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Came out to my parents...

D

dhchitown1984

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So I came out to my parents. Ugh. Sigh of relief, on one hand. Distress on the other. I'm venting, I'm not necessarily here for an uplifter or a shoulder to cry on, I just need to tell my story.

My father is a devoted republican conservative. I'll never forget the day when I was maybe 17 years old, and the first comments about my being gay came up. He said to me, verbatim, "If this is the path you choose, I will tell everyone in the family to make sure they don't support this perversion. I'll see too it that you don't get it."

Those words stained me. Permanently. Here I am, in 2011, at the age of 26, and I told my mom on Tuesday. I didn't tell my father. She asked if I told him, and she offered to tell him for me. Part of me feels like I took the cowards way out because I said yes, please do.

Anyways, today, we had dinner.... me, mom and dad. My 3 sisters weren't there, but I walked into my parents home and I said "hi" to my dad and I didn't even get a hello back.

We ate, in pure silence. It was tension-heavy. After my dad stopped eating, I said that I was seeing a therapist (to help me deal with my family relationships due to my sexuality, and yadda yadda yadda), and he immediately started....

"This is a terrible choice you're making."
"I can't believe you want to die with AIDS, all alone."
"I can't believe you want to make your family a part of this disease."
"You're 3 sisters won't want you near their kids because of your molestive tendencies."

I know that what he's saying isn't true. I get that part of it. I just don't know where to go from here..... what do I say? how do I approach it? Throughout our conversation, I asked him when he made the "choice" to be straight. He couldn't answer, other than to say that he was smart enough to know the difference.... whatever that means, so I asked again, but the next time, I asked, "What decision do you think I made that got me here?" and again, he ran around in circles.

Has anyone else gotten this reaction? How did you move forward?
 
Well, they need education obviously.

I would offer to tell them, in a kind way, that their backward ideas are wrong, and that they probably don't know or socialize with any other people that are actually gay, so their ideas are simply informed by prejudices and misinformation.

No matter what you say, obviously they will need time to adjust to the idea before there is any hope of them changing their attitudes.
 
Just remember that no matter what they love you.. They just can't face reality of you being gay yet. If you can try not to be confrontational next time the subject is brought up. My parents aren't as conservative as what you describe but they still aren't at a stage of fully accepting me.

Best wishes
 
dhchitown1984 said:
I get that part of it. I just don't know where to go from here.....
Click to expand...
I know you're not asking for a shoulder to cry on, but I had to reply to this. Assuming you've got a stable job, and your own place to live in, you honestly have no one else to think about but yourself, if your father is going to be this way. Also assuming he has actual influence over your mother and sisters, and their children. At the end of the day, you have to be strong for you, and do you, and not worry about anyone else that may cause you grief because of you're gay. If your father and family would be supportive of you and your life style, great. If they won't be, then so be it. You depend on you.

Anyway, when I first came out to my family, things didn't go so well. I honestly didn't know what to expect. My father was dead, so I didn't need to worry about him. My sister had suspicions, that I had confirmed for her. My mother was very upset, and wouldn't speak to me or acknowledge me for a few days. She's an old fashioned latin woman, so she came at me with the same ignorant things that your dad came to you with. She pressured me to see a therapist to actually try and make me straight. >_> Didn't work. Long story short, she eventually accepted that her youngest son was gay, but she didn't like it. That's the best I can get from her, I guess. She still loves me and expresses that, which I'm thankful for. Though, back then, I think I was a little emotionally damaged from that. I'm seriously playing down what I went through, and for a while, I believed that me being gay was a huge sin. I had broken some huge moral law by liking men, that I'm wrong. Not normal, and I isolated myself from so many people. I eventually grew out of that and manned up and realized I have to be strong for me and the kind of future that I want.
 
At least your mother is talking to you...

Do you think she might attend a PFLAG get together with you???

http://www.pflagchicago.com/

Or maybe you could just direct her to their main site...

I'm proud of you for coming out -- and a little distressed for you regarding your father's initial response...

Hopefully your family's cohesiveness is STRONG enough to outlast his anxiety...

Keep us posted...

And if you EVER DO need a shoulder, or an "uplifter", let us know...

:):):)
 
I'm glad you have a therapist to guide you through this and your father's reaction. He's bought into every misconception and stereotype out there. He even contradicts himself by calling it a "disease" and then saying you "chose" it. That makes no sense.

Anyway, he's not your problem. He's his own problem and if he wants a relationship with you, let alone a healthy one, he's going to need to get educated and enlightened. I hope that your mother can help that along, for the sake of family-peace, if nothing else. Swerve had an excellent suggestion with PFLAG. Perhaps your therapist, and you, can eventually get everyone in the same room and hash out whatever issues are really going on.

Good luck. Let us know what happens.
 
dhchitown1984 said:
My father is a devoted republican conservative. I'll never forget the day when I was maybe 17 years old, and the first comments about my being gay came up. He said to me, verbatim, "If this is the path you choose, I will tell everyone in the family to make sure they don't support this perversion. I'll see too it that you don't get it."

Has anyone else gotten this reaction? How did you move forward?
Click to expand...

