual orientation?
• Am I less willing to extend myself to my child’s partner or the part-
ner’s family than I would be if they were a heterosexual couple?
• Am I more hesitant to confront a homophobic remark than I would be
to confront one that is racist or anti-Semitic?
• Do I ask less about my lesbian or gay child’s life for fear of encour-
aging her or him to be homosexual?
• Do I offer less to my gay or lesbian child than I would to my hetero-
sexual child because I view the gay or lesbian child as less worthy or
entitled?
• Do I allow a greater distance to come between me and my gay or les-
bian child than I would if my child were heterosexual?
• Do I sacrifice the well-being of my lesbian or gay child in conformity
to cultural standards that may no longer hold relevance and meaning
to my life or the life of that child? Do I take the path of least resistance
for the sake of timidity or comfort?
These are difficult questions, to be sure: yet they probably mirror the
questions that millions of lesbians and gay men must ask themselves
every day. The courage it takes to answer these questions honestly may
well set families on the path to overcoming unexamined cultural preju-
dices.

New Cultural Ideals to Sustain a National Family

We are grateful to the families that opened their lives to us. Through
their examples and their remarkable stories, we have learned a variety of
lessons. Most impressive of all, we have seen many of these families for-
mulate new ideals that we believe have much to offer to our rapidly
changing society. These new cultural ideals build on those values of


You Have Something to Hear

family, love, tolerance, respect, sacrifice, spirit, and commitment that we

all hold dear.
Predominant in these ideals must surely be the precept that healthy,
functioning families, in all their combinations and permutations, are
essential for social well-being. This is true for us as individuals, as well
as for our democracy. To the extent that families provide abundant love,
respect, and tolerance to their individual members, those members can
thrive and society can prosper from all their vital contributions. When
families allow shame and stigma to overcome them, the resources they
need to thrive are greatly diminished or even lost, and the very unit that
holds our society together—the family—unravels.
The families we interviewed who were most successful in integrating
their lesbian or gay children recognize same-sex relationships as a nor-
mal variation of intimate partnership and family formation. They
understand that the relationship between two men or two women carries
within it all of the potential for love, kindness, care, sacrifice, and com-
mitment that we associate with the relationship between a man and a
woman. When families act courageously by integrating their gay chil-
dren and their partners, they help those children to realize that potential,
and our society is better off for it.
Parents of integrated families have discerned that personal meaning
in this time of the new millennium need not be derived solely from the
fulfillment of a heterosexual lifecourse. Indeed, as the Steins, the Jar-
retts, the O’Donnells, the Carlsons, and others so amply demonstrate, a
great sense of purpose and meaning in life can come from fostering tol-
erance and understanding for diversity, beginning with their own fam-
ily. As these parents worked on recognizing and accepting difference,
their view of the world and their place in it expanded.
What better lesson for America—a society challenged as never
before by its diversity—than to see families, one by one, accepting and
cherishing diversity. We believe that the families we interviewed who
were most successful at integration grew to appreciate and value the
individuality of their children. It was that growth that permitted them to
weave into the fabric of their lives the unique experience of having a gay
or lesbian child and to offer their child the assurance of their love and
respect. May the example of their growth help our national family find
the strength and courage to do the same.


 ▼
Appendix 
Tables
The following table shows the level of positive initial response on a scale
of – where 1 is negative and 6 is positive, and the percentage of each
category of family who had had some thoughts prior to disclosure that
their child might be gay.

Table A Initial Responses and Previous Thoughts

Average initial Average initial Percentage of

response of mother response of father families who
had previously
thought their
child was
gay/lesbian
Integrated 3.64 3.70 30%
Ambivalent 3.43 2.88 25%
Disintegrated 2.43 1.80 57.1%

Table A Levels of Integration by Gender of Child

Gay Son Lesbian Daughter

Integration 81.8 18.2
Ambivalence 71.4 28.6
Disintegration 57.1 42.9


Appendix 

Specific integration criteria and the percentage of families in each cate-

gory that met them

Table A Criteria for Integration

Family type, percentage Disintegrated Ambivalent Integrated

Reported positive change
in relationship between
child and mother 11.1 40.9 69.2
Reported positive
change in relationship
between child and father 14.3 47.6 83.3
Reported positive
changes in relationship
between parents 37.5 52.4 66.7
Report positive effects
on family (closer, more
communicative,
change in roles) 33.3 60.9 53.8
Acknowledge child’s
improved state,
happiness 22.2 69.6 92.3
Expressed
appreciation of
positive contri-
bution child’s
coming out has
made to parent’s life 66.7 87.7 100
Have disclosed to
at least one
member of
extended family 11.1 78.3 100
Have disclosed to
two or more
members of
extended family 0 60.9 92.3
Have disclosed to
at least one friend
or coworker 66.7 95.7 100


 Appendix 

Table A (continued)

Family type, percentage Disintegrated Ambivalent Integrated

Have disclosed to
two or more friends
or coworkers 33.3 87 100
Include lover and/
or “in-laws,” even
with reservations 0 64.3 100
Include lover and/
or “in-laws,” without
significant reservations 0 7.7 100
Report involvement
in PFLAG or
gay/lesbian community 66.7 82.6 100


