Chapter Three: Fraught With Peril

Coming Out At Close Range

by The Plaid Adder


The experienced outcomer will come out to just about anyone. Co-workers, checkout clerks, passing Jehovah's Witnesses, you name it. The novice, however, is far more likely to select as his/her intaker someone s/he is close to. For the novice, coming out is an ordeal that will only happen either under extreme duress, or with someone s/he trusts completely. Either or both of these conditions is liable to apply with family members, close friends, or current/former romantic and/or sexual partners. In a situation of this nature, when your relationship with your intaker is something intimate and vitally important to both of you, extra care and attention is needed to avoid triggering an emotional meltdown in comparison with which Three Mile Island seems like a mishap with a microwave.

To take the least problematic first:

The Close Friend

The first thing to remember, as you watch your outcomer struggle with his/her prepared speech, is that by choosing to come out to you, s/he is implicitly saying, "I value your friendship so highly that I am willing to put myself through stomach-churning, liver-curdling hell simply because I want you to know enough about me to stay close to me." Remember that this is a great compliment, and it is polite to thank him/her for it like your mother always told you to.

Second, be aware that the reason your outcomer looks like someone who has just stepped off the QE2 after a rocky transatlantic crossing is that s/he is afraid that telling you this will completely alter the way you look at him/her. It is your first duty to convince the outcomer that this fear is a mere chimera, a fantasy, a creature of the heat oppress'ed brain with no grounding in reality. Since you know the outcomer you know how to do this better than we do. However, here are some ways we suggest you don't do this:

If you have qualms and scruples about the morality, healthiness, or general advisability of the homosexual lifestyle, now is not the time to share them. Does your friend tell you that your favorite date outfit is a fashion crime for which hanging is too light a punishment? Does your friend feel obliged to point out to you that those whose faculties of taste have not been rendered inoperable by a flood of testosterone feel that your present love object's bleached bouffant, mental vacuity, and plate-glass-shattering laugh ought to be enough to take her off the short list? Does your friend pass remarks, every time you tuck into a plate of hamhocks, on the ultimate fate of unbelievers who continue to defile their bodies with the flesh of unclean animals? No, s/he does not, because s/he has learned that friendship and narrowminded jugmentalism go together like fine bone china and an enraged rhinoceros. No more should you, at a moment when your friend has placed him/herself in a very vulnerable emotional position, plunge the spike of self-righteous condemnation into his/her soft unprotected underbelly. Restraint builds character. Suck it up and support.

Once you have convinced the outcomer that you are still every whit his/her friend and you intend to revel in his/her company with all your customary vehemence, it helps, if your relationship generally encompasses this sort of thing, to give your outcomer a hug. Your outcomer may still be plagued by fears that you are lying to him/her and that behind that compassionate smile is a quivering mass of loathing and disgust, and by voluntarily initiating physical contact you are proving that you will not, henceforth, recoil from him/her as from a red-hot poker. It is vitally important, however, that you be convincing when you do this, so if you are not someone who usually hugs people, because you weren't picked up enough as a child or didn't have fluffy enough toys or whatever, don't try it. If you hug your outcomer the way the first runner-up hugs Miss America, it will rather spoil the sincerity effect you have been working on through the whole conversation.

The Partner

For obvious reasons, when your current or former lover comes out to you, there are whole new opportunities for trauma and danger. This is also a situation in which the difference between coming out as bisexual and coming out as gay/lesbian certainly springs into sharp relief.

We'll start with the gay/lesbian coming out and move on to the special issues involved in the bisexual coming-out. To begin with the easier-to-handle situation:

