When Girls Chase Boys...

I am sure this is not a problem unique to raising a gay son.... but it puts a unique spin on it.

**** Context (for anyone new or who doesn't remember).... my gay son is 10 years old *****

There is a girl in my son's class who is frequently chasing him. I cannot believe that at 10 and 11 years old they are still engaging in this incredibly primitive form of flirting, but that's clearly what it is. This is really bothering my son. Earlier in the year, when she kept grabbing him and chasing him, he spit at her to get him to stop. He of course got in trouble for spitting at her, but didn't tell anyone that she wouldn't stop chasing him.

Girl keeps chasing him. I ask, "So, what if she 'catches' you? If you don't run, she can't chase you." He says she grabs him and holds onto him, and he hates it.... but of course he hasn't actually clearly said to her, "Leave me alone!" I ask why. He doesn't know. I think he is just trying so hard to fly below the radar.

He has been picked on in the past as being "gay," but he isn't flamboyanty "out" at school - he's only ten and he is on the shy side. I think perhaps he is afraid that if he seems uninterested in female affection people will figure out that he's gay? I don't know. It just seems that this element of his identity makes everything complicated. When a teenage girl at Broadway camp teased him once about having a crush on her, he freaked out. He didn't know what to do because he was afraid that denying it would = gay, but while doesn't want them to think he is gay, he doesn't want to just play along because, well, it's not true, and he doesn't want to be in the closet and hide either. That's not who he is. Sigh. He just makes this stuff so complicated. I've tried to explain teasing and flirting in the past and that it's just a normal part of life. It all frustrates him.

I finally just emailed the teacher tonight. Teacher is awesome and emailed me back right away. She and I both agree it is important my son learn to speak up when stuff is bothering him. I'm glad he feels safe at home, but he needs to find his own voice. He can't be relying on me in middle school, and he starts middle school next year.

My husband and I had a long talk with him tonight about growing up and flirting. Pretty much the next ten to twenty years of his life are going to involve a lot of giving of attention and receiving of attention, some of it physical, some of it in other forms. And it is important to know how to deal with it.

My husband is great. He knew just what to say, "Are there any boys you like?" There is. One. So my husband says, "What if it was him doing it? How would you feel then? What would you do?" My son blushes and says, "I'd kind of like it. I would probably grab him back." Exactly. How do we figure out who likes us and who doesn't? Flirting. But it is important to send clear signals. And my son does not send clear signals. He runs.

So, we explained the importance of saying "Stop. I do not like that. I don't want you to grab me. I don't want you to chase me. You need to leave me alone."

I think this is just a lesson more parents need to teach kids. I think we have all become so concerned with teaching our kids not to hurt other kids' feelings that we have forgotten to teach them that it's okay to say "Stop. I appreciate your attention, but it is unwanted attention right now, and I would like to be left alone."

A Year...

In the musical Ragtime, at the beginning of the first act, the father is leaving on an expedition to the North Pole. As he says goodbye to his family, he says, "It's only a year. Nothing much happens in a year. The world will not spin off its axis.  Nothing will change."

Although this musical debuted in 1996, I feel as though the author's words were practically prophesying 2016.  What a year. For marginalized populations, particularly the LGBTQ community, everything has changed. It feels almost as if the world has spun off its axis.

Who could have possibly predicted Brexit?  Or Pulse?  Or Trump / Pence?

My son will start middle school soon.  I have been dreading this for a while, as it seems that the mix of puberty and a shift in psycho-social development stages creates a perfect storm.  Plus, society's method of grouping students by age for schooling, and isolating them on campuses only with each other really creates this vacuum in which kids have no perspective and no role models. It's a recipe for disaster.  My son does musical theatre, and in the musical theatre community, "kids" typically refers to all of the youth in the production, and the youth tend to cling to each other.  My son hangs out with the other kids in the shows, as well as with the adults. He learns with all of them.  They do theatre games, they learn the music and dances, etc.  Why can't school be like that?  I understand why math class is taught in age groups, but most other subjects really have enough diversity that students of a variety of ages could learn together, but we don't do that. In this country, we don't even let them share the same physical space, so middle schoolers are caged up with other kids in this awkward stage, with only their teachers to model appropriate behavior.

But I digress....

I was already afraid for my son to enter middle school, but then I hear reports about middle school students targeting Mexicans with chants like "Build That Wall," and I hear about news reports of strangers telling gay people that Trump is going to put marriage back the way "God" wants it, and I am just so much more afraid.