 ▼
Appendix 
Context and Methods
of the Study
T H I S S T U DY WA S T H E B R A I N C H I L D of the late developmental psy-
chologist, Andrew Boxer, who was deeply interested in parent-child
relationships, and the family. In collaboration with anthropologist
Gilbert Herdt, and later, psychotherapist/social worker Bruce Koff, the
study was begun in the late s. As we noted in the introduction, we
were able to contact a variety of parents of gays and lesbians who agreed
to discuss their experiences of their child’s coming out. The interview-
ers were typically older adults who were themselves heterosexual, gay,
and lesbian by orientation, and worked together as a team. The original
description and fuller findings and methods of the study are contained in
the publications of Boxer et al. (), Herdt (), and Herdt and
Boxer (), and we refer the interested reader to these key publications
for additional reading. Here we wish to examine the methods of our
study.
In our earlier study we examined the changing culture of American
homosexuality as constituted through four distinct generations or
cohorts (see Herdt and Boxer ). Cohort age-differences are likely to
have consequences for the study of development in general, and in par-
ticular with regard to parent-child relations. Although the oldest living
cohort dates from the turn of the century, many of these surviving per-
sons, now in their seventies and older, grew into adulthood and discov-
ered their same-sex desires typically without ever having “come out” to
parents or others. Today many of them remain largely invisible.
Whereas the oldest cohorts lived in secrecy and with fear, suffering the
psychosocial cost, today’s youth are developing a future life course by
coming out and living gay and lesbian lives (see the short annotated bib-
liography at the end of appendix , for suggestions of further reading to
illustrate this theme).
The motivations for and timing of coming out to parents are multi-
determined, as this book reveals. They include political and ideological
reasons; the need for honesty and the need to reduce the strains of pass-
ing or deception; increased confidence and self-esteem resulting from


Appendix 

self-acceptance; new personal relationships; anger and confrontation.

Disclosure of one’s gay/lesbian identity to parents can be a stressful and
anxiety-provoking situation for any individual. Few systematic studies
have thus far examined the coming out process and its impact on the
quality of the parent-child relationship; we have alluded to these
throughout the book. Previous investigations, largely based on case
reports, portray hiding one’s sexual identity from parents as resulting in
more distant relationships. Existing data indicate that between approxi-
mately  to  percent of homosexually or gay- and lesbian-identified
respondents have reported being open about their sexual orientation to
parents (reviewed in Boxer et al. ).
The parents in our study (approximately equally divided between
fathers and mothers) were recruited from two sources: the parents of
youth from the Horizons Community Services agency for gay and les-
bian teens in Chicago, and a local social support group for parents with
gay and lesbian children. It was primarily because of the youth group
that we were able to locate a few parents who were negative or from
families we would designate now as “disintegrated.” This is perhaps the
most difficult family constellation to interview, and few prior studies
have seen such parents. The second source of support was the local
PFLAG group in Chicago. This group was critical to our recruitment of
a broad mainstream. These parents were primarily white, middle- and
upper-middle-class, in their fifties, and with young adult sons and
daughters who had come out to them, mostly during the children’s
young adulthood. They were from Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic
families. A small number were from minority groups; those parents
were also middle-class. They sought social support through member-
ship in the parent group in order to assist them with various aspects of
this coming out process. Obviously, our parents were not a random
sample; rather, they reflect the constraints of working through volun-
tary organizations. Consequently, these parents were generally more
likely to moving toward integration, as we have indicated earlier in the
text. This was also a somewhat older group of parents, as indicated in
the text by tables  and . The length of time since their children had
disclosed their homosexuality to them ranged from less than one year to
more than ten years. Each father/mother was individually adminis-
tered a semistructured interview and a battery of paper-and-pencil
assessments.


 Appendix 

Upon reading the interviews, we arrived at a number of indicators of

integration. We then identified key questions, the answers to which
served as indicators of integration. Following are the indicators for inte-
gration and the corresponding questions we used to elicit information. It
should be noted that, because of the narrative nature of the interview,
other questions may have at times elicited information relevant to these
indicators. Such information was factored into our analysis whenever
this occurred. We also realize that some questions did not adequately
elicit as much information as we might have liked or to the level of speci-
ficity desired. This was particularly true in determining the level of
“inclusion.” We made allowances for this in our analysis so that families
were not rated positively or negatively in respect to integration when
information was missing or insufficient.

Indicator 1: Positive changes in relationships between the

target child and the parent
A. Describe your relationship with your son/daughter.
B. In general, how would you say things go between you (=very poor,
=bad, =average, neither good nor bad, =good, =excellent)?
C. Is that the way your relationship has always been, or would you say
that things have changed between the two of you? What is different
now? What do you think caused these changes?
D. “How has your child’s coming out affected your relationship with
your spouse?” (Narrative responses to these changes were subse-
quently coded to indicate the direction of the change, i.e., better or
worse, and the focus of the change, i.e., change in self or change in
the child.)

Indicator : Expressions of appreciation of positive contribution

child’s coming out has made to parents life
A. How has learning about your child’s sexual orientation affected you
as an adult and as a parent? (Probes: How has it affected the way you
think of yourself as a parent? How has it affected the way you think
of yourself as an individual?)
B. What are the positive things that have happened to you concerning
your son/daughter’s coming out?


Appendix 

C. What has been the greatest burden regarding your child’s coming
out? Is there anything you can think of that is upsetting that has hap-
pened concerning your child’s coming out?

