Originally published in Medium.com on April 9, 2024
A mother accepts her gay son
The story I’m going to tell is one that the great majority of gay men have some version of, each with its own twists. These stories mainly concern the coming out announcement and the degree of acceptance a gay man can expect to face. Acceptance can range from full to partial, or from regret to outright rejection. The conversations that ensue can be anywhere from calm to vicious. The outcomes can strengthen the relationship, maintain the status quo, or they can break the relationship apart.
But coming out is just the first chapter of the story. The story line can stay on the same trajectory or it can mutate as circumstances change. There’s a chance it may see its way to a happy ending or that is could devolve into lifelong animosity. The reality for the majority of gay men will be that whatever changes occur, they almost always have to come from the parents. Gay men stay gay, because it’s a matter of identity, not choice. It’s a God given right, one not susceptible to change by conversion therapy, interventions, or governmental dictates.
In older versions of the coming out story, men as old as I — born in 1943 — often decided to postpone the conversation until there was almost no need to have it at all. Society in mid-20th-century America was still criminalizing and pathologizing gay men, so the conversation would almost always be stressful, and we knew beforehand that it would be.
Many of us wanted to avoid rattling our parents, and to that end many of us became convinced we could change. That tension prompted many of us to stay in the closet longer than gay men do today. This was the Silent Generation, after all, called such supposedly because we didn’t complain much and, if we were gay, because we hid. It’s peak was the decade of the 1950s, when the word “gay” with its positive connotations was only just beginning to wrap itself around homosexuals.
Before that we were just faggots and fairies.
Hiding as we did, we teenagers typically didn’t know there were others like us. There were no mentors from the underground gay community or positive information about ourselves. There were predators and pedophiles, though, including, most notably, closeted Catholic priests. This left us susceptible to self doubt and, worse, to thinking we could change if we only prayed hard enough, ignored our nature, married, and pretended.
The Baby Boomers who followed became more prickly about being demonized, but the AIDS crisis of the 80’s, during which the U.S. government was content to see gay men suffer and die, changed the dynamic. AIDS drove home the mantras “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” and “Silence = Death.” Things started to change because the Boomers weren’t silent.
Gay boys born into the Millennial generation came of age around the turn of the century and gradually became more secure in their identity and appreciated their own worth as gay people. This was thanks partly to the activism of earlier generations and, of course, the internet. There was enough positivity now to change the hearts and minds of psychologists and psychiatrists, and lo and behold we were no longer diseased. We were allowed to regard ourselves as normal, with the expectation that we had all the rights of normal people.
So now, what I understand from media, from Pride days and from gay men younger than me, is that coming-out conversations are generally less fraught than in my generation. (Let me know, please, if I’m mistaken about this.) So let me dwell some on how those conversations went or didn’t go back in the old days.
In my case, the initial complications involved a father who told fag jokes and a mother who was demandingly religious.
Both were predisposed by their natures to be compassionate, but as silent as society was about gay people, they didn’t overtly acknowledge that one of their sons might be gay. I choose to think that both my parents would have extended their compassion to that son, but I didn’t give them the chance. I left home for college at 17 without having had the conversation.
My father¹ was likely noncommittal about the Catholic Church’s negative feelings about gay people, but my mother was not. She likely put herself into rigid denial of what she saw in her gay son’s behavior. She had the job of trying to reconcile her love for her one out-of-the-ordinary son to the hate messaging of her church, which declared her son headed to hell. The easiest way to do this was to deny the obvious.
Later in her midlife it’s fair to say that the Church had dug even more deeply into her fatalism. She admitted to me, kind of as a last hope to turn me back, that her biggest worry was that I would not be there with her in heaven. I had long before known that it wasn’t going to be possible to convince her to un-anchor her conviction that it was the church’s teachings which were flawed, not her son.
Instead, I appealed to her fundamental sense of fairness and compassion and argued the obvious, that I wasn’t an immoral person, no more so than any other well-brought-up human being. I had, of course, been raised by her and my father to be the kind of person that they were themselves. The apple in this respect fell close to the tree.
So how could a God, who the priests taught loves all his creatures and who made people in his image, justify condemning me to hell? The argument was convincing enough in her mind to stop visualizing me in eternal flames, but it was also necessary that she advocate every day from then forward for God’s mercy on her son. She took on my case, as if she were a celestial lawyer, arguing that her moral, gay son deserved to be up there with her too. I think both she and I took it as a given that she was a shoo-in for heaven. It wasn’t presumptuous on her part that she’d get a spot. She had earned it.
What I didn’t tell her was that I had stopped believing in the heaven-hell dichotomy. The Catholic catechism shaped my life through my early years, but I abandoned it in a confessional booth one day as a late teenager. The inevitability of my gay self so strongly asserted itself by that time that it wasn’t compatible with the teachings of the Church. I had to choose between integrity and sanity or a life of self doubt and emotional flatness.
When I did leave Catholicism, there was a long gap of ten years before I felt the conviction of my decision. Those years coincided with the time I spent mostly away from my parents in university and graduate school.