The Ex

If you are the sort of person who likes to stay in touch with your ex-lovers after they become ex, it is not at all unlikely that at some point one of them will let you know that s/he has now realized that in fact you were right when you claimed that the problem about the toilet seat cover couldn't have been the only reason you parted ways. In general, we recommend you follow the rules for either the Close Friend or the Casual Coming-Out depending on how intimate your post-relationship relationship is; but of course this will be more difficult for you if you cannot first answer the questions that you will be screaming silently to yourself in your head, such as...
"Was it something I said?"
A really spectacularly bad breakup can cause someone to reevaluate much, but the odds are that if your ex still feels close enough to you to tell you all this, it was not a revulsion for you personally that drove him/her to seek the love of his/her own gender. Your ex may indeed have cherished a deep and abiding hatred for you at some point, but unless there are other considerations this will usually not translate directly into swearing off anyone who wears your set of genitals. Biting into a bad apple prompts you to spit it out and go look for one that isn't all soft, mushy and malodorous; it doesn't convince you that all apples are evil and henceforth you must eat nothing but peaches. If, on the other hand, you come to realize after a few years of sampling different varieties of apple that none of them really make your mouth water, or that every time you eat an apple you find yourself spending the next 5 days close to a bathroom, you will eventually decide to try a different kind of fruit. It is e'en so with members of the opposite sex: if you like 'em, one bad one won't put you off them. If you don't, the sweetest and tastiest among them will still not float your boat. We know it's difficult, but don't take this personally; it's got a lot more to do with your outcomer than it does with you.

"How could you not tell me?"
Well, because if s/he had known at the time, s/he probably wouldn't have been dating you in the first place. Remember, coming out to yourself is a long and complicated process, and often it only happens after the outcomer has had heterosexual relationships and found them unsatisfying. Again, this has less to do with your personal shortcomings than with your outcomer's own identity, but our culture pushes people toward heterosexuality with such force and vigor that it can take a while before someone figures out they want to fight back.

"So, all those orgasms were fake, then."
Well, it is certainly a possibility. However, this is in many ways a separate issue. It's unlikely that your outcomer came to this knowledge solely as the result of not being able to reach orgasm with you. If that were sufficient cause for conversion, America would be even more awash in lesbians than it already is. (This, we might add, is one of the reasons people are so dead set on hanging on to homophobia in the first place. If all other things were equal, market economics dictates that straight men would either have to revamp their product to make it a lot more competitive or resign themselves to celibacy en masse.) Our culture has created such a pathetic mismatch between what a straight man thinks of as great sex and what a straight woman wants that many straight women don't normally have orgasms, or indeed enjoy sex very much at all.

On the other hand, it's also possible that your partner did enjoy sex with you and wasn't faking at all. People change; and there are also a number of factors involved in defining your orientation that don't have to do with sex per se. Your partner may just have decided that trust and intimacy are more important than raw orgasmic power, for instance; or that while sex with men is fine and dandy, sex with women is a phenomenon that she cannot quite bring herself to believe can be wholly of this world.

"Now may be the time to get that HIV test, no?"
Well, if you've been having unprotected sex with anyone who can't furnish proof of their virginity, we suggest such a test may be long overdue. But the fact that one of your exes has joined one of the originally-identified high risk groups does not necessarily mean that your chances of having been infected are now higher than before. For one thing, HIV is now spreading faster among the heterosexual population than among the gay population, because lesbians have always been low-risk and gay men have been much more sensitized to the dangers of unprotected sex and the importance of taking precautions than many a straight person, who is still, we grieve to report, putting him/herself at risk in the mistaken belief that this is still an exclusively gay disease. For another, what your ex has done since breaking up with you can't possibly affect you, unless you have been in the habit of sleeping together occasionally after the breakup, which does happen. "Well, DUH," you say, upon reading this last sentence; but people are irrational about this, and certainly irrational enough to believe that when an ex joins the other team that somehow retroactively increases one's risk of infection.

So, you've calmed yourself down and followed the Close Friend rules. You may then be wondering, "Is it polite to ask my ex some questions about whether this news explains certain things that went askew or awry in our relationship?" This is a decision that's up to you to make and it depends on the kind of relationship you now have. If you are able to talk about what happened when you were together without causing each other emotional distress, it may not be a bad idea to look back over your past together and see if you reach any epiphanies. If, however, you notice that this is causing him/her acute distress, don't push it. If your post-apocalyptic friendship is more casual, then you probably don't want to get into something this personal. Again, use this simple rule: if my ex started asking me personal questions of this nature, would it bother me? If the answer is yes, desist.

And now...

