Way back in the 70's, my mom broke down and told me Dad was a "homosexual."
Last edited Sat Apr 13, 2019, 01:56 AM - Edit history (4)
Dad never told me, just Mom, and she swore me to secrecy. She was explaining to me, her oldest, why she was so miserable. They stayed married for years -- till the youngest was in college. If you ever saw the movie, Far From Heaven, that's the closest on-screen depiction I've seen of a family like ours. But my parents stayed together much longer than the couple in the movie (neither feeling they had any choice) and my mother didn't have an almost-boyfriend on the side.
It's hard to describe to someone who wasn't alive then how publicly invisible gay people were while I was growing up. I didn't know a single other person with a gay parent. How could I? There was no internet back then. If there was anyone else in my school with a gay parent, they weren't talking about it.
And then it was the 80's, and the "AIDS crisis," -- the so-called "gay man's disease" that had no known cause, treatment, or cure -- and my parents split up and my father moved in with a partner. During the next decade, almost all of my dad's gay friends ended up dying of AIDS, but Dad and his partner managed to live together more than twenty years. Dad didn't live long enough to see marriage equality, but he would have been so proud.
The beautiful photos in this NY Times story, all dated after Mom told me about Dad, reminded me of how different it must be to grow up in a world where gay people AREN'T invisible.
And now one of them might be running for President!
A salute to Pete Buttigieg, for being the first openly gay candidate but surely not the last!
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/lens/lesbian-lives-movement-jeb.html?fbclid=IwAR31Hc2zvEshJveknsXA1OZxKJht6XxshJKFrgt1HbJprGZmU74pTUUq0I8
Photos of Lesbian Lives Meant to Inspire a Movement
Joan E. Biren began to photograph at a time when it was almost impossible to find authentic images of lesbians and aimed to help build a movement for their liberation.
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THANK YOU for sharing that.
I sincerely hope all of you have found a path of peace, one that brings happiness.
Even my mother, in her next-to-last decade, found her true love. She only had him for a short time, but he gave her so much happiness before he died.
Unfortunately, I have a sibling in a distant state who still hasn't made peace with our lives. A couple years ago, she told me not to tell our secret to any of our high school friends, who live in yet another state. But I had shared the secret long ago, when my mom stopped caring who knew. Somehow my sister, who lives in a deep-red state, never came out of our dad's closet. It's very sad.
Thank you for caring!
even among young people who would INSIST it had nothing to do with gay people.
One of these was my own teenage niece -- the daughter of my sister who was still in denial. When she said her math test was so gay, and I started to reply, I could see my sister holding her breath, watching me. I knew if I told my niece about her grandfather I wouldn't be able to see my sister's family again. So I just pointed out to her that saying something you didn't like was "gay" was very hurtful. She said that it had nothing to do with gay people, it was just an expression. I said that the problem was you never know who might be gay and whose feelings you might be hurting when you said it. And THEY wouldn't know how you felt about gay people. And then she said that her best friend's brother was gay! And I said, imagine how your friend feels to hear that expression. How her brother feels. And I could see the wheels turning. She didn't argue with me. I doubt that she used the expression again, at least purposely.
At some point along the way my sister finally told her children about dad. But, living in that little red town, she told them not to tell anyone, because it could hurt them if people knew. And so it goes on.
Thank you for sharing your own story. I am so sorry that that's how you had to grow up -- that anyone had to grow up like that. It infuriates me that some people are still trying to push people like you and my dad out of the light.
