My son
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Anonymous
| My son is gay. I knew for awhile but we never discussed it. He talked to my wife about it and told her "don't tell dad, he'd be disappointed." We don't keep secrets from each other so we shared that. My wife told my son that I would be proud of him no matter what but still he hasn't brought it to me. I've spent a great deal of time with my son and always drop in things as we talk about a variety of subjects that should give him all the indications that I support him no matter what and I am very pro gay rights (marriage, etc) and my sister is gay and we are extremely close. My question is should I just take the initiative and tell my son that I know he is gay and that I have known for quite some time (even before my wife confirmed it) or does that create a different problem - trust broken with his mother? I would certainly tell him that I've known for a long time but he would most likely just attribute it to his mom breaking his confidence. Any thoughts? |
Anonymous
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I came out to my mother the day she asked "Is Larla just a friend -- or is she special to you?"
I'm so glad she asked. That made it so much easier. I said "Yes" and she said "I thought so. I'm glad." And that was it. |
Anonymous
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Do not take the initiative and let him know that your wife outed him to you. That would be really painful.
Just keep dropping hints. |
Anonymous
| Gay man here. Do not tell him that your wife told you. In fact I would take that to the grave with you. But you can keep telling him that you’d be fine if he was gay. |
Anonymous
| He’s probably projecting his own self-image onto you. A lot of gay men are ashamed of being gay, regardless of how their parents raised them. There’s no escaping the messages from society that to be gay as a man is to be deviant and to have failed miserably. |
Anonymous
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How old is he?
You can take him out to dinner and casually talk about relationship advice and start off saying "someday you'll meet a guy you'll like" and take it from there. If he asks if your wife told you, you can reply with "you're my son, I don't need others to tell me because I know you." Once it's done, it's out, life goes on. If you have a good family environment, it should be quite straightforward. |
Anonymous
| It’s hard to wait for them to come to you, but yes, just keep dropping hints. You’re doing fine OP. |
Anonymous
Thanks...I will keep up my "I've got your back no matter what" hints. |
Anonymous
| Another dad here. My son didn’t tell his mom or me directly, but he hinted around. It was upsetting because I wasn’t 100% sure he was hinting - the one thing he ever said most directly to me I wasn’t sure I heard right. Finally I just said “You’re really private and that’s fine, but I’ve thought for a while that you and [male friend] were in a relationship. Your mom and I love you and you should feel comfortable talking to us about whatever you want.” He said “No, not in a relationship with [male friend], in a relationship with [other male friend].” I just said something like “Cool, I like him.” I also asked him what if anything he wanted us to say when people said stuff like “Is Larlo meeting any girls?” DS said “say whatever seems right to you”, which was not a big help. I’m glad we at least talked about it though. |
Anonymous
| It’s odd that one can think oneself as enlightened and educated but then find that one still carries prejudice. I’m in my mid sixties so I grew up in a very different world. A world where not only could same sex couples not marry, but homosexual activity was actually illegal in most states in America. We were always taught that homosexuality was bad. I’m glad things have changed but I’m having a hard time keeping up with it. I keep coming across new words I don’t know referring to different sexual preferences I’d never heard of. Just yesterday I first read the term “scoliosexual” which I’m not sure I understand. New letters keep getting added. I had finally memorized “LGBT” when they added “Q.” I must admit I don’t understand what the Q adds. But now they’ve added “IA.” I don’t even know what those letters stand for. But I’ve recently realized that I still carry prejudice. My son is 14 and has no interest in girls. This seems odd to me because we were all girl crazy at that age. To me this seems weird. But my son thinks it’s weird that I was so interested. To him that seems incomprehensible. I’ve asked him if he’s interested in boys and he says no. DW doesn’t think he’s gay. But what concerns me is that this concerned me. I guess when for so many years one is taught that something is bad, you can’t just wish the prejudice away. But maybe that’s the problem. Telling people that they should be ashamed of being prejudiced doesn’t make anyone less prejudiced; it just makes them deny that they’re prejudiced, even to themselves. And that only makes it worse because any problems like addiction or racism can’t be corrected if we refuse to admit that we have the problem. We shouldn’t be telling people prejudice is something to be ashamed of. We should be treating prejudice like a disease which should be cured. |
Anonymous
The Q is for both queer and questioning FYI — Queer being a vague umbrella term for “not into cis heterosexual relationships” (cis means identifying as the same gender you were assigned at birth if you hadn’t heard that one yet) and questioning being an equally vague term for “I’m trying to decide if I’m not straight but I’m not sure.” I think the Q is very important especially for people still figuring out their gender identities and is also good for incorporating trans and nonbinary identities because some people who identify as eg Lesbian are only interested in other cis women and don’t feel comfortable having trans women use lesbian so she can claim queer with less friction. I is for intersex, which incorporates a lot of nonbinary physical gender states (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex). The A usually stands for asexual although depending on context can also be used for allies. Asexual (in this context) refers to people who are simply uninterested in sexual or romantic relationships. A lot of these terms have been used longer than you might think but only reached the mainstream recently as we have decriminalized and unpathologized them. Lots of people aren’t going to start talking loudly about being asexual if all it gets you is involuntary commitment to a mental institution and corrective rape. Queer has fluctuated through being a self-identifier and pejorative since it started being used as a sexuality identifier in the late 1800s, as have most of the words in the LGBTQIA+ alphabet soup which is probably one of the reasons we have so many of them. 