The Current Partner

Again, if your current partner is coming out to you as gay or lesbian, well, part of what s/he is trying to tell you is that things are not going to work out. So you have two pretty thorny issues to deal with here, and it's gonna be rough. Your objective is not so much to come out of this unscathed as to be able to put out whatever small flames are still dancing about your person once you have fought your way through the wall of fire. However, we do have some suggestions. Do not, for instance, assume:
That this is simply an excuse covering up the real reason for your breakup.
In this case, the "It's not you, it's me" line is not merely a convenient fiction. People do not identify as gay or lesbian unless they mean it. The risks are too high. If your partner simply wanted to camouflage his/her true motives, s/he would simply make up some cock and bull story about not being ready for a serious relationship, or having a fear of commitment and intimacy, or not being good enough for you, or having to leave the country as a result of a slight misunderstanding with the FBI.

That there is something you can do to prevent this from happening.
Your outcomer has already made his/her decision; you may not like the result, but there's little you can do to change it. Don't let your natural grief over the imminent break-up induce you to break the cardinal rule, which is, remember, NEVER SECOND-GUESS AN OUTCOMER. It will only make him/her angry, and chances are your outcomer is already angry enough. Do not provoke him/her by trying to talk him/her out of something this personal, this traumatic, and this certain.

That if you had only been more nurturing/manly none of this would have happened.
It's unlikely, as we said before, that you personally are the cause of your outcomer's sudden discovery. Something about your relationship may have crystallized things for him/her, but you are not the sole and root cause. After all, as your parents should have already told you by now, you are not the center of the universe, so you are not the Prime Mover for every change that takes place in your partner's life.

That there must be a third party involved and if you could only send Luca Brazzi down to his/her home with an offer s/he can't refuse all would be well.
There may indeed be a third party involved; something's gotta catalyze this process of discovery and a sudden, violent crush is as good a motivator as any. But it follows not therefrom that if you can neutralize the third party, your relationship will be saved. If your outcomer has realized, as a result of this, that s/he is no longer playing for your team, it won't matter that this particular love object is no longer on your outcomer's radar screen. The relevant point is that you now no longer fall into the category of potential partner, and must learn to accept this.

All of the above, remember, refers to a situation in which your outcomer is identifying as gay or lesbian. If your outcomer is identifying as bisexual, some very important things are different, the most important of which is:

If your current partner comes out to you as bisexual, this DOES NOT MEAN that breakup is imminent. Now, if your outcomer wants to dump you for other reasons, there's nothing we can do about that. But it is entirely possible that your outcomer is telling you this not because s/he wants to scare you off but because s/he wants to be closer to you. You might be thinking, "Well, if s/he is telling me s/he's attracted to two genders, does this not imply that s/he finds my poor monogendered body an inadequate love toy?" For answer, we refer you to the relevant sections of "The Bisexual Coming Out," but in summary: just because your outcomer can be attracted to people whose gender you aren't, that doesn't mean s/he is unsatisfied with the services you have been providing. Most people continue to feel attraction for passing strangers, celebrities, and cute trigonometry teachers even after they commit to one particular love object, and just as you can love your partner and still think Al Pacino is to die for, your partner can love you and still think Al Pacino is to die for. It can become something you bond over, rather than the cause of your bitter parting.

Of course, that will only happen if you handle this well rather than spectacularly badly, so have a look at the chapter on bisexuality and bear its counsels in mind. We realize that you may be asking yourself, "Well, if my partner is happy with me, why rock the boat by telling me all this unsettling stuff?" The answer is that this is part of who your outcomer is, and if you want your relationship to develop you will have to learn to know and love that part of him/her. It may never become an issue in the sense that s/he will never leave the comforting shelter of your embrace to act upon these desires, but it will be an issue in terms of your understanding each other, and s/he has done right to let you know it's there.

On the other hand, it is possible that your partner is letting you know that s/he feels it's time to explore this side of him/herself, and that in order to do this s/he must be free. You will probably not see it that way, but again, we are not in the business of mending broken hearts or mourning over a love gone cold. You should be aware, however, that there are some things about this situation that are different from the lesbian/gay coming-out-related breakup,

For Better or for Worse...

For the ex-partner, of course, these differences are less crucial, but still apply. It is more likely, for instance, that your relationship died its death for reasons that are if not totally unrelated to his/her outcoming, at least more indirectly connected. In any case, if you follow the appropriate rules for Section One you should have no trouble coming through this experience having strengthened your character and your post-breakup bond with your outcomer.

