MOTheR Gay Pride

June is Gay Pride Month, and I’m required to write one Pride blog post or I get my gay membership card canceled! (joke)

So from my blog name I’m obviously gay, but I’m also a 65 year old man who couldn’t admit I was gay until my early thirties. By that time I had been married 13 years and had three children. I would never change the path I traveled that resulted in the three most important things in my life, and a lifelong friendship with my former wife. However, the reasons I went down that path of shame about myself came from years of emotional sadness, insecurity, and a fixation on productive behavior that was nonetheless detrimental to my life.

When I was 3 years old my parents had a discussion whether or not I was gay. They only told me this later in life, which I found kind of frustrating. When I asked why they had the initial discussion, they said I didn’t play like my brother or sister. I was just different in that I was not into physical play like the boys were or played dress up and with dolls like the girls did. My play mostly consisted of enjoying creative things, educational type activities, and using my imagination building tents and forts, whether inside using the sofa cushions or outside with a cool teepee my parents had bought me from Sears. They never shared any more details of that 1963 conversation, but they probably went with the general philosophy at the time that they should channel me into more stereotypical boy-type activities.

My parents put me in peewee baseball at about 5 or 6 and it was awful. I am so uncoordinated that I couldn’t catch a baseball if someone dropped it into my glove. I couldn’t skateboard or catch a football, either. Even at that early age, none of the other kids wanted me on the team. My mom made it worse by wanting to be the mom that cheered on her son the loudest and longest, which only drew more attention to me at a time when I just wanted to sink into the ground. I begged not to go to practice or games, but my dad’s comment was that members of our family were not quitters. Gratefully, they didn’t make me play baseball again the next year or participate in any sports other than a few more years of swimming and diving lessons.

But the damage was done from that early baseball experience. I never felt I was standing on solid ground. I felt like of like I was on an iceberg that was forever moving but hard to figure out where. (Sadly, this is seered into my memory.) I never felt like I was living up to my parents’ or peers’ expectations. I can be remember endless Cub Scout and Boy Scout meetings I had to attend even though I was not into camping, hiking or almost anything else they did. At least once every day I heard my parents start a sentence with, “When you grow up, get married and have children…, and they meant marriage to a woman.

The teasing started in second or third grade at school with the kids calling me “girl,” though later on it did evolve to “gay” and “faggot.” Luckily I was intelligent and good at school so I could often bury my nose in a book or homework. But I also became addicted to food at about 8 or 9, and was the fattest one or two kids in school. I never really had more than one friend at a time as I think I felt safer when I wasn’t outnumbered. While I occasionally thought as a teen that another boy was nice looking or had a great build, I thought it was because I wanted to be like them. I never thought it was because I wanted to do be with them. I buried anything gay that I thought so deep that it never reached my level of awareness. It was not what I was supposed to be so I didn’t let it anywhere near the surface. At least growing up in Orange County, California gave me the opportunity to enjoy swimming, bodysurfing, and learning to sail small boats in the ocean. I think being near the ocean at that time was the one place I could just be myself, be alone in a crowd, and enjoy the beauty of the world.

I started working at 14 year old as a janitor in the hair salon my mom went, sweeping up floors, refilling the hair products, cleaning the restroom, and wiping down the chairs and sinks. I made $2.50 an hour for four hours a week and I was hooked. I did something beneficial to someone, got paid for it without having any feelings of unworthiness, and made money. I quickly started losing the weight as I changed my addiction from food to work. Within a few years I was working and going to college 60 hours a week, and continued to work at least that many hours for the rest of my career.

I met my future wife when I was 18 at a restaurant where we both worked. We got married 18 months later. She was the first person whom I felt loved me unconditionally. I felt a sense of security with her that I had never felt before and I completely latched onto that beautiful feeling. I buried myself into her, quickly working up the career ladder, improving houses, and having kids. Even after working long hours, I was also focusing on what we now term “flipping houses” though I never thought of it like that. I just finished fixing up either a brand new or run down house in a couple years, got anxious with the free time and had us move to another fixer. But finally when the third pregnancy came along, I somehow finally and relatively quickly figured out I was gay. It has always been there strongly below the surface. It made me terribly sad as I knew it meant the end of our marriage. And I realized it would have happened much sooner if my then wife hadn’t been such a wonderful person.

This wasn’t a choice as some of you will want to term it. It was finally becoming aware I was actually more of a real person than the robot who was never totally fulfilled, even with the wonderful stuff the world told me would make me happy. I felt I had been acting the role of myself being what everyone expected instead of actually being myself. I didn’t have a breakdown as that just wasn’t how I operate, but my world fell apart. We had the baby and stayed together another year, but the marriage ended. She finally asked me to leave as I wasn’t able to on my own. I’m so grateful that after another six to twelve months, my former wife and I got to a place where we are very close friends. I spent most of the next decade learning to be who I really was and being a father to my kids. I saw them almost every day as we stayed living within a few miles of each other.

I eventually found my partner about a decade after my marriage ended and we have been together over twenty years. Everyone gets along great and we all enjoy being with one another. It’s so nice on the holidays and family events being able to just have one event where everyone gets along. I know the kids really appreciate that. And I’ve enjoyed each grandchild as they have come along.

I felt I had evolved through life by coming out and overcoming the conditioning about how I should act from my first few decades of life. Sadly, the basic feelings of fundamental unlovability never left me. I had a great career, but felt I was never meeting expectations, though I was. I was very hard on myself thinking I was a failure even as I continued to succeed. I also felt a failure as a father, and a failure as a romantic partner. They deserved better than me as I had let everybody down. The feeling were less intense after I admitted I was gay and went into a community that finally accepted me, even at a time when very few gay men had children. But those childhood feelings conditioned you and stay with you. When I eventually reached a time working in a situation that was awful, requiring me to play big election politics and big union politics, both for the sake of their benefit more than the taxpayers, customers, or workers, and living away from home, those awful feelings returned. And while it will have to be the subject of future posts, I become involved in a situation that resulted in me signing a plea deal and spending 32 months at a prison camp for a white collar crime. The feelings you develop in childhood often don’t away, even decades later.

To close up this long post with a simple message, I’d most like to say to parents everywhere to just let your kids be who they are as soon as they start finding their own path. You can’t make a gay kid straight and you can’t make a straight kid gay, but you can screw them up trying to make them something they aren’t. And this isn’t some sort of column related to trans surgery or puberty blocking hormones, or some way to make this about the extreme rather than the most prevalent. Be loving and supportive but you don’t need to go overboard to try and prove you are mother or father of the year. You should absolutely not be your child’s best friend. Be their parent and let your kids grow and change. Don’t try to reprogram them or change them. Doing so only ensures eroding your relationship, creating a kid with insecurity or feelings that leave them with little or no self worth. Gay pride is just a way at its very core to let people know they are ok, they are loved and they matter to the world. And I’m still working on that issue for myself.