Congratulations on coming out and I'm sorry that it didn't go well with your father.

I haven't gotten that reaction, so I can't be of any help there. I think you've gotten some excellent advice so far.

My question is about what you wrote above. Did he know you were gay or did you say you were bi? What happened when you were 17 that lead him to talk about "this path" because that doesn't really sound like something that would just come up out of the blue.

I hope everything is able to be resolved positively and quickly.
 
I try to remain calm when I hear stories like yours, but a part of me is outraged. It's amazing to me that parents don't realize when they have children that besides being male or female there is also the question of sexual orientation and gender identity. All of these topics have been in the open for 30-40 years. Denial I guess is what prevents some people from imaging the scene of a child coming out.

I'm a parent and I wouldn't think of having that strong a reaction to anything either of my children told me unless it involved criminal behavior.

I'm futher outraged by a political party that refuses to openly support family and friends who happen to be LBGT. I think some parents are probably too embarrassed to admit they are embarrassed or somehow guilty thinking they caused it, but instead show anger.

Sometimes I get tired of trying to point the way to the uninformed, but when you think about it the person with the knowledge does have a certain responsibility regardless of age or status.

We will never know how many straight men are actually bi, leaning straight. We will never know how many straight men played around growing up. It's hard to know what your dad's fears are causing him to spew.

If you're ever up to it tell him you know of a guy on line that was married for 14 years and had two kids and was slowly going mad, on a dark path of sneaking around because he hadn't lived his first 31 years being true to himself. Tell him also that some 28 years latter that man and his partner of those same 28 years walked one of those kids down the aisle along with the mother. Tell him that that same guy had prostate surgery last year and that same partner took family leave to care for him.

Our time here is finite. We are each responsible to be our authentic self. Your job is to fulfill your aspirations as best as you are able and not to make your father happy at your expense.

In a calm quiet moment or perhaps in a letter you might tick off the admirable qualities you have gotten from him. Tell him with all that going for you you refuse to take along closemindedness. You have faith that he's better than that.

If he's still in his 40s, technically at 64, I could be his dad. Boy, if this was happening to my grandson, I'd kick some ass.

Good luck to you. It will get better even if he doesn't change because you will understand this is about him, not you. He has no power to keep an uncle away from nieces and nephews. By the way, if it's perverts in the family that cause this, who was the pervert in his that turned you?
 
Congrats in being true to yourself. My only advice is to stay strong, stand on your ground, and don't let his uneducated opinions affect you. Hopefully, he'll eventually unite with you even if it takes years.
 
Thank you all for your feedback. The support on this board is definitely appreciated.

I definitely wanted to come back to share a rather positive twist to my story, which covers two points.

I came out to my sister probably six months ago. I had told her about what had happened, and she immediately called my father to denounce his dictation for how the rest of our family would treat me, which was awesome. I believe this conversation was part of the trigger to his response, which I'll share after I make another bullet point.

In my father's fit of rage and anger when we were having our conversation, he asked me "Do you know you're 100% sure that this is just the WAY you are? Have you ever even had sex with a woman?" And I very calmly replied, "no, I haven't. I've dated here and there years ago, but I am 100% sure that I'm gay." I think he was caught off guard by my reaction and he said "So that's it, 100% sure." And I said "Are you 100% sure you're heterosexual? Have you dated another man to know, with certainty, that you're 100% heterosexual?" He didn't take that very well, and he interpreted it as an implication, so I just had reassured him that I wasn't questioning anything, I was just making the point that I never made a choice to not be straight, but I knew who I was.

And here's the happy ending.... my dad emailed me this morning and said, "Sorry for blowing up the other day, I shouldn't have done that. I talked to your sister. I want to talk to you later, and I thought about what you said. I'm 100% sure about me, so maybe you can be 100% sure too."

I literally cried. My mom had called me to see how I was doing, and I shared with her the message my dad sent. She wasn't aware he reached out to me, but she said my conversation appears to have been more impactful than we were both anticipating it to be. She said this was going to be a long journey for our father/son relationship, but she's a lot more optimistic about it.

So yay!!!

Thanks again everyone for your support. This message board is amazing.
 
dhchitown1984, that's fucking awesome! I'm very happy for you and your family!
 
With that addendum, your and your family's journey just got shorter. I guess I won't have to kick his ass afterall. Yay, healthy parenthood and heathy families. We can make mistakes, apologize and work together. I'm proud of you, your sister and your dad. Those were good tears, my lad!
 
Anyone who acts like they do did not have much love for themselves or you. My parents had a hard time understanding, but never talked like that. Personally I would tell the,m to fuck off
 
Glad to hear your dad is slowly coming around, he was an asshole for judging you as a child molester and that you would die from AIDS. Throwing around judgments like that shows that as a father, he needs to take some time to uh...get to know his son. But that is a step in the right direction, it sounds like you've done a good job getting him to be more open-minded about this.
 
wow that's cool that a cranky Republican would come around so fast. would like to hear more about your relationship. Maybe he heard that Sarah Palin and Sharron Angle aren't scared of gays.
 
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