The Immediate Family

Trickier situations arise when a family member decides s/he needs to drop The Big One. One chooses one's friends, and therefore the outcomer, if s/he is a person of some taste and refinement, will likely have chosen friends who will not recoil in horror. However, one does not choose one's family. One is thrust, willy-nilly, into its bosom, and whether one is then nurtured, stifled, or dragged howling and wild-eyed through a Freudian psychodrama of pain, shame and polymorphous perversity is not under one's own control. This means that it is far more likely that a family coming-out will result in some kind of wanton destruction unless the intaker is extremely careful. At the same time, as the stakes are considerably higher here, it will be more difficult for you the intaker to listen to the news with equanimity. Even if you are someone who wants to see the ban lifted on gays in the military, or just feels it's a shame that Pat Buchanan can't find himself someone else to pick on, you (and your outcomer) may be shocked to discover that what's just fine and dandy when it goes on out in the big world suddenly looks to you like a reeking, flesh-tearing menace when it breaks in upon your domestic circle.

Also, since you are a close family member, it becomes less likely that you will be able to predict this outcoming in advance. You have known the person in question since s/he was knee-high to a glowworm, and cues that might strike the casual observer as obvious appear to you to be natural developments of proclivities you noticed during the outcomer's childhood. It is very likely that you will not realize, say, that your tomboy sister is now a dyke, or that your brother's early interest in Cut 'n' Style Barbie has prepared him for considerably more than his lucrative career in the hairdressing industry, until s/he actually tells you these things.

You should not feel bad, then, for being unable to stifle an initial expression of surprise. These things happen. What is more important is that you then go on to reassure your outcomer that although you are of course somewhat taken aback, you feel it will be easy enough to integrate this knowledge into your understanding of your outcomer's history and personality, and that indeed, now that you think upon it, many things are clear to you that were once doubtful and murky and seen as if through a glass darkly. There is of course a right way and a wrong way to do this.

Right:
If I'd only known, I would've let you redecorate my dollhouse when you asked instead of getting Mom to do it.
Wrong:
I knew as soon as you were born that you would break my heart some day, but I never dreamed it could hurt this much.

Siblings

Although your outcomer is probably much more worried about how your parents are going to take it, you should not assume that your reaction is not important. Indeed, the significance of the siblings' reaction can be said to be roughly proportionate to the severity of the parental disapproval the outcomer experiences. If your mother has kittens upon hearing the news, or if your father decides that swearing, breaking things, and saying "You may think you're a hip '90s cat but you're not too big for me to put you across my knee" constitute an appropriate response to this revelation, it will be all the more important for you to let your outcomer know that you support him/her. It is more likely that you will actually do so, since you will probably be younger than your parents (barring bizarre time-travel or alternate-reality plotlines) and since you have your own life and are less liable to believe, say, that your own happiness, peace of mind and sense of self-worth are absolutely dependent on being able to knit baby booties for your outcomer's children or pay for her enormously expensive church wedding.

During the actual outcoming process, of course, you will let your sibling know that you support him/her and that however childish your parents are being right now you are mature enough to deal with this. As time passes, however, your role will become ever more pivotal, for it is your job to chip away, slowly but inexorably, at the foundations of parental disapproval until eventually the structure crumbles from within. Here are some ways you can do that:

Parents

The problems presented to the child whose mother or father comes out to him/her have received comparatively little attention in the literature on the subject. And yet, it is by no means an uncommon occurrence. Back when you were born, there were vast areas of the country where the inhabitants had little or no knowledge of homosexuality--or, indeed, one might say, sexuality in any of its forms--and this unfortunate lack of exposure resulted in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of potential queers being railroaded into heterosexuality for the simple reason that they had no idea there was a Plan B. Decades later, women and men across the country are waking up and going "D'OHHH!!!" It is entirely possible that one or both of your parents is numbered among the silent army of people who will, eventually, figure out that it's not sex, per se, that isn't working for them, so much as the sex of the partner involved.

The first obstacle for you the intaker to overcome will be, of course, your natural desire to avoid ever thinking about your parents in any sexual context, let alone one that may be familiar to you only through your clandestine glances through special issues of Penthouse. Once you overcome said hurdle there will be others to clear, including the fact that the parental coming-out is often attached to things like infidelity and/or bitter, acrimonious divorce proceedings. However, there are things you can do to contain the scope of the damage.