Indicators  and : Disclosure to others and inclusion

A. Who was the first person you told about your child’s sexual orienta-
tion? What was your reason for telling them? What was the situation
like? How did they respond? Did this experience affect your decision
to tell others (or not to tell others)? How? Why not?
B. Do any other members of your family know of your child’s sexual
orientation? Can you list them for me and tell me how they know of
it? Who told them? When were they told? How did they respond?
C. If other family members do not know, is it important to you or to
your child that your child’s sexual orientation be kept from them?
Why is that? Are there family members in particular who you feel
must not be told of it? Who? Why?
D. Have you discussed your child’s sexual orientation with others out-
side of the family? Who? What was it like? How did they respond?
How did you feel about it? If not, can you tell me about that?

Indicator : Positive effect on family

A. How has your child’s coming out/being gay affected the relation-
ships in your immediate family? (Probes: Has it brought your family
closer together? Has it moved you farther apart? Has it caused
changes among relationships within the family? What is the nature of
these changes? How did they occur?).

Indicator 6: Acknowledgment of child’s improved state

A. Describe your child for me. What is he/she like as a person? How has
he/she done in school? (Probe for educational attainments, occupa-
tional achievements, etc.)
B. What are the main worries or hassles that you see your child experi-
encing in her/his life right now?
C. How has your child been helpful/supportive of you in dealing with
his/her sexual orientation? Was there anything he/she did that made
it more stressful for you?


 Appendix 

Indicator 7: Involvement in PFLAG or gay community

A. Have you heard of PFLAG? Have you considered attending? What
affects your decision? How long have you been participating in
PFLAG?
B. Aside from PFLAG, who was the person, support, or resource that
you made most use of in dealing with your son/daughter having
come out to you?

Indicator : Capacity to project into the future

A. We all think about the future at times, wondering what life has in
store for us. We often make guesses or predictions about what might
happen in our lives. I would like you to make some guesses now about
your son’s/daughter’s life. What do you expect to happen in his/her
life? Tell me as many of these as you can. You don’t have to be
absolutely certain that what you guess will actually happen. A good
guess is good enough. (After each event, interviewer asks: At what
age is the event likely to occur?)
Responses to these questions were subsequently analyzed and
assigned a value of  or  based on whether or not such responses indi-
cated integration. These were added to arrive at an aggregate score for
integration. Other independent variables were measured against these
aggregate scores to determine possible correlation. These variables
included age of parent, age of child, degree of religiosity of the parent,
educational level, racial/ethnic background, gender of target child,
marital status of parent, when told, initial responses, and previous
thoughts that the child was gay or lesbian.
We found a propensity for parents to reflect upon the range of issues
involving their parenting. The parents raised basic questions, such as,
“Who is my child?” and “What do I really want for him/her?” Many of
the parents took the opportunity and made the most of it. This was an
opportunity for growth and personal development, coincident with their
own transitions in middle age and seniority. Some talked about feelings
of guilt, not related to the question of causality, but rather because of
their initially negative responses to the news that their child was gay or
lesbian. This introspective process frequently resulted in a more realis-
tic assessment of parental expectations as well as delineated boundaries
between parent and child. Part of this parental self-examination process


Appendix 

involved reshaping some of their parental fantasies (Cohen and Weiss-

man, ).
Every parent has a set of expectations about their children, including
an image of future life events—what those should be and when they
should occur. After parents had reoriented themselves to their children’s
new identity status, they restructured and altered some of their parental
expectations regarding the future life course of their children. Through
the reciprocal socialization from child to parent (Cook and Cohler
), many parents talked about being confronted with the reality of
their children’s sexual identity in a way they never experienced with
their heterosexual children. But more than sexuality, parents talked
about the many ways that they became socially and culturally enlight-
ened through the coming out process. Others talked about becoming
political activists.
In the earliest study of parents of gays by Ann Muller (), the
stories of many parents suggested that they became “stuck” in the
coming out process at an initial phase. They could not seem to go fur-
ther. They were able, in essence, to retreat to what Griffin, Wirth, and
Wirth () called the “ostrich effect,” that is, ignoring their chil-
dren’s homosexuality or pretending that it did not exist. However, the
accounts given by those parents who engaged in a high level of denial
highlight changes in their acceptance that occurred over time, as well
as the differing perceptions of mothers and fathers, in addition to
those of sons and daughters. We have also found among our sample of
parents that the historical time during which the parents (not the chil-
dren) began the coming out process affected how they were able to
negotiate the process. Just as there are now gay and lesbian adult role
models for the youth in our study, so too do parents today find role
models to support and facilitate their own coming out process. We
wish to emphasize that coming out is a process, not just an outcome.
The process of integration in the family context interfaces with the
psychosocial interior of the family as a whole, and with the life course
trajectories of individual family members. To understand this process
more adequately, future researchers must study the whole system
across time—even across a generation—to see how psychology and
culture are interacting.


 Appendix 

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boxer, A. M., J. A. Cook, and G. Herdt. “To Tell or Not to Tell: Patterns of
Self-Disclosure to Mothers and Fathers Reported by Gay and Lesbian
Youth.” In Parent-Child Relations Across the Lifespan, ed. K. Pillemer and K.
McCartney, pp. –. Oxford University Press, .
Cohen, R. S. and S. Weissman. “The Parenting Alliance.” In Parenthood: A
Psychodynamic Perspective, ed. R. S. Cohen, J. Cohler, and S. Weissman.
New York: Guilford, .
Cook, J. and B. J. Cohler. “Reciprocal Socialization and the Care of Offspring
with Cancer and with Schizophrenia.” In Life-Span Developmental Psychol-
ogy: Intergenerational Relations, ed. N. Datan, A. L. Greene, and H. W. Reese,
pp. –. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, .
Griffin, C. W., M. J. Wirth, and A. G. Wirth. Beyond Acceptance: Parents of Les-
bians and Gays Talk About Their Experiences. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Pren-
tice-Hall, .
Herdt, Gilbert. “Coming Out as a Rite of Passage: A Chicago Study.” In Gay
Culture in America, ed. G. Herdt, pp. –. Boston: Beacon, .
Herdt, Gilbert and Andrew Boxer. Children of Horizons. Boston: Beacon, .
Muller, Anne. Parents Matter. New York: Naiad, .


