As a child & family therapist, I have worked with a number of young clients over the years that have struggled in some measure to come to terms with their sexual orientation. By and large, these individuals experienced more distress over coming out to their family than coming out to themselves or their friends. Accepting themselves was only half the battle. Being accepted by their parents was sometimes an even greater challenge—and fraught with all sorts of peril, including the loss of parental approval, eviction from home, attempts at “conversion,” etc. At a time these children were walking an emotional high wire and desperately needed the safety net of their parents’ unconditional love and support, they frequently were left wanting—and at risk, for depression, suicide, substance abuse, school difficulties, running away, et al. Having the parents on board, per se, was critical.
What follows are excerpts from two stories in the New York Times, published a couple of years apart. (I encourage you to read both articles in full.) While both feature the experiences of boys named Zach who came out to their parents, they have very different outcomes and represent, in a way, the extremes that gay & lesbian youth may encounter as they express the truth about themselves:
Accepting Gay Identity, and Gaining Strength
MADISON, Conn.—ONE month before Zach O’Connor, a seventh grader at Brown Middle School here, came out about being gay, he was in such turmoil that he stood up in homeroom and, in a voice everyone could hear, asked a girl out on a date. It was Valentine’s Day 2003, and Zach was 13.
“I was doing this to survive,� he says. “This is what other guys were doing, getting girlfriends. I should get one, too.�
He feared his parents knew the truth about him. He knew that his father had typed in a Google search starting with “g,� and several other recent “g� searches had popped up, including “gay.�
“They asked me, ‘Do you know what being gay is?’ � he recalls. “They tried to explain there’s nothing wrong with it. I put my hands over my ears. I yelled: ‘I don’t want to hear it! I’m not, I’m not gay!’ �
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.
The O’Connors had hunches. Mr. O’Connor is a director of business development for American Express, Ms. O’Connor a senior vice president of a bank, and they have had gay colleagues, gay bosses, classmates who came out after college. From the time Zach was little, they knew he was not a run-of-the-mill boy. His friends were girls or timid boys.
“Zach had no interest in throwing a football,� Mr. O’Connor says. But their real worry was his anger, his unhappiness, his low self-esteem. “He’d say: ‘I’m not smart. I’m not like other kids,’ � says Ms. O’Connor. The middle-school psychologist started seeing him daily.
The misery Zach caused was minor compared with the misery he felt. He says he knew he was different by kindergarten, but he had no name for it, so he would stay to himself. He tried sports, but, he says, “It didn’t work out well.� He couldn’t remember the rules. In fifth grade, when boys at recess were talking about girls they had crushes on, Zach did not have someone to name.
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.� [full text]
And now a very different tale:
MEMPHIS—It was the sort of confession that a decade ago might have been scribbled in a teenager’s diary, then quietly tucked away in a drawer: “Somewhat recently,” wrote a boy who identified himself only as Zach, 16, from Tennessee, on his personal Web page, “I told my parents I was gay.” He noted, “This didn’t go over very well,” and “They tell me that there is something psychologically wrong with me, and they ‘raised me wrong.’ ”
But what grabbed the attention of Zach’s friends and subsequently of both gay activists and fundamentalist Christians around the world who came across the entry, made on May 29, was not the intimacy of the confession. Teenagers have been outing themselves online for years, and many of Zach’s friends already knew he was gay. It was another sentence in the Web log: “Today, my mother, father and I had a very long ‘talk’ in my room, where they let me know I am to apply for a fundamentalist Christian program for gays.”
“It’s like boot camp,” Zach added in a dispatch the next day. “If I do come out straight, I’ll be so mentally unstable and depressed it won’t matter.”
The camp in question, Refuge, is a youth program of Love in Action International, a group in Memphis that runs a religion-based program intended to change the sexual orientation of gay men and women. Often called reparative or conversion therapy, such programs took hold in fundamentalist Christian circles in the 1970’s, when mainstream psychiatric organizations overturned previous designations of homosexuality as a mental disorder, and gained ground rapidly from the late 90’s. Programs like Love in Action have always been controversial, but Zach’s blog entries have brought wide attention to a less-known aspect of them, their application to teenagers.
Although Zach wrote only a handful of entries about the Refuge program, all posted before he arrived there in the Memphis suburbs on June 6, his words have been forwarded on the Internet over and over, inspiring online debates, news articles, sidewalk protests and an investigation into Love in Action by the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services in response to a child abuse allegation. The investigation was dropped when the allegation proved unfounded, a spokeswoman for the agency said.
To some, Zach, whose family name is not disclosed on his blog and has not appeared in news accounts, is the embodiment of gay adolescent vulnerability, pulled away from friends who accepted him by adults who do not. To others he is a boy whose confused and formative sexual identity is being exploited by gay political activists.
In his last blog entry before beginning the program, at 2:33 a.m. on June 4, Zach wrote, “I pray this blows over,” adding that if his parents caught him online he’d be in trouble. He described arguments he had been having with his parents, his mother in particular. “I can’t take this,” his post reads. “No one can. I’m not a suicidal person. I think it’s stupid, really. But I can’t help it – no I’m not going to commit suicide – all I can think about is killing my mother and myself. It’s so horrible.” [full text]
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