The first is to realize that your parent is liable to be as uncomfortable explaining his/her sexual identity to you as you will be hearing about it. To be prepared for the level of discomfort you will probably experience during the more clinical parts of this conversation, take this handy quiz:

Parental Comfort Level Assessment Test

  1. How old were you when your parent(s) told you where babies come from?
  2. Your parent(s) explained this to you by:
  3. When you first began menstruating, your parent:
  4. When you had your first wet dream, your parent:
  5. If your parent discovered your birth control lying about the house, s/he would most likely:
Assign yourself 4 points for every A answer, 3 for a B, and so on. If your total is:

15-20: You'll be fine. If you have questions about how your parent came to this conclusion or why s/he now prefers to walk on the wild side, or just want to know where s/he gets her handcuffs and riding crops, go ahead and ask. Your parent is clearly fairly embarrassment-proof.

10-15: Your parent will probably want to take a rational, enlightement type approach involving using the phrase "certain urges" and a lot of use of the passive voice. Allow him/her to hide behind the shield of scientific terminology if necessary. It will be a comfort.

5-10: Uh oh. We recommend that you focus the discussion on the less material issues involved, such as love, self-awareness, identity politics, and choice of haircut. Avoid pressing this parent to discuss the gritty details of his/her voyage of discovery. If s/he faints into the guacamole salad it will be embarrassing and painful for him/her, and you'll be stuck cleaning it up.

The higher your parental comfort level score, the safer you will be asking those burning questions that you are both not sure you want to know the answers to and at the same time can't get out of your mind, such as, "So, did you use to like men and now you've changed your mind, or were you fantasizing about Julie Newmar the entire time I was being conceived?" The lower it is, the more you will want to restrict yourself to questions such as, "So what does this 'Herbert' do for a living?" or "Have you told Grandma yet?"

Cognitive dissonance will probably be your biggest problem. As living proof that your parents once had heterosexual intercourse, you will probably find it difficult to accept your mother or father's claim that s/he has no future plans to repeat the performance. The reason your brain is having such a hard time wrapping itself around this concept and wrestling it to the ground is that we are told from the time that we are very very wee that sex drives are basic biological things that are built into us at the assembly-line stage and are pre-set when we come from the factory. If your parent was manufactured according to heterosexual specifications, you are thinking to yourself, must this sudden shift in object choice not indicate a malfunction of some kind? In addition, the "is it a choice or is it innate" question that always rears its unprepossessing head at some point during any discussion of homosexuality has led many on both sides to argue that homosexuality is something inborn, an all-consuming biological imperative that people just "can't help." Well, you may be asking, if my parent could "help" being gay when I was but a roguish twinkle in my father's eye, why can't s/he "help" it now? A related perception is that since being gay is such a bother and a trouble, only someone who just couldn't bring him/herself to have sex with a member of the opposite gender would be willing to undertake this daunting task. Then why, O ye gods, you might wonder, would my parent, who has demonstrated a proven ability to make the beast with two backs, be willing to join the ranks of the reviled?

Well, the first step in overcoming this mental block is to realize that when it comes to sexual identity, in the immortal words of Yoda, "You have much to learn, my son." For many people, sexuality is something that develops over time as they find out more and more about what butters their muffin and what gives them the squicks, and it takes them a while to get to the point where they know what they want. Many women, for instance, spend a portion of their lives assuming that the inability to enjoy sex is just something that comes with the uterus. It can be years before they are lucky enough to meet a nice woman who is willing and able to teach them otherwise. Similarly, many men grow up so focused on following the job-wife-kids-car-condo achievement pattern that it can be years before they find themselves staring very very hard at one of those Hilfiger's ads and thinking, "It's not really the arresting graphic design that's holding my attention, is it?" (We'll be returning to these issues in Chapter 4, "So Your Point Is...?: The Bisexual Coming-Out".) Because your parent once tasted the (in our humble opinion, frequently overrated) joys of heterosexuality, that does not necessarily mean that s/he is "really" straight. It simply means that s/he has come a long way, baby.