 ▼
Appendix 
Resources
 to provide some
I T I S O U R H O P E T H AT T H I S B O O K W I L L S E RV E
reassurance to parents, families, and helping professionals that there is a
path toward wholeness and well-being upon learning that a child is gay
or lesbian. We believe that other resources can be helpful as well. A vari-
ety of local resources exist within most cities and even small towns and
rural areas. If you are unfamiliar with the resources in your area, con-
sider the following steps:
. Contact PFLAG (see below) to locate the chapter nearest to you and
obtain literature and other assistance.
. Contact the nearest college or university to see if they have a campus
organization for lesbian, gay, and bisexual students.
. Consult a local gay/lesbian newspaper, or other newspapers that
may appeal to youth or provide guides to cultural and community
events.
. Contact a local mental health association or center and ask for a refer-
ral to a mental health professional who is affirming and knowledge-
able about gay and lesbian issues.
. Contact clergy who you believe will be sympathetic and knowledge-
able about gay and lesbian issues.
. Check out telephone directories, including the Yellow Pages, as well
as guides and directories written specifically for the gay/lesbian
community that are available in larger cities. (These can be found in
book and music stores, clubs, bars, and community centers.)
. Visit a local bookstore or public library. Some bookstores, including
the larger chains, have sections devoted to gay and lesbian issues. On
occasion, books on homosexuality are placed (erroneously, we
think!) under “gender studies.”
. If you have access to the Internet, consider the following websites,
many of which provide links to a vast pool of information on homo-
sexuality, including articles, videos, and on-line discussion groups for
parents:


Appendix 

Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays:

www.pflag.org
My Child Is Gay! Now What Do I Do?:
www.pe.net/~bidstrup/parents.htm
The SafeTeen Project:
www.gayplace.com/project/project.html
E-Quality’s Religion & Homosexuality Links:
www.mrs.umn.edu/~pehng/Equality/religion.html

You may also do an online search and purchase books for parents of les-
bians and gays at the websites of major bookstore chains, including
Amazon (amazon.com) and Barnes and Noble (barnesandnoble.com).

National Organizations
The following national organizations can be of particular assistance:
. Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians
and Gays (PFLAG)
 th. St., N.W., Suite 
Washington, D.C. 
––
(www.pflag.org.)
. Human Rights Campaign
 th St., N.W, #
Washington, D.C. 
––
(www.hrusa.org.)
. Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund
 Wall St., #
New York, NY 
––
. National Center for Lesbian Rights
 Market St., #
San Francisco, CA 
––
 Broadway, #A


 Appendix 

New York, NY 

––
. National Gay and Lesbian Task Force
 th St. N.W.
Washington, D.C. 
––
. National Lesbian and Gay Health Association
 S St., N.W.
Washington, D.C. 
––
. Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network
 W. th St., #
New York, NY 
––

Additional Reading Resources

While there are few studies of the parents of gays and lesbians, with
the exception of the important work of Ann Muller, and Robert A.
Bernstein, noted below, several additional books and papers may be of
great help to the interested reader wishing to learn more of the general
area. We recommend the following texts:

Aarons, Leroy. Prayers for Bobby: A Mother’s Coming to Terms with the
Suicide of Her Gay Son. San Francisco: HarperCollins, .
Ben-Ari, Tirosch Adital. “It’s the Telling That Makes the Difference.”
In R. Josselson and Am Lielich, eds., Interpreting Experience: The
Narrative Study of Lives, : –. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage,
.
This is one of the most interesting studies of how gay men and lesbians come
out to their families in another culture. The setting is Israel, and through
highly rich and sensitive portraits, the author shows the plight of families
who experience difficulties with the sexuality of their children.
Bernstein, Robert A. Straight Parents, Gay Children: Keeping Families
Together. New York: Thunder’s Mouth, .
A highly readable personal account of how a father comes to terms with his
daughter’s homosexuality. The journalist reports on a variety of aspects and


