Losing one son, gaining another

'I'm gay' - the revelation can be hard to tell a parent, but it can be almost as hard for the parent to hear. Fionola Meredith reports

'I just came out to my parents last night. My friends have all known for about a year now, along with my sister (I'm 23), but I hadn't plucked up the courage to say anything to my parents till last night. I just decided to bite the bullet and go for it . . . the reaction was as expected. My dad seemed fine about it, but my mother wouldn't stop crying. The bad thing about it is she never cries, and never swears, and she did plenty of both.

"She blamed herself, I think, asking if there was anything she did wrong, which made me in turn feel bad. She did say she loves me and supports me, but still couldn't quite understand the whole thing. I'd say she was just in shock. It's still all very surreal. Although it does make me wonder whether I should have said anything at all?"

This young man's experience of telling his parents he was gay recently appeared anonymously on the Dublin-based website, QueerID. It's just one coming-out narrative among many thousands that spring up daily across gay cyberspace: countless stories describing the burden of secrecy, anxiety, guilt and - most of all - a desperate longing for acceptance. From that sweaty-palmed, stomach-churning moment when a child tells his mother and father he's gay, there is no going back - for him or them. Yet while coming-out accounts proliferate, we hear little from the parents - it's as if many are stunned into a confused, fearful and often rather embarrassed silence.

Breaking that silence prompted Derry woman Cathy Falconer to write Good as You: Mothers' Reactions to Gay Sons, recently published by Guildhall Press. Anecdotal and analytical by turns, Falconer's book charts the slow and often painful process of adjustment and eventual acceptance that many parents go through after their child's revelation. Her decision to focus on mothers and sons derived both from personal experience - her own son, Barry, came out five years ago, when he was 17 - and from the perception that children are more likely to come out to mothers than fathers.

Even when they may have already suspected their child's sexual orientation, the reality of the situation puts many parents into an emotional tailspin. And while it's far from uncommon for a young person to spend three or four years plucking up the courage to reveal his or her sexual identity, the bewildered mother and father struggle to absorb the news instantly.

One account, published by Parents' Support - an Irish organisation set up more than 17 years ago to provide care and advice to parents of gay children - conveys the deep sense of shock and disorientation some parents experience:

"It was Christmas holiday time. Our grown-up children were home. Our oldest son, Tony, came into the kitchen one afternoon as we washed up after lunch. He said: 'Mum, Dad, I need to talk to you.' As we sat down we knew he had something serious to say to us and somehow, though it had never crossed our minds before, we knew what he had to tell us: he was gay. Our handsome, gentle boy who was our pride and joy, this most honest and truthful of our children, the boy who wouldn't take biology at school and who became a vegetarian because he couldn't bear cruelty to animals; this wonderful son who was awarded scouting's highest honours, who had always worked so hard, who qualified for and successfully got through third-level college against all the odds, was gay. My son would be called those awful names, would be the butt of jokes. How could God be so cruel to him and to us?"

Michael Barron, co-ordinator of Belong 2, a Dublin-based support group for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people aged 14-23, says that young people are painfully conscious of their parents' expectations of them and fear letting them down. He advises youngsters considering coming out to their parents to be open to any reaction.

"Even the most open-minded parents will be surprised and need time to adjust," he says.

For many, a mind-numbing sense of grief was the first dominant feeling.

Cathy Falconer went through an intense period of grieving. She describes it as "a loss - I was looking at my son and thinking, who is he now?"

Another mother explains: "It's like you've lost someone and now you have to live with someone different; things weren't what they were. It's scary."

According to Falconer, most mothers in the study, once confronted with the reality of having a gay child, reacted with symptoms of "despair, not knowing how to cope and mourning for the dream of the child they thought they had and for his heterosexual future expectations". Yet it was fears about their child's future - their safety and quality of life, the risk of social stigma and prejudice - that disturbed mums most. One mother says simply: "My head is full of 'what if ?' "

Some parents found that their own unexamined prejudices towards gay people were challenged by their son's admission. Others feared that their son's homosexuality was somehow "sinful" or "unnatural".

Falconer has her own brisk response to such questions: "God made him the way he is - that's my view."

Not surprisingly, in a society which continues to define and characterise gay people primarily by their sex lives, the thought of the physical reality of gay sex is often most difficult for parents to accept. Fathers in particular, perhaps influenced by culturally ingrained ideals of machismo and heterosexual virility, find this aspect of their son's lifestyle challenging.

"I remember speaking to one father struggling to come to terms with the situation, saying: 'I'm doing my best, but I just can't get past the thought of him kissing another man,' " says Jim Egan of Parents' Support.

Accepting the physical reality of her son's sexuality caused problems for one of the mothers in Falconer's study, who said: "I find the whole thing sickening. I couldn't cope with that. It was going through my head, everything they would be doing. I was torturing myself."

Another mother, on finding a photograph of an unknown man under her son's pillow, admits: "I ripped it up. I didn't tell him, just wanted to push that out of the way. Maybe that was a kind of denial."

Floundering desperately in the wake of their child's news, parents often clutch at the apparently comforting misconceptions that it's just a phase or that it can be cured. One mother used to say to her gay son: "You only think that, you'll feel differently in a year or two." But each time her son would respond: "I won't, I know what I am."

Often, these initial attempts at denial shift rapidly into a deadening sense of self-blame and guilt. Old Freudian ideas about the supposed causes of homosexuality - smothering, seductive mothers and cold, rejecting fathers - contribute to mothers' self-questioning fears that they have unknowingly caused their son to be gay. "I thought it may have been environmental, because my oldest son, who is heterosexual, played with dolls when he was young; then my gay son did the same," says one mother. "Is it because his dad didn't spend enough time with him? Is it because I sent him to an all-boys school? Did I have a bigger influence than I thought bringing him up?"

Given all the outpourings of pain and confusion that coming out to parents may initially bring, why is it so important to the majority of young gay people that their mother and father know the truth about their sexuality? The desire for acceptance and continued love appears to be the motivating factor for many.

According to Parents' Support, "any parents who accept and help their gay child's coming out into the open are simply continuing the role started the day the child was born - to help him or her be confident and happy.

"The very fact that they have been so brave as to tell us is an indication of their confidence in us. Our challenge is to respond to that confidence."

But the support organisation warns against explicit or implicit denial. "Parents who cannotaccept the news may sweep it under a carpet of silence and this can be felt as cold rejection. Silence can also be simply the custom of a family that is loving but is not in the habit of talking about personal matters. Yet this is precisely the time for us to overcome our reticence, to acquire new understanding and let them know we love them as much as we ever did. Some of us love them more."

Many mothers in Falconer's study felt that acceptance was a necessarily incomplete state, a tentatively maintained balance. One mother says: "Although I'm saying I accept, I find myself still struggling with things." Another felt that "there is an awful lot of contradiction, confusion, all going on at the same time".

Yet Falconer found that the love, admiration and loyalty that mothers felt for their sons eventually took precedence over their own needs and expectations, their social values and prejudices. The shock of a so-called suddenly gay child jolts many parents into getting to know their son or daughter in a new, unexpected and personally challenging way. But most eventually find a quiet equilibrium.

Good as You: Mothers' Reactions to Gay Sons, by Cathy Falconer, is published by Guildhall Press, £5.95

Contacts: Belong 2 at www.belongto.org;Parents' Support at www.gayswitchboard.ie/parents.htm