It is 1983.  I’m sitting with mom in her hospital room.  She’s in for a gall bladder operation and I’m chatting with her and her roommate, a lady about her age, but definitely not the sort mom would be seen with in church.  A nice lady, decent, smart…really smart…and very worldly.  She has a lady friend with her.  The four of us are chatting about the upcoming mid-term election.  I had picked up the mail before coming to the hospital, and in it was a campaign flier address to me from the Republican party.  It was in the form of a letter from Ronald Reagan.  "I need you to help win this election…" , says Ron.  "I need you…"  The lady and her friend suddenly burst into gales of laughter…  "Ronald Reagan sent this…" She gasps out, "I NEED YOU…to a homosexual!"

Their bright carefree laughter goes on and on.  It is a rich joke.  Eventually they notice that mom and I aren’t saying anything.  We’re both sitting there blank faced, not daring to so much as glance at each other…

(Uh…mom…just what have you been saying to this nice lady…?)

They calm down a bit, and tactfully get up to go get something from the hospital cafeteria.  On the way out of the room, as she passes by me, mom’s roommate gives me a look of quiet understanding and…places a gentle hand on my shoulder, as if to say "Hang in there kid…it’ll be all right…"

The door closes behind them.  Mom and I both immediately change the subject…

Last Sunday, the New York Times profiled a gay teen, Zach O’Conner, and his family, and his struggle to come out to them.

What was so heartwarming about his story, is how accepting his family was, and is.  Just look at those faces in that picture.  There is the kind of family every gay kid should have.

By sixth grade, he knew what “gay” meant, but didn’t associate it with himself. That year, he says: “I had a crush on one particular eighth-grade boy, a very straight jock. I knew whatever I was feeling I shouldn’t talk about it.” He considered himself a broken version of a human being. “I did think about suicide,” he says.

Then, for reasons he can’t wholly explain beyond pure desperation, a month after his Valentine “date” — “We never actually went out, just walked around school together” — in the midst of math class, he told a female friend. By day’s end it was all over school. The psychologist called him in. “I burst into tears,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Yes, it’s true.’ Every piece of depression came pouring out. It was such a mess.”

That night, when his mother got home from work, she stuck her head in his room to say hi. “I said, ‘Ma, I need to talk to you about something, I’m gay.’ She said, ‘O.K., anything else?’ ‘No, but I just told you I’m gay.’ ‘O.K., that’s fine, we still love you.’ I said, ‘That’s it?’ I was preparing for this really dramatic moment.”

Ms. O’Connor recalls, “He said, ‘Mom, aren’t you going to freak out?’ I said: ‘It’s up to you to decide who to love. I have your father, and you have to figure out what’s best for you.’ He said, ‘Don’t tell Dad.’ ”

“Of course I told him,” Ms. O’Connor says.

“With all our faults,” Mr. O’Connor says, “we’re in this together.”

This is what family is all about.  I am so happy for this kid.  And yet, still so sad in a way, for another one.

And that would be the kid I once was.  Me.

This paragraph in Zach’s story really struck me hard…

Cindy and Dan O’Connor were very worried about Zach. Though bright, he was doing poorly at school. At home, he would pick fights, slam doors, explode for no reason. They wondered how their two children could be so different; Matt, a year and a half younger, was easygoing and happy. Zach was miserable.

Now…I came out to myself at the relatively late age of 17.  But had I lived in today’s climate it would probably have been at about his age, looking back.  I saw it all, and yet I had a zillion ways of avoiding it.  And to be fair to myself, I was taught a lot of outrageous lies about homosexuals, and that had the effect not of making me hate myself, so much as convincing me I wasn’t that.  All through my adolescence I figured my crushes on the other boys amounted to nothing more then that pat phrase of the times, "going through a phase".   Whatever that was.

But by the time I’d finished high school I knew perfectly well how it was with me.  And then came the big problem.  Not accepting myself, but getting mom (dad had passed away shortly after I graduated) to accept it.  She finally did…sort of…but literally only months before she too passed away.  And even then she just didn’t want me to talk about it.  When I was a young man freshly out of high school, she all but insisted on a kind of "don’t ask, don’t tell" rule.  Whenever I ventured anywhere near the subject, she would grow cold and icy, which if you’d ever met her, you could guess how shocking it was for me to face it.  Mom was sunshine and light everywhere she went.  Everyone knew her as this cheerful, sparkly kind of person, the kind of person who could brighten the spirits in a gathering of misanthropes.  And she was.  It wasn’t an act like it is for some people.  I know, I lived with it.  She always had a good word for everyone, was always kind to everyone, even people who were mean to her.  Her religiosity was never dire and miserable like her Yankee Baptist mother’s.  She was sweetness and light.  Except when it came to that.

