Mom, 1957

This is not a story of a son coming out. This is a story of a mother coming to terms with having raised an emotionally healthy gay son. And every word of it is true. Thanks Mom.

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When I told my mother I was gay on New Year’s Eve 1992, there was shock and disappointment because, based on our history together, I’d had the highest expectations for her….

Growing up the youngest of four boys, with a motorcycle loving father, I had all the macho male role models every ‘traditional family values’ organization yearns to enforce on the perfect nuclear unit. Did not matter. By age three, I wanted to play with Barbie Dolls. Dad argued vehemently with Mom for satiating my desire for those dolls. She insisted, perhaps with an implied message directed at him, “They say that boys who play with dolls make better fathers.”

When I was four, Mom and I would ‘sing, sing a song’ along with Karen Carpenter when she came on the radio. Soon after I entered kindergarten, my teacher informed Mom that I had told her “I don’t like to play with the boys because they’re too rough.” (Things have changed since I became a man…). This was about the same time I would wait impatiently all year for the Easter airing of The Wizard of Oz on television, because VCRs didn’t exist yet.

I spent warm spring afternoons sitting on my bedroom windowsill crooning “Tonight” with my West Side Story record, imagining that it was because of seeing me that Tony’s world went away. I also ended up with a huge, persistent crush on one of my father’s motorcycle buddies. Everyone assumed I just idolized this particular masculine figure, but my mother would often say, “Danny adores him. Just absolutely loves him.”

When I asked Mom what it means to be ‘gay’ (spurred by Joyce DeWitt’s very last line in the pilot episode of Three’s Company), my mother did not turn red, did not trip over her words, did not scold me for using such vulgar language, did not tell me that people who are gay do evil things and then go to hell.

Mom simply said, “If a man is gay, it means he loves another man the way I love your father.”

Later that year, I made a major childhood decision: I began reading Nancy Drew over the Hardy Boys. I also became obsessed with the Village People. Mom had already had that gay talk with me, so she was able to openly gripe that she could never have the hunky construction worker. She also recounted a story to me of a gay friend from her past who asked her out on a date once, saying he would become straight for her because she was so beautiful. Her rejection was direct and to the point, “You don’t really want to date me. You’re gay, and you can’t change that.”

In the 1980s I focused my love of music on artists like Boy George and Madonna. I made plenty of female friends doing high school musicals, none of whom I ever dated, and I had no male friends. During the college years, I did some modeling, went clubbing several nights a week, and remained single.  

Then, in March of 1992, I walked into my first “anything goes” techno club and decided I was at last ready to connect emotionally and physically with another individual if I should meet him. Over the course of months, I made some close gay friends, all of whom my mother met and adored.

During Christmas week of that same year, I had a holiday gathering—at which Mom got a little tipsy. This soon had her saying very openly to some of my gay friends, “If Danny was gay, I would have no problem with it. But he hasn’t said anything.” This was spoken as if I wasn’t in the room, but I was sitting right across from her. I was glad to hear that this chapter of our relationship was not going to be some huge drama.

Well, the next afternoon, New Year’s Eve, I drove Mom to a liquor store to pick up champagne, and while we were there, she bravely said, “Danny, you have an awful lot of gay friends. Are you gay?”

Thrilled that she was ready to deal with this, I smiled and said, “Yeah, ma. I jumped the fence” (it was a catchphrase at that time).

She went pale, got all confused, and wasn’t sure what the catchphrase meant, so I had to explain. She stammered, “You’re really gay?”

When the confusion was cleared up, the immediate reaction was the silent treatment. She couldn’t even look at me. As I left the house for my New Year’s Eve celebration that night, I courteously told her the club and crew I’d be at and with, respectively. 

Now comes the tricky part. I’d informed Mom of my plans to crash at a particular friend’s place for a slumber party. While at the club, I got caught up in the moment with a different friend when it was time for a midnight kiss. One thing led to another…and I went home with him instead.

Next morning, the friend whose place I was supposed to crash at called and told me that my mother called his place looking for me. He simply told her, “I’ll make sure he gets back to you….”

Clearly, she was checking up on me, something she had never done before. How do mothers know when you’re up to no good??? This was the first time I’d ever stayed over a guy’s place!

When I got home, she was livid. She accused me of lying to her, she said she didn’t know what I was doing…and unfortunately, when she was snooping through my phone book for my friend’s number, she saw a phone number listed under the word ‘blood.’ Now, I had barely dabbled during my half-a-year of being sexually active, but my friend had given me the number so that I could be responsible and get checked if I began doing anything major. Mom didn’t know any of this, just assumed the worst, and said, “I don’t even know you anymore.” And I responded with the gay cliché “I’m the same person I always was.”

After another two days of the silent treatment, I was going about my business, just waiting for her to remember the twenty-three years worth of positive reinforcement she’d taught me about gay individuals—and waiting for her to stop her hypocritical behavior. Leaving the house for my job that day, I said my courteous goodbye as I passed her bedroom. She called to me.

“Danny. I want you to know I still love you. You know I still love you, right?”

She got up, embraced me tightly and began crying. I assured her I knew she loved me. I couldn’t help but wish she’d just come to her senses already and get over it. I expected nothing less of her.

She asked me how it had happened. “Did I do something wrong? Did your father ever do something to you? Did one of your brothers….?”

Isn’t it amazing how even the most open-minded of mothers finds it easier to momentarily believe that her husband or other children are pedophiles than to just accept that her son is gay?

I forcefully squelched her fears, utterly bewildered that she couldn’t grasp the concept of her Village People loving, Nancy Drew reading, Carpenters singing son being gay.

“I just want you to be happy, and safe.”

“Mom, I’m very safe, and I am so happy I’m not straight, because if I was, I wouldn’t be the person I am. And I love who I am.”

She is the one who taught me to love who I am, and to be myself, starting the moment she handed me a Barbie Doll despite gender restrictions regarding toys. That was the very first time she demonstrated that my happiness was the most important thing to her, and the unspoken sentiment stuck with me.

She also taught me that a gay man is just a man who loves another man the way she loved my father. And with that life lesson learned, five months after I told her I was gay, I met the man I’ve been in love with ever since.

It took Mom no time to find her niche with her gay son. Only a few weeks after our serious discussion, I was eating dinner and she was folding laundry while we watched Ricki Lake together (what can I say? It was the 90s, I was gay, she was a homemaker). When a very flamboyant young man walked onto Ricki’s stage, I blurted out, “What a flamer.”

Without skipping a beat, Mom responded, “Look who’s talking….” 

Now that was more like it.