😝 But I understand your point — that it’s hard to overcome the prejudices we learn when we’re young and the world can change a LOT in a single lifetime. I think it’s great you’re realizing your prejudices when you look at your son’s developing identity. What really matters isn’t that you’re concerned (let’s be real, we’re all worried about our children all the time aren’t we’re) but that you love and respect him and are letting him figure it out even though his teens aren’t going quite the way you expected. |
Anonymous
I was in a similar situation, except I was the parent who knew. During a lighthearted moment with dc, I told them their Dad knew everything we'd discussed and that he was 100% supportive and completely cool with everything, including being left out of the conversation. Dc was relieved and thanked me. |
Anonymous
This resonates with me a lot. So thank you. I feel similarly. I have realized I have a lot of ingrained prejudice from my childhood and the thoughts can still pop up at moments of personal stress or tension, even though I genuinely disavow them at this point in my life and don't agree with any of it. And then you feel guilt and shame. And the fear of someone finding out or saying/doing "the wrong" thing. We also worry for our kids. It's different for them now, but it's hard to let go of the fear that being at all "different" will lead to a harder life and just general challenges. In our day, life was not kind to people outside the heterosexual norm. Hard to shake those memories. |
Anonymous
Thanks for explaining much of this. When I was young Queer was just another word for gay. I guess it’s changed. Did saying you were asexual get one committed? I never knew that. I’m still not sure I understand “scoliosexual.” I remember the first trans woman who was openly trans that I ever met. Many years ago when I was 16 our family spent a month at Club Med in Tahiti. That was back in the days when Club Med was still a pretty wild place in the 1970s before it toned itself down. One of the women working in the restaurant was trans. Then in the 1980s I had a friend who met a woman in a club in New York City where I was living at the time. They hit it off and they were going back in a cab to his place but on the way she told him that she used to be a man and my friend as politely as he could told her it wouldn’t work out. One thing I’d like to understand better is the issue of trans women in women’s athletics. I know this has become an issue but I don’t know enough about it to have an opinion but I’m old enough to remember that people used to accuse East German women swimmers of being men who had been converted to women. But it seems that it’s impossible to separate this issue from politics. In the old days people said what the East Germans were doing was terrible and gave the Germans a huge advantage. Now it seems that if you question whether trans women athletes have an advantage you’re a bigot. I’m really having a hard time keeping up. |
Anonymous
| And I guess I worried that my son might be gay because he has enough challenges as it is. He has ASD, ADHD, partial hearing loss in his right ear and, as we have only recently found out, partial color blindness. My son also carries the gene that runs in my father’s mother’s family that causes stuttering. My son’s stutter began at three, as mine did. But unlike my parents, who punished me for stuttering which made my stutter permanent, I had become an expert on the subject and knew exactly how to handle it. By the age of five my son could hardly utter a sound but I gave my wife strict instructions on how to handle it. Now his blocking and struggling have entirely disappeared and his repetitions sound sort of like the upper class British affectation. He used to be almost helpless at school because of his ASD. But he had an IEP so he got help and a wonderful girl classmate kind of adopted him and helped him out. I was afraid he would be a target for bullies but it never worked out that way. Everyone wanted to be his friend. In a weird way his ASD actually helped because it made it so difficult to become his friend. As my father in law says, his looks helped him, too. I’m half Jewish and half WASP and DW is Korean. I’m not sure what my son is but he has exotic good looks and worked with a modeling agency in New York City before we moved to D.C. because I got a job as a trial lawyer at DOJ. I’m not the only stuttering trial lawyer and I’m not the first but there aren’t many of us and we all know each other. My son became a terrible discipline problem when I sent him to the Auburn School for kids with ASD where his Neuropsych said he’d be a perfect fit. He even hit, kicked and bit the teachers. I remember meeting my son’s female desk mate at a birthday party. She told me she was my son’s desk mate “with all the benefits and drawbacks that go along with that.” Her words. So I guess I just felt that, being gay, if he were gay, might be one challenge too many. But I actually hated Auburn, too. I took my son out and sent him to Fusion, where he excelled. My son’s also been the top rated Kindergarten through Eighth Grade chess player in D.C. for years. He’s now attending a very highly rated boarding school in Western Massachusetts and is top of his class. It’s all boys, which is fine with my asexual son. But he didn’t want to board. He still wants to live with me so I bought a house up there. They say a parent shouldn’t be a friend but my son is my best friend in the world. He’s also the moral conscience of our family. He won’t allow me to have an occasional beer and he made DW and I stop having occasional marijuana. He’s quite strict with us. |