I couldn’t talk about my life to her.  I couldn’t talk about the things other kids can talk with their parents about.  She never browbeat me about it, never demanded I start dating girls, never once said any of the mean and hateful things to me I’ve heard other parents have said to their gay kids.  But we couldn’t talk.  And having no parent to confide in, at that critical stage of my life, I just had to hold it all in.  And it made me miserable.  I began having what they call these days, "anger management issues".

At home, he would pick fights, slam doors, explode for no reason. They wondered how their two children could be so different; Matt, a year and a half younger, was easygoing and happy. Zach was miserable.

That was so me.  And looking back on it after mom retired, I never really appreciated how bad I was.  Then when mom passed away, I inherited her diaries.  And I saw it all then.  It was very painful reading…

Bruce came home in a very bad mood.  Stomped into the bedroom…  So I called up J*** & went over to her place for the rest of the evening.  He had my stomach just tied up in knots…Oh how I wish he would turn back to the Lord & become like the little boy I once knew, kind, thoughtful, & love for all…

But I wasn’t her little boy anymore, let alone bloody likely to walk back into a church where I would be demonized as an abomination in the sight of God.  I was a young man with a young man’s needs and doubts and heartbreaks, all the more confusing and difficult to deal with not so much because I was gay, as that I couldn’t talk to the one person in my life who by all rights should have known me better then anyone, and who might have been able to give me some guidance, but mostly just love, when I needed it most.  And love she Did give me…but it had, or so I felt, strings attached.  Strings I was terrified to break.

She absolutely positively didn’t want me to come out to her. Every time I even went near the subject of my sexual orientation she would get cold and angry herself and throw up a wall. So I just accepted the fact that we could never talk about it, and I always had to keep that part of me inside when I was in the house.  So when my first love left me, and then my second try went very bad on me, and then my third, and I was a miserable desolate wreak inside, I had to keep it inside.  I grew increasingly sullen and angry. 

Even my friends back then, who were mostly straight, saw it.  It was a time before the Internet, and easy access to information about the greater gay community beyond my doorstep.  I only knew of a few seedy bars downtown, where I really didn’t want to be.  To get my weekly copy of the Washington D.C. gay paper, The Blade, or the Advocate, I had to venture down to this really squalid adult bookstore in nearby Wheaton.  Gay kids nowadays will, thankfully, never know how alone and isolated it felt to be gay back then.  Most of my friends were straight kids I knew from my high school days, and I really couldn’t talk much to them either, as counter-cultural tolerant as they were (though some of them not so much really).  But none of them could have given me what mom might have been able to, had we both lived in a different world.

If only I’d had a chance to open up to her about what was going on in my life, if only I’d had her to talk to then, I might have been a lot less angry, a lot less miserable. My temper was always flaring. I would storm into my room and sulk for hours. I knew I was having "anger management" issues back then, but in retrospect I never thought I was as bad as I was, until I read her diaries. She was a lot more upset then she let on back then. But even in her diaries, she never spoke about what she knew my sexual orientation to be (her friends would later tell me things she told them). She knew, she just didn’t want me to say it. The really sad thing about it all is that she’d have had a much easier son to live with back then, if I could have been open with her about it.

After she retired and moved south I was able to strike out finally on my own and get some of it all worked out.   When the first computer BBS systems came along, I was finally able to connect to the gay community at large, and make gay friends, and talk about all the things in my life I never could with mom.  By then mom and I would talk weekly on the phone, sometimes for hours. But we never talked about that part of my life right up to the day she died. My visits with her were seldom and short.

As close as she ever got to acknowledging my sexual orientation, and voicing a little motherly support, was one day on the phone, just a few months before she started having the heart trouble that would kill her.  It was August 2000.  She asked if I was coming down to the annual flea market and I told her then that it was hard to enjoy it, hard to really enjoy any vacation really, without someone to share it with.  And she sighed like she always did when I brought that up, and after a moment, finally said, "I know…I know you’re so lonely.  I wish you weren’t.  I hope you find someone of your own…(pause)…it doesn’t have to be a girl…"  I was a bit stunned.  Before I could say anything she changed the subject. 

So I know a little about what that poor kid was going through. It’s so good he was able to get it out, so wonderful that his parents are so supportive. And…look at what it did for him.

The O’Connors say middle-school officials were terrific, and by eighth grade the tide turned. Zach was let out 15 minutes early and walked across the football field to Daniel Hand High School to attend the gay-straight club. Knowing who he was, he could envision a future and felt a sense of purpose. His grades went up. He had friends. For an assignment about heroes, a girl in his class wrote about him, and Zach used her paper to come out to his Aunt Kathy.

He still wasn’t athletic, but to the family’s surprise, coming out let out a beautiful voice. He won the middle school’s top vocal award.

There’s a lesson there for all parents.  A big one.

Love your kid.  Just…love them.  Just as they are.