Middle school is less than a year away.  If you'd have asked me a year ago what November 2016 would look like, I could certainly not have guessed at the increase in fear.

I can only pray that the next year brings an unexpected peace. Trump ran on a campaign of completely bucking a system that he now has to find a way to work within. I can only hope that he will find himself so incredibly humbled by the difficulty of the tasks facing him that he has a huge change of heart. I can only hope that this unexpected turn of political events has awakened liberal-sympathizers enough to turn them from bystanders into true allies. Perhaps it takes the darkest night to really see the stars.

Gay Role Models

I met some of The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence tonight.  First off... a word about how amazing these people are. They are drag nuns who do community service. I can't even believe that this is a thing.  But I love love love it.

I asked one of the sisters, "What do you wish someone told you when you were a young gay kid?" 

The answer was interesting. I had hoped for some sage words of wisdom and encouragement I could pass on to my kid, but instead I got a bittersweet piece of retrospective.

He (she? I am unclear on how to use pronouns for male cisgender drag people) said that he just wished he had role models. Adults who were where they are and know what they are going through and can give an image of hope for a positive life and future.

Why is this bittersweet?  Okay, well, it didn't answer my question. But I love that my son does have gay role models in his life. Several of them, but most specifically a guy at church who volunteers teaching Sunday school and children's ministry. Rhett is a great guy who is young and fun and openly gay.  Being gay is just a small percentage of who Rhett is in my son's eyes. In my son's eyes, Rhett tells better jokes than anyone he knows.  Rhett throws himself completely into every game they play, even if it means eating 17 jalapenos, which somehow equals "hero" in the eyes of a little boy who cringes when pasta sauce is too spicy. Rhett sings well. Rhett is a good actor in the skits that they sometimes do in church.   But my son also knows that this great Christian adult happens to be gay. He has met Rhett's boyfriend. And my son sees that his straight daddy is also best friends with Rhett, and that gives my son a lot of hope too.  That he won't lose all his straight friends when he comes out to them. And that he will not have to choose between love and church. Because the two should never be mutually exclusive.

My son also does theatre. I hate to promote stereotypes, but some are true, and the gay male theatre stereotype is true. We have met many straight males. But it seems like over half of the men running theatre programs in our area are gay. And that's fantastic.  My son sees gay couples at cast parties. And he sees Human Rights Campaign Equality stickers on practically every car in the parking lot. He knows his directors and choreographers and producers are gay. But mostly he just loves them because they are great artists. And my son wants to be an artist when he grows up. Not just a gay man. 

But I know that we are so, so lucky. In a fairly large suburb (over 100,000 people) with something like 30 churches, we are one of only two churches I know of in town that truly welcomes full participation of gay members. That means that all the other little kids growing up in the other churches in my city do not have these role models. And I am certain that some of those kids are gay.

And the school district where we live is really conservative too. When you search for "gay straight alliance" on the schools websites, it seems like none of them have them. I have never seen a local GSA represented at any local PRIDE thing or gay community events, so I am pretty sure they don't exist.  If there are gay teachers in the schools, no one knows about it. Heck, there are rarely male teachers in the schools. They are all older white females.
 
Little kids need gay role models.  I hope that young gay men understand the importance of being involved in the community, and I hope that community organizations, YMCAs and Boys and Girls Clubs and churches and schools, understand the importance of supporting openly gay individuals. Because little kids NEED role models that remind them of themselves. They need people to show them that, even if they don't have classic cisgender heterosexual visions of a happy future, that it's okay. That happy and gay can be synonyms. They certainly aren't antonyms.

Pulse

When I heard about what happened in Orlando last night, I almost couldn't think about it.  I had to sort of look at it and then look away and not think about it.

When he was eight years old, already identifying as a part of the LGBTQ community, my son could not understand why it upset his grandfather to hear him identify as gay.  I explained that his grandfather was just scared for him.  This of course necessitated an explanation.

"Why would he be scared for me?"

"Because people sometimes really hate gay people. Like the way they used to hate Black people."

"Like Martin Luther King Jr.?"

"Yup."

"They killed him.  Do people want to kill gay people?"

            How does a mother answer that question?   
        In my opinion, one must tell the truth.

"Yes, some people do. There was a gay politician named Harvey Milk who fought for gay rights, and someone murdered him, just like Martin Luther King."

"Do people still want to kill gay people?"