If your parents parted ways long ago, this will probably be your biggest stumbling block; once you have cleared it, you can then move on to fixing your father up with that nice maitre d' at Chez Lui or helping your mother select an appropriate hairstyle. If your parents are still married, you should realize that this is probably about to change. However, you should not necessarily assume that your parent's decision to come out is the sole cause. Often the realization that one has been playing for the wrong team lo these many years will happen as a result of one's realizing that one's marriage is not what one wants from a relationship. There are probably many other things that have gone wrong, and your parent could not fix them all by recanting, even if that were possible. In either case, you must realize that you have as little control over what your parent can or will do with his/her sex life as s/he has over what you do with yours, and just as you expect him/her to leave you to your own devices and decline to meddle in what is none of their business, you cannot expect your parent to retool his/her entire sexual identity simply because that would make your own life easier. The only thing for it is to accept the change, support your parent, and start working on snappy comebacks for playground taunts. Here are a few to get you started:

Troglodyte's Taunt:
Your Response:
Your mother wears combat boots!
And she looks damned fetching in them!
My dad can whup your dad!
I dunno, my dad's pretty handy with a whip.

...you get the idea.

Children

If you're the kind of sadistic person who enjoys seeing people break into a cold sweat, one of the quickest ways to do this is to ask, "Have you told your parents yet?" Of all the different kinds of outcomings, this is the one that is most likely to result in permanent and irreparable damage. Stakes are high, emotions are intense, and opportunities for rejection, pain and humiliation zing through the outraged air like bullets in a Sylvester Stallone vehicle. The finer points of etiquette will here fall by the wayside. Your primary goal should simply be to get through the conversation without doing grievous harm to either your offspring, yourself, or your relationship. This is trickier than it may at first seem.

On the etiquette front, you must be prepared for a certain amount of awkwardness on the part of your child. For centuries gay and lesbian children have searched ceaselessly for the Holy Grail of parental coming-out--the Right Way To Bring This Up. Despite several research grants devoted exclusively to this purpose by kind philanthropists interested in decreasing the incidence of tongue-swallowing, eyeball-popping and myocardial infarction among intaking parents, it has proved far more elusive than the secret of alchemy. If you are in a good mood, your child will be reluctant to spoil it. If you are in a bad one, your child will be reluctant to do something that will certainly make it much, much worse. If you are at home, your child will fear that you may lock him/her in the basement with 30 hours of Baywatch in a desperate last-ditch attempt at deprogramming; if you are in public, your child will fear that s/he and your entire family will become the primary feature of tonight's local news broadcast. There is just no smooth way to segue into a conversation that will include the words "Mom," "I'm," and "gay" in the same sentence. You can expect the announcement to come abruptly, apropos of very little, and must be ready to just put down the Thanskgiving turkey on the counter, take off the oven mitts and deal with the situation to hand.

Initial reaction is very important, since what has been causing your outcomer to wake up screaming on a nightly basis for the past week or so is his/her vision of you dropping dead right on the spot, shouting, "Henceforth I have no son!", throwing him/her out of the house along with his/her suitcase, or wailing, "Sweet Lord, why don't you just kill me now?" In general, it is important not to become your child's worst nightmare, at least if you are interested in preserving an amicable relationship; in this situation, it is even more critical that you not realize his/her worst fears within seconds after processing the information. Even stunned silence is better than saying any of the following:

Things Your Child Will Never Forget Or Forgive

In order to avoid making these or other unfortunate and relationship-shattering responses, you will have to abandon some of your most cherished parental illusions, among them:
If I just make the child's life miserable enough, s/he will eventually give up and do what I want.
This might have worked when you were trying to get him to wear a tie to church, but it's not going to work now. In the history of coming-out no child has ever said, "Goodness--I had no idea you would be so upset! It's all right, Dad, I'll go right out and start dating women like a good boy. Sorry to have troubled you." This is because generally speaking a child does not go through the trauma of coming out to his/her family until s/he feels s/he has already reached the point of no return. Your child will not be the first to break this record. Trust us on this.

This must be because I didn't breastfeed her.
If you haven't yet confronted the possibility that some aspects of your child's life may be determined by something other than your own involvement in it, now may be the time to do that. Freud notwithstanding, children will occasionally make decisions based on something other than their failure to properly resolve an Oedipal complex. More important, however, is that you realize that it doesn't really matter why this happened; the question is how you will make this particular change your friend.

