I think we spend a chunk of childhood worshiping our parents, the first stars we follow, and another chunk rebelling against them for all the ways they are different from who we want to be. If adulthood is about reconciling these opposing energies and coming to peace with our parents – and our selves – as flawed and autonomous people, then growing up can be even more difficult for gay people. After all, we first learn to worship something different than we are, and we venture out further from that, and ultimately, we have a longer journey to “get back home.”
My family situation is actually somewhat more complicated than that. My dad is technically my stepfather who adopted me, a couple years after marrying my mother, when I was eleven. My biological father is a gay man, who came out of the closet and divorced my mother when I was 8. So, in a sense, I am a gay man who has had both a straight and a gay dad.
When I become a father, as an out gay man in the 21st Century, I know that I will set an example of how to live with pride and integrity. To do this was much more difficult for a gay man in the 1970s when my biological father married my mother and had me. I don’t know whether I’ve always known I was gay – I didn’t have a concept of what gay was, or sexuality at all, in my early childhood. But I have always known that I was different. The examples were easy to find – I liked to play with dolls or play dress up or do many of the things girls were supposed to do, and I recoiled at almost everything boys were supposed to. My awareness of my differentness went deeper, I knew there was something in me that was inherently other. And I knew that it was in my father too.
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