"Um... yeah, some, but mostly it's getting a lot better. It's getting so much better."

Castro memorial - June 12

So how do I explain this???

I believed it when I said it.  That it was getting better. I am an optimistic person. There is no way, two years ago, that I could have possibly known that the worst LGBTQ violence in our history was yet to come. And a man was arrested in Santa Monica on his way to LA Pride. And there is no evidence that the two were tied together in anyway. It's not one isolated incident of awfulness. It is evidence of a resurgence of hate.

Hate that could cost my son his life. It hurts. So. Bad. 

We are pulse. As a mother, I know the fear. I know that all those victims have moms who have cried tears of fear that someday someone's illogical hate for their child, based on just who they love, would result in pain . And they probably have relaxed over the years and started to think, "It's okay. It's getting better. But here it is. 

I love my son as who he is, and his trailblazing childhood confidence as an out gay kid has made me a better person. If I could pray a prayer and make him straight again, I would not ever do it. 

I want so badly to just be 100% okay with my son being gay.

But I am never going to be okay with knowing that people want to kill my son just for who he is.

 I don't know if that will ever stop hurting. 

Beautiful Thing

My husband and I watched this movie tonight, Beautiful Thing, and while it was a good movie, it really made me think about something else that really is a beautiful thing in my life.

In the movie, the young man, Jamie, goes to a gay bar. His mom finds out. She confronts him about it, and he tries to lie. And it makes her so sad. Like it would any mom. 

"Why do you just talk to me, Jamie?"

"I'm knackered." 

"Jamie. Please. Just talk to me."

 "What about?"

"I'm your mother."

"Some things are just hard to say."

"I know. I know that."

 "You think I'm too young. You think it's just a phase. You think I'm gonna catch AIDS and... and everything." 

"Don't cry. It's alright. I'm not gonna put you out in the morning like an empty bottle." 

Jamie is wrong about his mom. She doesn't think it's a phase. She loves him for who he is. She's crying and upset because she found out that he's been bullied about it for a long time.

And I'm sure she's crying because she feels that there's grown a distance that she never intended there to be between her and her beautiful baby boy.  It's like, after you give birth to a baby and they put that baby in your arms and you spend your first few days just holding that child to your chest, and you think feel in your soul that you are one. That although this tiny little person is now outside your body, you will always feel as absolutely close as you do at that moment. 

No mom wants to imagine her son hiding out in a closet. 

When I go to PFLAG meetings, sometimes the topic comes up of the moment we found out. I try not to use the phrase "coming out" when I describe my son's story, because that seems to suggest that there was a closet that he was in, but in my son's case, well, he never felt the need to shut the door. 

And that is a beautiful thing. 

The door has always been open. Because there are gay people in our lives. Because I talk about issues facing LGBT people. Because I explained what the news and the supreme court victories meant. Because I listened when he was four-years-old and said his male camp counselor was cute. And so his daddy and I chose our pronouns carefully after that and checked our assumptions. We couldn't assume he'd marry a woman, because he might not. So we talked about families, not "bride and groom" or "husband and wife."  When we talked about his future, we used words like "someone you love," and we started paying attention to the homophobic language around us to try to shield him from it. Because you just never know.

And when he was old enough to feel something that he realized was different,  he had words to talk about it, and when he had something to say, well, he said it. 

There are no proverbial closets in our home. And that is a beautiful thing. My son is open with me. As open as any boy will be with his mom, I suppose. He probably won't tell me about his first kiss, but I didn't tell my mom about my first kiss either. 

My son is in the early stages of puberty. It's late childhood, It's that age, and he is aware of all the sexual references in society and pop culture. But  when he wants information about sex, he doesn't Google it. He asks me. Because he knows he'll get an honest answer. He'll get a kind, non-binary, love-centered, truthful answer. He knows that when I don't know something, I'll find the answer. 

And so my son and I talk about things. I know he has a crush on Karan Brar. And that he doesn't like when Karan Brar takes roles where he does a fake accent. 

Although sometimes I feel really sad for my son that he doesn't know anyone else his age who thinks like he does, I know it is just because too many parents build accidental closets. They build them when they speak in binary terms like "man and wife." They build them when they silently let crazy Uncle Henry rant about "dykes."  If you fear that someday your child might come out to you, just don't create a home with closets. Don't let binary-biased language go un-checked in your home. Build a home without closets and there won't be one for your child to come out of.