It's not that I'm against homosexuality, I just don't want my child to be unhappy.
While this may on the surface seem like a logically defensible objection, it crumbles when you take into account the fact that if you assemble 100 gay and lesbian people in a room and ask them, "What's the worst experience you've ever had as a gay man or lesbian?" 95 of them will answer, "Coming out to my parents." (The other 5 will respond, "Being courtmartialed.") If you don't want your child to be unhappy, well, don't make your child unhappy.

It's my duty to my child to try to save him/her from the terrible fate that awaits gay and lesbian people.
It's natural and touching that you want to protect your child. However, the more effective and less traumatic way to do this is not to try to force your child back into the closet, but to do what you can to make the world less evil. Think of it this way: this is your child, and those who would discriminate against or abuse him/her for his/her sexuality are like so many hunters attacking the cubs of the protective mother bear that you are. The appropriate response is to growl menacingly, bare your fangs and claws, and slit them up a treat.

This means I will never see my child marry or have children.
Well, you'll never see your child have a big church wedding with 20 attendants, the Archbishop, an announcement in the Times and music provided by Uncle Hank's Texas Two-Steppers, but that doesn't mean your child will never find love and happiness with another person, or even that you will be denied the opportunity to blow half a year's salary on flower arrangements, lackluster food and a white dress you can only get one wearing out of. Similarly, while your child's approach to reproduction will naturally have to be a little different from yours, there are various avenues open to the gay or lesbian couple that wants to hear the pitter patter of little feet about the house. However, both of these things will be made more difficult for your child if you continue to refer to his/her partner as "that vampire what corrupted my own flesh and blood."

If I don't tell my child how heinous and revolting a sin this is, his/her eventual damnation will be all my fault.
We repeat: your child is not going to change his/her mind. Whether you accept his/her news or not will have absolutely no bearing on his/her future object choice, and thus will not determine the ultimate fate of his/her soul. What it will determine is whether your child is willing to continue speaking to you after this conversation is over.

These things are hard for any parent to get over; we understand that. We only ask that before you respond to your offspring's announcement, you administer to yourself the following short quiz:

1. Check the sentence that you think best describes your true feelings:

If you chose the first statement, you will of course see the necessity of refraining from telling your offspring that you are deeply disappointed, grievously offended, and eternally embittered by his/her choice of lifestyle. Remember, this is something you cannot change; if you want a relationship with your child your only option is to learn to accept it. If you chose #2, well, you've got problems a humble bunch of etiquette mavens can't help you with.

So, if you're still with us, you probably now want to know what to do to make sure your child knows that you still love him/her and will always support him/her. The easiest way to do this is to say, "We love you, and will always support you." Do not assume that your child will assume that you feel this way. S/he won't. Even if you are a normally taciturn and understated kind of parent, this is a situation where if you do not spell your feelings out, your child will assume the worst. Silence, under these conditions, does not connote assent; it connotes shocked and horrified catatonia.

But, you may be thinking, what if I am upset by this? What if, despite having read your excellent and rhetorically-sophisticated arguments about why this should make me happy, it instead makes me feel like--what is the term you kids use nowadays--hurling? Should I fib?

Well, far be it from us to suggest anyone should violate the eighth commandment (that's the one about bearing false witness, not the one about coveting your neighbor's ass). What we do suggest is that you look deep inside, find the parts of you that feel most affirming and supportive of your child, and let them do the answering. You don't have to understand and groove on homosexuality in the abstract in order to support your child (although we will discuss below the problems that result if this perceptions gap is never narrowed). Think of it this way: your child is in trouble, and needs your help. This is all you really need to know. Get around your theoretical reservations by focusing on what your child needs.
If you can't say --
Then at least say --
I'm glad to hear it.
I'm glad you told me.
There's no shame in being gay.
I will never be ashamed of you.
I hope they do legalize same-sex marriage.
Your partner is always welcome in our house.
I pledge to fight homophobia wherever it lurks.
Anyone who tries to hurt you because of this will have to get past me first.
I'm pleased as punch to have raised a kid who's willing to question mainstream American values.
I respect your right to make your own choices and would never try to change you into something you aren't.
However, this is a tricky game to play, and you risk crossing the line between guarded yet encouraging and hurtful and estranging. Cut yourself off at the pass if you feel yourself drifting toward any of the following

