This post was submitted by corey

This month I came out to my parents, something that – as I have written about before – was not an easy task. Here’s the story, in bits and pieces.

I rolled the car up to the edge of the lot, parking it a few feet from the wall of stones that separated us from the ocean. The sky was clear and the white sun, still low in the sky, was almost blinding in the corner of my eye. My mom and I were at the very tip of the Stonington Borough, a section of our Connecticut town that had once been an old fishing village, and had defended the Union during the War of 1812; today it was a neighborhood of posh stores and seven-figure townhouses where wealthy New Yorkers summered.

After I had taken my mom out to breakfast that morning, she suggested we go for a drive, and that was inevitably where we ended up. It was the spot where kids used to go to “park” back in the days of her youth, where me and my sister used to swim out to a dock and scream each time seaweed touched our feet, and where I once walked with a guy on another winter morning shortly before he broke my heart.

Today it served a different purpose, and I knew it the moment we arrived. “I just want to let you know that your dad and I are very happy that you told us,” my mom said suddenly, cutting into the silence. “Nothing changes how much we love you, and we are totally okay with you being gay.”

She had tears in her eyes now, as she told me how bad she and my dad felt for making this difficult for me, and for being so hostile towards the notion – probably in their heads for many years – that I might be gay. My father in particular had made his vehement opposition to gays known, and for many of my years trapped in the closet it had been a constant cold war between us. “But we’re changing,” my mom said, still trying not to cry. “We’re changing.”

—

I had laughed when my sister told me, though it was clear that she was upset. Maybe I should have been, too.

My parents had come to visit her in New York two weeks before Thanksgiving, and when they did, my dad tricked my sister into outing me. He lied to her and said that I had come out to him a few days before, and she took a few seconds too long to respond. Her pause confirmed what he had known for years: that his son was gay.

My mom and sister had been furious at him, but I took the news gently. It figured that rather than asking me directly, my dad would handle things in a fucked-up way that everyone else found inappropriate. It was hard to get mad at him for being himself, especially since I had acquired so much of his I’ll-do-it-my-own-goddamn-way mentality.

When I asked my sister how my parents had reacted to this, she reported that they didn’t say very much but seemed to take it okay. That was the only reaction we had to go by, as when I talked to them over the phone in the days that followed, they ignored the subject and acted like the whole thing never happened.

This all occurred during a busy week full of distractions, topped off by my learning that I had been accepted into Teach For America and would be moving to Denver in six months. Soon a week had passed since The Incident, and I realized that if I didn’t take action and say something myself we may never address it. I sat down and began to write them an email, in which I intended to preemptively answer all the questions I knew they’d have, and leave the conversational ball in their proverbial court.

“Dear Mom and Dad,

I hadn’t planned on doing this this way, but life never works out exactly the way you plan things, huh?”

—

On November 3rd, I was screaming at my dad over the phone. Not because I was mad, but because I was talking politics, which with him always meant yelling.

It was the night before the election, and he was still undecided. That was actually a miracle in and of itself, as he had been a pretty strong McCain supporter since early in the campaign. Though my dad is a registered Democrat, we had long ago concluded that his actual politics were a mixture of libertarianism and fascism, depending on the issue and his mood.

Finally he said, “You know what I’m going to do?”

“What?”

“I’m going to vote for Obama tomorrow, just to get you to shut the hell up.”

I paused for a moment before choosing a simple response. “Good.”

And that was the end of it.

Somehow the election had turned into a personal matter for my family. More so than politics, my parents’ votes seemed based on my personal call for them to embrace change, open-mindedness, and optimism towards the unknown, even if it confused and scared them. I got the sneaking suspicion that their votes weren’t referendum on Iraq or the economy, but on what they strongly suspected about their son.

—

“I hate going to weddings,” my dad explained to my sister. “There are two weddings I want to go to in the rest of my life, and that’s yours and Corey’s.”

This was my last day with my family for Thanksgiving break. We were driving through the rain, back from a breakfast of crepes and coffee at a Belgian restaurant downtown.

It was comments like that which always hurt me greatly in the past, those subtle expectations my parents would express that I knew I wouldn’t be able to fulfill, like talk of girlfriends and grandkids. After moving away from home and coming out to everyone but my family, going back was always like a nightmare in which I knew what I was seeing was just a fabrication but that always left me, in its wake, questioning who and what I really was.

This time when he alluded to me getting married, though, I knew it wasn’t meant to slight me, coerce me into being something I wasn’t, or aggressively deny what he already knew. Rather, it was an acknowledgment that he genuinely wanted me to be happy and start a family of my own.

I wondered then how my parents felt when the Connecticut Supreme Court gave gays the right to marry a few weeks before, and wondered whether or not they had thought of me being able to move home and walk down the aisle, and if it was possible for that to scare the hell out of them and yet make them feel relieved and proud at the same time.

I wondered what had made my parents change from being so hostile towards gays for so many years to suddenly finding room in their hearts to take me for who I am. If my working-class, conservative, small-town parents could go from homophobic to accepting like a switch being flipped, I wondered what change in America gays today couldn’t live to see.

—

My parents were not happy senior year of high school when I told them I was considering Georgetown for college. It was too far from home, it was in a city, and to make matters worse, the Hoyas were bitter rivals of Connecticut’s UConn Huskies. “You can go to Georgetown if that’s what you decide,” my dad had told me, “but I will never root for Georgetown basketball.”

But I went to Georgetown anyway, and within two weeks of the ’05/’06 season, my father’s UConn memorabilia was packed away forever. He and my mother tuned into every Georgetown basketball game religiously, cheering hard and watching for me in the crowd. I don’t go to the games anymore, but sometimes I think that they still look for me on their TV screen, hoping so hard to find me there.

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