Appendix 

problems of being a heterosexual parent of a lesbian or gay child, and makes

an impassioned plea for understanding and culture change.
Borhek, Mary V. Coming Out to Parents: A Two-Way Survival Guide for
Lesbians and Gay Men and Their Parents (rev. and updated). Cleve-
land, Ohio: Pilgrim, .
Boxer, A. M., J. A. Cook, and G. Herdt. “To Tell or Not to Tell: Patterns
of Self-Disclosure to Mothers and Fathers Reported by Gay and Les-
bian Youth.” In K. Pillemer and K. McCartney, eds., Parent-Child
Relations Across the Lifespan, pp. –. New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, .
This study contains extensive and rich data related to how adolescents who
are gay- and lesbian-identified seek to come out and create new identities
and relationships with parents and families. This was the first publication of
the Chicago Horizons study, which led to Herdt and Boxer’s Children of
Horizons in l. Highly recommended for detailed analysis of the sociolog-
ical and clinical patterns.
Cabaj, Robert P. and Terry S. Stein, eds. Textbook of Homosexuality and
Mental Health. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association
Press, .
The most comprehensive general textbook with a mental health perspective
on topics of gay and lesbian mental health available from the leading author-
ities in the field. While there is no entry on parents of gay men and lesbians,
the variety of essays on youth, couples, psychological well-being, and aging
are highly useful and recommended for practitioners and general readers
alike.
Clark, Don. Loving Someone Gay (rev. and updated). Millbrae, Conn.:
Celestial Arts Publication, .
Dew, Robb Forman. The Family Heart: A Memoir of When Our Son
Came Out. New York: Ballantine, .
Fairchild, Betty and Nancy Hayward. Now That You Know: What Every
Parent Should Know About Homosexuality. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, .
Griffin, Carolyn Welch, Marian J. Wirth, and Arthur G. Wirth. Beyond
Acceptance: Parents of Lesbians and Gays Tell About Their Experiences
(rev. and updated). New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, .
Herdt, Gilbert. “Introduction: Gay Youth, Emergent Identities, and
Cultural Scenes at Home and Abroad.” In G. Herdt, ed., Gay and
Lesbian Youth, pp. –. New York: Harrington, .


 Appendix 

This is the introduction to the first general reader on the topic of gay and les-
bian adolescence, with a number of selections that deal with aspects of fam-
ily life and parent/child relations.
——. Same Sex, Different Cultures. New York: Westview, .
This study is a short, cross-cultural study of the lives and issues confronting
gay men and lesbians around the world, including aspects of culture, family,
and community.
Herdt, G. and A. Boxer. Children of Horizons: How Gay and Lesbian
Youth Are Leading a New Way Out of the Closet. Boston: Beacon,
.
The first comprehensive community and developmental study of the com-
ing out process of adolescents in the United States. This study highlights
aspects of change and resilience in the lives of individuals and families and is
highly recommended for general readers and specialists.
Laird, Joan, and Robert-Jay Green, eds. Lesbians and Gays in Couples
and Families: A Handbook for Therapists. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,
.
Levine, Martin, Peter Nardi, and John Gagnon, eds. In Changing Times.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, .
A comprehensive examination of the impact of the AIDS epidemic on the
gay and lesbian community from some of the most significant observers and
commentators of the past quarter century.
Marcus, Eric. Is It a Choice? Answers to  of the Most Frequently Asked
Questions About Gays and Lesbians. San Francisco: HarperSanFran-
cisco, .
Muller, Ann. Parents Matter: Parents’ Relationships with Lesbian Daugh-
ters and Gay Sons. New York: Naiad, .
The first detailed study of the stories and lives of parents of gays and lesbians
as related by a mother of a gay son. The participants were largely derived
from PFLAG. This is a compassionate and astute study with many good
insights and is highly recommended.
Rafkin, Louise, ed. Different Daughters: A Book by Mothers of Lesbians.
Pittsburgh: Cleis, .
Ryan, Caitlin and Donna Futterman. Lesbian and Gay Youth: Care and
Counseling. New York: Columbia University Press, .
An award-winning comprehensive survey of the needs and resources for
adolescent and young adult gays and lesbians and their families. The mental
health discussions are particularly valuable for parents seeking answers to
critical questions.


 Notes

Introduction: When Your Child Says, “I Have Something to Tell You . . .”

. Robb Forman Dew, The Family Heart: A Memoir of When Our Son Came Out
(New York: Ballantine, ).
. G. B. McDonald, “Exploring Sexual Identity: Gay People and Their Fami-
lies,” Sex Education Coalition News, no. , p. , quoted by Ritch C. Savin-
Williams in “Coming Out to Parents and Self-Esteem Among Gay and Les-
bian Youths,” Journal of Homosexuality , nos. – (). A  study
demonstrated that gay males who see their parents’ approval as important to
their self-worth are more likely to have higher self-esteem if their homosex-
uality is accepted by their parents (Savin-Williams, “Coming Out to Par-
ents,” p. ).
. G. Herdt and A. M. Boxer, Children of Horizons: How Gay and Lesbian Teens
Are Leading a New Way Out of the Closet (Boston: Beacon, ), p. .
. Gary Ramafedi, James A. Farrow, and Robert W. Diesher, “Risk Factors
for Attempted Suicide in Gay and Bisexual Youth,” in Psychological Per-
spectives on Lesbian and Gay Male Experiences, eds. Linda D. Garnets and
Douglas C. Kimmel (New York: Columbia University Press, ), p. .
. Michelangelo Signorile, Life Outside: The Signorile Report on Gay Men—Sex,
Drugs, Muscles, and the Passages of Life (New York: Harper Collins, ).
. The Heterosexual Family Myth: How It Can Be Harmful

. P. Gibson, Gay Male and Lesbian Youth Suicide: Report of the Secretary’s
Task Force on Youth Suicide (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing
Office, DHHS pub. no. ADM, ), :–.
. National Conference of Catholic Bishops/United States Catholic Confer-
ence, Washington, D.C., February , .

