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.
