I could have made up an answer, just to avoid a potentially tense situation. But I answered honestly, “I’m an advocate for gay and lesbian families.” He looked confused so I gave him a little more information. “I talk and write about the experiences of children growing up with gay and lesbian parents.”
I travel frequently for my job, so I’ve been in this situation before. In the best cases, answering this question opens the door to a discussion, regardless of whether the person supports the idea of gay parents raising children.
But occasionally, the passenger next to me responds with silence. That’s what happened this time. He looked at me, blinked and then sat back in his seat, staring straight ahead. Finally he grabbed the magazine in the seat pocket in front of him and opened it. His body language, roughly translated, meant, “I did not buy a perfectly good seat on this airplane so that I could sit next to some lesbian.”
Or at least I’m guessing he thought I’m a lesbian. When I tell people what I do, most think I am. But for those who are open to talking with me, I usually reveal that I’m heterosexual. My dedication to gay and lesbian issues grew from the love and pride and rage and fear I experienced growing up in a “nontraditional” family.
When I was 5, my father came out as gay to his family and friends and moved in with another man. By the time I entered elementary school, I was learning about the cruelty of homophobia. “Faggot” was the favorite put-down among the boys in my class. I didn’t know what it meant until my parents explained that it was a mean way of saying someone was gay. Since my classmates seemed to be so hostile about gay people, I decided I should keep quiet about my family.
People who knew me then are surprised by my outspokenness. “Can’t you move on?” they ask. But I am driven to speak about my past because the consequences feel less risky now that I’m an adult. I no longer worry about people who might try to “protect” me from my father by taking me away from him. I don’t have to wonder every time we go out: is this the time he gets “caught”? I remember when I was about 8, I was walking down the street between my father and his partner and holding both of their hands. It felt dangerous, because by standing as a link between them I was “outing” them. What would happen if others realized my dad was gay? Would he lose his job? Get beaten up? Be declared an unfit parent?
While the threat of being separated from him was never real, I spent plenty of time worrying about it. Fortunately, my mother (who is heterosexual) made no attempt to limit my father’s custody rights. If she had, she probably would have gained full custody. Our courts have a history of favoring straight parents over gay ones in custody battles.
My parents did their best to make me feel good about where I came from. They told me that even though they were divorced and my dad was gay, we were no less valid than any other family. But they could do nothing about the abundance of negative messages about homosexuality that I interpreted as direct attacks on my family.
Why did so many people–including TV evangelists and talk-show guests–think that my dad was such a terrible person? They didn’t even know him. While my friends had monsters keeping them awake at night, I lost sleep over the anti-gay rhetoric spouted by right-wing politicians.
College marked a significant change in my life. The 1,500 miles between home and school gave me the distance I needed to figure out who I was, separate from my parents. I thought I had outgrown the label of “daughter from a gay family.” Soon after I graduated, however, I connected with a group of teens with gay and lesbian parents while volunteering for a youth organization. When I realized how similar their stories were to mine, I was inspired to start talking openly about my own experiences.
When I do speak, many people assume I’m a lesbian. And for those who don’t respect homosexuals, it’s the only reason they need to dismiss my arguments for gay rights. Once I identify myself as straight, however, I’ll watch their rigid, angry faces soften to ask me questions. I’ll see the handful of college students in the audience who were rolling their eyes sit up and listen. It gives me hope that they’ll hear my message: it wasn’t having a gay father that made growing up a challenge, it was navigating a society that did not accept him and, by extension, me.
Maybe my companion on that California flight would have been open to what I had to say if I had told him I’m straight. I’ll never know. As for the silence between us for the rest of the trip, I heard it loud and clear.