. The Heterosexual Family Myth: How It Can Be Harmful

. George Weinberg, Society and the Healthy Homosexual (New York: St. Mar-
tin’s, ). See also Gilbert Herdt, “Introduction: Gay Youth, Emergent
Identities, and Cultural Scenes at Home and Abroad,” in Homosexuality and
Adolescence, ed. G. Herdt (New York: Harrington, ), pp. –.
. Tirosch Adital Ben-Ari, “It’s the Telling That Makes the Difference,” in
Interpreting Experience: The Narrative Study of Lives, eds. R. Josselson and
Am Lielich (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, ), :–.
. A. M. Boxer, J. A. Coo, and G. Herdt, “To Tell or Not to Tell: Patterns of
Self-Disclosure to Mothers and Fathers Reported by Gay and Lesbian
Youth,” in Parent-Child Relations Across the Lifespan, ed. K. Pillemer and K.
McCartney (New York: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –. See also
Caitlin Ryan and Donna Futterman, Lesbian and Gay Youth: Care and Coun-
seling (New York: Columbia University Press, ); Anthony R. D’Augelli
“Enhancing the Development of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Youths,” in
Preventing Heterosexism and Homophobia, eds. E. D. Rothblum and L. A.
Bond (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, ), pp. –; Joyce Hunter and
Robert Schaecher, “Gay and Lesbian Adolescents,” in Encyclopedia of Social
Work, th ed. (Washington, D.C.: NASW Press, ), pp. –.
. A. M. Boxer, B. Cohler, G. Herdt, and F. Irvin, “Gay and Lesbian Youth,”
in Handbook of Clinical Research and Practice with Adolescents, eds. P. H.
Tolan and B. J. Cohler (New York: John Wiley, ), pp. –. See also
G. Herdt, “Developmental Continuity as a Dimension of Sexual Orientation
Across Cultures,” in Homosexuality and Heterosexuality: The Kinsey Scale
and Current Research, eds. David McWhirter, J. Reinisch, and S. Sanders
(New York: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –; G. Herdt, “ ‘Com-
ing Out’ as a Rite of Passage: A Chicago Study,” in Gay Culture in America,
ed. G. Herdt (Boston: Beacon, ), pp. –; G. Herdt and A. M. Boxer,
“Epilogue: Growing Up Gay and Lesbian in the Time of AIDS,” in G. Herdt
and A. M. Boxer, Children of Horizons (Boston: Beacon, ).
. Gilbert Herdt, Same Sex, Different Cultures (New York: Westview, );
John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homo-
sexual Minority in the United States, – (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, ).


 . What Affects a Family’s Resilience?

. What Affects a Family’s Resilience?

. Froma Walsh, Strengthening Family Resilience (New York and London:
Guilford, ), p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Gina O’Connell Higgins, Resilient Adults: Overcoming a Cruel Past (San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass, ), p. .
. Walsh, Strengthening, p. .
. See, for example, Erik F. Strommen, “You’re a What? Family Member
Reactions to the Disclosure of Homosexuality,” in Psychological Perspectives
of Lesbian and Gay Male Experiences, eds. L. D. Garnetts and D. G. Kimmel
(New York: Columbia University Press, ), esp. pp. –.
. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s
Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ); Nancy J.
Chodorow, “Heterosexuality as a Compromise Formation: Reflections on
the Psychoanalytic Theory of Sexual Development,” Psychoanalysis and
Contemporary Thought  (): –.
. Ellen Lewin, Lesbian Mothers: Accounts of Gender in American Culture (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ); Charlotte J. Patterson, “Families of
the Lesbian Baby Boom: Parents’ Division of Labor and Children’s Adjust-
ment,” Developmental Psychology  (): –.
. G. Herdt and A.M. Boxer, Children of Horizons: How Gay and Lesbian Teens
Are Leading a New Way Out of the Closet (Boston: Beacon, ), p. .

. When a Family Loses Its Way: Disintegration

. G. Herdt and A. M. Boxer, Children of Horizons: How Gay and Lesbian
Teens Are Leading a New Way Out of the Closet (Boston: Beacon, ), p.
.
. Kath Weston, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (New York:
Columbia University Press, ). See also Joan Laird and R. Green, eds.,
Lesbians and Gays in Couples and Families: A Handbook for Therapists (San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass, ).
. As quoted in Caitlan Ryan and Donna Futterman, Lesbian and Gay
Youth: Care and Counseling (New York: Columbia University Press,
), p. .
. Ibid, p. .
. Gilbert Herdt, Gay and Lesbian Youth (New York: Haworth, ). See also
Boxer et al.
. Martin S. Weinberg et al., Dual Desires: Understanding Bisexuality (New
York: Oxford University Press, ).


. Somewhere in the Middle: Ambivalence

. Somewhere in the Middle: Ambivalence

. Anne Muller, Parents Matter: Parents’ Relationships with Lesbian Daughters
and Gay Sons (New York: Naiad, ).
. G. Herdt and A. M. Boxer, “Epilogue” to paperback edition of Children of
Horizons: How Gay and Lesbian Teens are Leading a New Way Out of the
Closet (Boston: Beacon, ); see also Martha McClintock and Gilbert
Herdt, “Rethinking Puberty: The Development of Sexual Attraction,” Cur-
rent Directions in Psychological Science  (): –, and Gilbert Herdt,
Same Sex, Different Cultures (New York: Westview, ).
. Richard Isay. Becoming Gay: The Journey to Self-Acceptance (New York:
Pantheon, ).
. Ellen Lewin, Recognizing Ourselves: Ceremonies of Lesbian and Gay Commit-
ment (New York: Columbia University Press, ).