My mother grew up in a Detroit Polish-immigrant community and imbibed a strong commitment to family typical of Polish cultural values. She took on the role of family matriarch after her own mother passed. She wasn’t well educated, and while she understood my physical withdrawal from the community was necessary for my career goals, every leave-taking was teary.
My mother had a profoundly sorrowful time with her mother’s death. She struggled with the desire to keep my grandmother alive, but suffering terribly from an advanced cancer, or wishing for the only remedy for that pain, that being her death. My mother was truly devastated and despairing when the inevitable happened, and she went into a deep mourning afterwards. Everyday we heard her sorrow from behind the closed door of a dark bedroom.
The bond of her connection with my grandmother had been strong and loving. It was primarily my mother of all her siblings who maintained a linguistic link with my grandmother. Their intimate conversations were only in Polish, though English was more common at family gatherings to accommodate the non-Polish speaking. She rarely spoke the language in the years that followed.
For the month of my mother’s formal grieving, she paused being a mother and wife. The essentials she carried out joylessly, until finally my father tenderly brought her back. He reminded her that she had four living children to care for. I was 11 at the time and my mother 37.
During those first 11 years of mine, my mother wanted to strengthen her children’s bonds with our Polish heritage and she’d send my brother and me to my grandmother’s to spend time with her. On most of those occasions there was some reason to set foot in my grandmother’s parish church, the same one my mother attended through the 8th grade, where my parents were married, and where my brother and I were baptized. Not everything, though, was focused on some religious activity, since the churches were social centers as well. We’d go to the parish hall for bingo nights, not just for mass and rosaries.
During these 11 years, I had only a vague, undefined sense of myself as a gay boy, though I was not following the usual trajectory of what you’d expect of a straight boy. I was more “sensitive.” This may have been one of the reasons for my mother wanting to strengthen my connection to the life of the church. She early on equated that sensitivity as some indicator of spirituality, making me in her mind a prime candidate for the priesthood.
That was another tradition in Polish families, sending one son, typically the second son, which I was, off to tend souls. I bought into that idea and, in the years following my grandmother’s passing, I became an altar boy at our local parish. Then somewhere around my 13th or 14th year, I agreed to be interviewed as a candidate for the priesthood, joining an order that ran a high school to begin training for the seminary. By this time, though and maybe thank God, my realization of being gay was beginning to peak, so I declined the priesthood, though I did later attend an all boys Catholic high school. Puberty had put me on the verge of accepting myself, but not yet quite fully.
My mother continued to believe, after my pass on the priesthood, that I had missed an opportunity that would have saved my faith. The next hope she held out was for me to find some nice Polish girl to marry and to give her grandkids. She even tried to arrange a marriage with an undocumented young woman from Poland when I was in my 30s. She still was in denial of the essential me, thinking it was just an abnormally long phase I was going through.
All that thinking crashed when the partner I had at the time died of AIDS He and I were both 45 and we had been together for 11 years. That loss I’d have to say was not unwelcomed by my mother, though this was more a matter of a serious personality clash between them. But the significance of his loss to me did imprint itself finally on my mother. From then on it exposed the fiction that any change in direction was in my future and she and I learned to settle into building a friendship. We finally had the conversation.
Then some 12 years later, I met my second partner, a man some 12 years older than me, who my sister pointed out physically resembled my father, who had passed by that time. I won’t acknowledge any Freudian implications of that resemblance she saw, just to deny that I saw it myself. My mother possibly saw the resemblance herself. In any event, she thought the new one was great and they hit it off easily. She was 84 when he and I met and over the next 10 years as she slipped into a mild dementia, I became whole and acceptable in her judgment. I wonder sometime if the dementia might not have freed her mind to stop worrying about not sharing heaven with her.
At our last in person meeting shortly before her death at 94 she was in a rehab facility following a medical crisis. I spotted her sitting at a lunch table eating quietly with two other patients. She was surprised to see me, since I had just flown in to surprise her. We usually talked once a week by phone, but I hadn’t seen her in a year.
I wasn’t sure given her dementia that she would recognize me, but she did after a little initial confusion. She smiled, grabbed my hand and announced to her table mates that this was her son from Washington. He works for the government — which I did not. Then we hugged and kissed.
We left the table, returned to her room, and talked. I began to understand then the weakness of her mental state. But as sad as that was, what she chose to talk about was not heaven and hell and whether I was still going to church or whether I was still in “that cult,” a long time bugaboo when she found I was attending a Buddhist sangha. None of that came up.
I started this recollection by supposing that a strong mother-son bond seems to be easier to establish today for some young gay men. I doubt if that’s a universally true generalization, but there’s the evidence of PFLAG chapters around the country, mothers with their sons at Gay Pride parades, and even locally here in West Virginia parents bringing their teenage LGBTQ sons and daughters to gatherings of their peers. So, yeah, things have changed. But as glad as I am that it’s easier, I’m content to have had to work a little harder at it. No regrets.
¹ There’s a companion piece about my father here on Medium. He and I didn’t have the conversation directly, so I had to intuit much about the underpinnings of our relationship.