Revealing sexuality to immediate family can only happen once in life. At a certain point it is difficult to not involve family who is very much a part of one’s life.
There came a time after moving away from home where I felt the need to tell my parents about my personal preference of sexual attraction, and my life.
It always seemed strange to me that I had to tell my parents, “I’m gay.” It is a very interesting statement because no heterosexual child tells their parents that they are straight. It is assumed in our society that children are born attracted to others of the opposite sex, they will grow up, lead lives of marriage and have babies. No parents seem to think when their child is born, “my baby must be gay.”
With all of this in mind, I felt the need to clue my parents in on what was going on in my personal life, seeing as though I had a pretty serious boyfriend at the time. I wanted to be comfortable with myself, and be comfortable with talking to them about my relationships in the way that my brother would talk about his girlfriends. I thought, in many ways it would be different for me because I was not having a relationship with a girl. It was intimidating to think about how I was not leading the same relationship life as my brother, and I couldn’t help but wonder how my parents would take my big news, especially knowing that they are fairly strong Catholics. I kept my head up, tried to hold in my butterflies and nerves, and continued to work up the guts to word vomit my gay announcement.
I could not figure out for the life of me what was holding me back and scaring me so much to not tell them about my boyfriend. I would practice what I was planning on saying so many times that I began to feel ridiculous and pathetic. The words ran through my head, over and over again like a broken record. Finally, my mom, my step dad Richard and I went out for pizza one of the last nights I was visiting them at home in California. I felt dinner was the time to tell them and I told myself there was no backing out. We ate dinner, finished, and I still hadn’t spit the words out. I knew they could tell I had something to say, it was spelled out on my face. At last, my mouth opened and I told them: ”Mom and Richard, Kevin and I are…daaaating.”
My parents had met my boyfriend Kevin when coming to visit me in New York, but I had never told them he and I were together. Surprisingly enough, they didn’t act any different and wanted to know everything from where he was from to how long he and I had been dating for. It caught me off guard in many ways because I had no idea that my mom and stepfather would be so understanding and accepting. To this day, I am able to talk to them about my relationships and they treat me no different than they treat my brother and his heterosexual relations.