. You Have Something to Hear: New Cultural Ideals

. J. Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, ); Frederick W. Bozett, “Gay and Lesbian
Parents: Future Perspectives,” in Gay and Lesbian Parents, ed. F. W. Bozett
(New York: Praeger, ), pp. –; J. D’Emilio and E. B. Freedman,
Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and
Row, ); John Gagnon and W. Simon, Sexual Conduct (Chicago: Aldine,
); David Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, ); Gilbert Herdt, ed., Gay Culture in America
(Boston: Beacon, ); J. Weeks, Sexuality and Its Discontents (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, ).
. Paul Robinson, The Modernization of Sex: Havelock Ellis, Alfred Kinsey,
William Masters, and Virginia Johnson (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, ).
. I. Beiber et al., Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study (New York: Basic
Books, ). For the most recent detailed analyses, see Robert P. Cabaj and
Terry S. Stein, eds., Textbook of Homosexuality and Mental Health (Wash-
ington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association Press, ).
. Gilbert Herdt, The Sambia: Ritual and Gender in New Guinea (New York:
Holt, Reinhart and Winston, ). See also Gilbert Herdt, Same Sex, Dif-
ferent Cultures (New York: Westview, ).
. Clelland S. Ford and Frank A. Beach, Patterns of Sexual Behavior (New
York: Harper and Row, ).
. Evelyn Hooker, “The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual,” Journal
of Projective Techniques  (): –.


 . You Have Something to Hear: New Cultural Ideals

. Gilbert Herdt and Andrew M. Boxer, “Introduction: Culture, History, and

Life Course of Gay Men,” in Gay Culture in America, ed. G. Herdt (Boston:
Beacon, ), pp. –.
. See Cabaj and Stein, eds., Textbook of Homosexuality.
. Timothy Murphy, “Redirecting Sexual Orientations: Techniques and Justi-
fications” Journal of Sex Research  (): –.


 Index

accommodation behavior, – children, gay or lesbian, –, , . See
adolescents, , , –, –,  also adolescents; gay sons; lesbian
age: and disclosure, ; and integration, daughters
,  cognitive dissonance, 
AIDS, , ,  coming out. See disclosure
alcoholism,  community involvement: as factor in
ambivalence: case studies of, –; char- integration, –, , ,  table
acteristics of, , –, –, ; A; resources for, –
description of, –; factors affect- compensatory behavior, , –
ing, –,  table A concealment, of homosexuality, , , ,
American Psychiatric Association, , , –
 appreciation, of child’s homosex- crises, previous experience with, –
uality, , , ,  table A
demilitarized zone, , , 
Beach, Frank A.,  developmental psychology, –
biology,  Dew, Robb Forman, , 
blame: assignment of, , –, ; disclosure, by family to others: as factor
internalization of,  in integration, , , , –,
Boxer, Andrew, xvii, xxii,  – table A; failure of, , ,
–; fear of, , –, ; impor-
“causes” of homosexuality, – tance of, 
Index

disclosure, by gay or lesbian child: effects grandparenthood, characteristics of, 

of, , –, ; factors affecting, grandparents, as agents of integration,
–; parental response to, –, 
–, , ,  table A,  grieving, –
discrimination, –, 
disintegration: dangers of, –; descrip- harassment, , , 
tion of, , , –; factors affecting, Herdt, Gilbert, 
 table A; and shame, –; signs heterosexism, . See also Heterosexual
of, –,  Family Myth
diversity, ,  Heterosexual Family Myth: challenges
divorce, –,  to, –; description of, , –;
effects of, , –, ; social control
education, as factor in integration, – exerted by, –
Ellis, Havelock,  homelessness, , 
homophobia, –, , , 
false selves, ,  “homosexual,” –, 
family relationships, –, ,  table Hooker, Evelyn, 
A Horizons Community Services, , 
fathers: response to child’s homosexuality Human Rights Campaign, 
by, , , ,  table A; role of in
integration, –,  table A inclusion, of child’s partner: in case stud-
Ford, Clelland S.,  ies, , ; as factor in integration, ,
Freud, Sigmund,  , , ,  table A
future, projection of for gay children, integration: advice for achieving, –;
–, ,  benefits of, –, –; case studies
of, –, –, –, –;
Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education description of, , , , ; factors
Network,  affecting, –,  table A; failure
Gay and Lesbian Youth Program of (See disintegration); risks of, ; signs
(Chicago),  of, –, , – table A
gay-bashing. See harassment; violence
gay daughters. See lesbian daughters Kinsey Reports, –
gay sons, –, , ,  table A Koff, Bruce, 
gender, and integration, –,  table Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 
A. See also fathers; gay sons; lesbian
daughters; mothers Lambda Legal Defense and Education
Goffman, Erwin,  Fund, 
grandchildren, expectation of: disap- Leavitt, David, 
pointment over, –; and Hetero- lesbian daughters: “causes” of homosexu-
sexual Family Myth, , , ; and ality in, , –; integration with,
integration,  –, –,  table A