Shoals on which to wreck an otherwise healthy relationship

"I still think homosexuality is an abomination, but you're my child and I'll always love you."
The hate-the-sin, love-the-sinner thing works fine if you are a televangelist broadcasting your purported tolerance into the black void of TV Land, but your child is not just some fool with a checkbook and a guilty conscience. S/he will doubt very much that you can love him/her and at the same time be revolted by something that is part of everything s/he is and does. This "sin" is not something like axe-murdering, which happens only once in a while during moments of extreme stress. This is something your child lives every day, and more importantly it's something that your child sees (if s/he is lucky) as a beautiful and life-transfiguring thing. Sexuality and identity are so closely wrapped up together for gay and lesbian people that if you hate the sin, you are hating the sinner. If your child believes part #1 of that sentence, s/he will look upon part #2 skeptically at best.

"We'll be all right if you just never mention this again."
The reason your child is going through this at all is that s/he knows it will be impossible to have a close relationship with you if you cannot talk about something that is so important to him/her. If you refuse to refer to the subject again, you are saying that you don't care enough about having that kind of relationship to confront and work through your own prejudices. Your child will respond accordingly by never writing, never calling, and not inviting you to the wedding.

"I support you, honey, but please don't tell any of my friends or colleagues about this."
Subtext being: If anyone finds out I've raised a gay child, I will die of shame. Your child will not appreciate being turned into your family's personal skeleton in the closet. Again, you cannot be ashamed of your child's sexuality without, in some shape or form, being ashamed of your child, and you didn't raise your child to be a fool, so s/he knows this.

Now, it is entirely possible that you are standing there huffing and puffing and saying, "This is all very well, but what about my needs?" Don't I have the right to be angry (and perhaps say mean and nasty things) because...
...my child has been lying to me all these years?
No. Your child has not been lying to you so much as protecting him/herself from swift and certain psychic destruction. Coming out to oneself is usually followed by a period of intense self-doubt, self-questioning, identity reformation and general panic and wacked-outness, and during this vulnerable and painful time nobody, but nobody, is ready to face the potentially apocalyptic disaster of a familial coming out. To avoid coming out, one has to stay in, and this sometimes involves fibbing. Your child is not deceiving you for the sheer pleasure of it, because s/he does not trust you, or because s/he is secretly deeply ashamed of what s/he is doing; s/he is lying because at this point s/he has to do that to stay sane. Understand this, and do not take it personally.

...my child is obviously doing this to punish me?
If your child is the kind of manipulative twisted self-centered brat who stays up far into the night thinking up ways to make your life miserable, it is highly unlikely that s/he would choose a method that will inconvenience him/her to such an extent. S/he would probably do something much easier but equally upsetting, such as dropping out of college, eloping to Vegas with an Elvis impersonator, or pawning Grandma's silver table service to support his/her carefully cultivated cocaine habit. Even the sweetness of revenge--often so much sweeter in the context of a resentful parent-child relationship--cannot compensate for the heinosity that your child calls down upon his/her head by coming out. The only thing that does compensate for that is true love.

...my child doesn't love me enough to exercise a little sexual self-control in order to spare me the pain and suffering s/he knows this is causing me?
True, you may be thinking, "I had that chance to run off to Cancun with that really hot photojournalist who came through town while my husband was away at the aluminum siding salesmens' convention, but I gave up him and his damn fine ass because I wanted to keep the home together for my children. Why can't s/he do the same for me?" Well, because it's really not the same thing. We're sorry about the photojournalist, but you do have a partner and a family, and have presumably known something of the joys of love and sex. (If you haven't, we can only say you really should have gone to Cancun. It would have done you good.) For your child, this "self-control" of which you speak would translate either into a lifetime of unrelieved celibacy and loneliness, or a series of empty and destructive straight relationships based on nothing more than wishful thinking and self-disgust. Your child does not want to go through this kind of long-term misery; and you don't really want him/her to go through it either.

But really, the salient point is that your biggest need, in this context, is to maintain a loving relationship with your child, and the only way to fulfil it is to accept him/her for who and what s/he is. With good intentions and an open mind, you should be able to do this. In the short term, follow the guidelines we've already outlined to avoid smashing your child's self-esteem flat in the first 20 minutes. Over the long term we suggest: Onward to Chapter Four: The Bisexual Coming Out.

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Copyright 1996 The Plaid Adder. Do not reproduce this material without the express permission of the author.