Someday I'll Tell My Parents

Dunner's post from yesterday, "Proud, yet not prideful," sent me back to something I wrote many, many years ago, which -- the more things change, the more they stay the same -- may or may not be relevant, but, indeed, seems to address an age-old dilemma that gay folk, in one way or another, usually seem to be able to take care of. When I wrote the following, I had a slightly distorted (perhaps, slightly militant) view of heterosexual sensibilities, or lack thereof. I can tell you, now, after all the years that have passed since I wrote this essay; I can admit now admit freely that, Some of my best friends are heterosexuals!

Someday, I’ll tell my parents …. someday

I’ve not told my parents I’m gay. Someday I will tell them. Someday. But, when that day comes, what will I say? How can I explain to them that being a homosexual is so much more than desiring and experiencing same-gender sex? How can I explain to them what is in my heart and mind? Indeed, how can I explain to them the essence of my soul which is a homosexual essence so much more intense – a fire of immense proportions – than what I perceive to be the essence of heterosexuals? Essence? Soul? Yes, perhaps I tend toward the mystical and romantic. But, there is that … feeling which is silent and invisible but is nonetheless present in me and every gay person I have ever met. It is a feeling that, somehow, transcends the vapidity of sanctified fictions preached by the holy men and women who chastise my existence; it is a feeling that, somehow, in my life I am reaching for a far more potent vitality than procreation. Perhaps I confuse you. Let me explain.

Twice this winter while sitting in Cheesman Park, eating my vegetarian lunch – nuts, carrots, orange juice – a gaggle of long-necked geese, usually about thirty birds, has gathered on the snow-covered lawns below the parking lot where they dig below the layer of snow with their beaks and eat something from the earth below the white freeze. Both times I have see the geese, they have been constantly apprehensive of the sounds and movements around them and, periodically, one or two of the dominant males have spread their wings to warn the rest of the gaggle of possible danger. Both times, the geese have been frightened away from the park, once by a lovely brown and white spaniel and once by three young children who approached the birds cautiously and quietly but not cautiously and quietly enough.

The presence of those geese in Cheesman Park, right there in the middle of Capitol Hill, righter there in the middle of Denver surrounded by people and cars and the noises of people and cars and the primordial threat to those incredible beasts (they can fly, for God’s sake!) represented by all of that civilization; the presence of those particular birds in that particular environment touched me deeply. It touched me as deep as the magnificent Teutonic hardness and concomitant sweet, soft, wonderful gentility of the Beethoven Piano Concertos. It was a joyous experience transcending all rational explanation. It was just … an experience. And, I do not believe the experience was the natural outgrowth of my education or cultural awareness. No, I felt the way I did about the geese – and Beethoven – because I am a homosexual. Call it the gay sensibility, if you like. Call it whatever you like, but I am convinced I felt what I did because I am gay. And, yes, how do you explain such things to your parents?

Archibald MacLeish wrote that “…Man can live his truth, his deepest truth, but he cannot speak it. It is for this reason that love becomes the ultimate human answer to the ultimate human question.” Oh, yes … and, how does one explain to his parents the love, the pure, absolutely potent nature of the love of man for man? How does one explain that homosexual love is deep and consuming – when one has it – and debilitating and painful – when one loses it?

It was Andre Gide, Nobel Prize laureate, who wrote in Corydon that, “You must also recognize the fact that homosexual periods, if I dare use the expression, are in no way periods of decadence. On the contrary, I do not think it would be inaccurate to say that the great periods when art flourished – the Greeks at the time of Pericles, the Romans in the century of Augustus, the English at the time of Shakespeare, the Italians at the time of the Renaissance, the French during the Renaissance and again under Louis XIII, the Persians at the time of Hafiz, etc., were the very times when homosexuality expressed itself most openly, and I would even say, officially. I would almost go so far as to say that periods and countries without homosexuality are periods and countries without art.” Yes, and how do you explain to parents that, in homosexuals, there is a profound respect for beauty in art and literature and music and that in homosexuals resides the stuff of creation of the most exquisite art and literature and music? How do you explain to parents who may admire Norman Rockwell and Lawrence Welk and the Reader’s Digest that in Michelangelo Buonarroti and Tchaikovdky and Gertrude Stein and E.M. Forster there is a beauty so far beyond their paltry admiration for paltry art that the difference is no less stark than that between gold and lead?

How do you explain to parents that gay men are not ashamed to cry because gay men understand there is emotional impotence in not crying when compassion and depth of experience and sadness and joy can only be adequately expressed in tears? How do you explain to parents that what may seem effeminate in gay men is just, simply, the ability to transcend the inbred American image of what a man should be; that masculinity is something so much more than emotional hardness and insensitivity? How do you explain to parents that gay men are infinitely more comfortable with their masculinity than most heteros? How do you explain to parents that homosexuals throughout history have contributed to humanity in the most civilizing and productive manner? How do you explain to parents that homosexuality is as natural to a homosexual as flight is to birds? How do you explain to parents that homosexuals are not sick and decadent? How do you explain to parents that you have been a homosexual for as many years as you can remember; that sexual orientation does not involve choices, but involves natural imperatives which are not wholly understood but are, nevertheless, intensely vibrant, intrusive, potent? How do you explain to parents that you are what you have always been and always will be and that you have not become a stranger in their house simply because you have acknowledged your homosexuality to them? How … how do you explain such things to parents?

Albert Camus wrote in The Night of Truth, that “Nothing is given to men, and the little they can conquer is paid for with unjust deaths. But man’s greatness lies elsewhere. It lies in his decision to be stronger than his condition. And, if his condition is unjust, he has only one way of overcoming it, which is to be just himself.”

Yes, I have come to terms with myself, my gay self. I know myself. Perhaps my parents will also come to know me as I am, a homosexual trying his best to exist in a society which has been less than hospitable to him.

Someday I will tell my parents I am gay … someday.



First published in Out Front magazine in 1980, under the pseudonym, Michael George. It was republished that same year by Update in San Diego.