 Index

“letting go”: description of, ; in parent- disintegration to, ; risks of integra-
child relationships, , , , , tion to, ; and shame-based thinking,
 –. See also parent-child relation-
The Lost Language of Cranes (Leavitt), ships; parents’ relationship
 Parents, Families, and Friends of Les-
bians and Gays (PFLAG): parents’
media, and the Heterosexual Family experiences in, , , , , , 
Myth, ,  table ; as resource for parents, ,
mental illness, homosexuality as, , , , , , ; as source of parents
 for study, , 
methodology, – Parents Matter (Muller), 
milestones, projection of, –, , parents’ relationship, –, , –,
– , ,  table 
military,  peers, and adolescent development, ,
mothers: response to child’s homosexual- 
ity by, , ,  table A; role of in PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends
integration, –,  table A of Lesbians and Gays). See Parents,
Muller, Ann, , , , ,  Families, and Friends of Lesbians and
Murphy, Timothy,  Gays
myth, definition of,  phase, homosexuality as, –
previous exposure to gays and lesbians,
National Center for Lesbian Rights, –
 previous suspicion of homosexuality, ,
National Conference of Catholic , , ,  table A
Bishops,  psychotherapy, –
National Gay and Lesbian Task Force,
 racism, 
National Lesbian and Gay Health Associ- religion, , , , –
ation,  reparative therapy, , 
normality, in Heterosexual Family Myth, resilience, factors affecting, –
,  resources, for information and support,
, , –
parent-child relationships, –, 
table A,  science, and stigmatization of homosexu-
parents: acts of love by, –; and ality, –
child’s disclosure, –, ; factors self-blame, , –
affecting integration in, –; and self-esteem, of gays and lesbians, –,
gay child’s development, –, ; as , n 
resource for others, ; responses to shame, –, , –
child’s gay identity by, , , –, , shame-based thinking, –
, –, ,  table A; risks of sibling relationships, 


Index

Signorile, Michelangelo,  suicide, , 

silence, about child’s homosexuality, ,
, , . See also demilitarized zone United Methodist Church, –
stereotypes, , –, , , . See also
Heterosexual Family Myth violence, , 
stigmatization, , , –
Stonewall Inn riots,  Walsh, Froma, 
substance abuse,  Weinberg, George, 


 BETWEEN MEN ~ BETWEEN WOMEN:
LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

Lillian Faderman and Larry Gross, Editors

Richard D. Mohr, Gays/Justice: A Study of Ethics, Society, and Law

Gary David Comstock, Violence Against Lesbians and Gay Men
Kath Weston, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship
Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in
Twentieth-Century America
Judith Roof, A Lure of Knowledge: Lesbian Sexuality and Theory
John Clum, Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama
Allen Ellenzweig, The Homoerotic Photograph: Male Images from Durieu/
Delacroix to Mapplethorpe
Sally Munt, editor, New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural Readings
Timothy F. Murphy and Suzanne Poirier, editors, Writing AIDS: Gay Litera-
ture, Language, and Analysis
Linda D. Garnets and Douglas C. Kimmel, editors, Psychological Perspectives on
Lesbian and Gay Male Experiences
Laura Doan, editor, The Lesbian Postmodern
Noreen O’Connor and Joanna Ryan, Wild Desires and Mistaken Identities: Les-
bianism and Psychoanalysis
Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer
Moment
Claudia Card, Lesbian Choices
Carter Wilson, Hidden in the Blood: A Personal Investigation of AIDS in the
Yucatán
Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England
Joseph Carrier, De Los Otros: Intimacy and Homosexuality Among Mexican Men
Joseph Bristow, Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing After 
Corinne E. Blackmer and Patricia Juliana Smith, editors, En Travesti: Women,
Gender Subversion, Opera
Don Paulson with Roger Simpson, An Evening at The Garden of Allah: A Gay
Cabaret in Seattle
Claudia Schoppmann, Days of Masquerade: Life Stories of Lesbians During the
Third Reich
Chris Straayer, Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Re-Orientation in Film and
Video
Edward Alwood, Straight News: Gays, Lesbians, and the News Media
Thomas Waugh, Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film
from Their Beginnings to Stonewall


Judith Roof, Come As You Are: Sexuality and Narrative
Terry Castle, Noel Coward and Radclyffe Hall: Kindred Spirits
Kath Weston, Render Me, Gender Me: Lesbians Talk Sex, Class, Color, Nation,
Studmuffins . . .
Ruth Vanita, Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Liter-
ary Imagination
renée c. hoogland, Lesbian Configurations
Beverly Burch, Other Women: Lesbian Experience and Psychoanalytic Theory of
Women
Jane McIntosh Snyder, Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho
Rebecca Alpert, Like Bread on the Seder Plate: Jewish Lesbians and the Transfor-
mation of Tradition
Emma Donoghue, editor, Poems Between Women: Four Centuries of Love,
Romantic Friendship, and Desire
James T. Sears and Walter L. Williams, editors, Overcoming Heterosexism and
Homophobia: Strategies That Work
Patricia Juliana Smith, Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women’s
Fiction
Dwayne C. Turner, Risky Sex: Gay Men and HIV Prevention
Timothy F. Murphy, Gay Science: The Ethics of Sexual Orientation Research
Cameron McFarlane, The Sodomite in Fiction and Satire, –
Lynda Hart, Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism
Byrne R. S. Fone, editor, The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature: Readings
from Western Antiquity to the Present Day
Ellen Lewin, Recognizing Ourselves: Ceremonies of Lesbian and Gay Commitment
Ruthann Robson, Sappho Goes to Law School: Fragments in Lesbian Legal Theory
Jacquelyn Zita, Body Talk: Philosophical Reflections on Sex and Gender
Evelyn Blackwood and Saskia Wieringa, Female Desires: Same-Sex Relations
and Transgender Practices Across Cultures
Marilee Lindemann, Willa Cather: Queering America
George E. Haggerty, Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth
Century
Andrew Elfenbein, Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role

