I’m 22 years old and I am not ashamed of who I am. I’m just afraid. I know my parents love me, but on more than one occasion, they have made their dislike for “fags” rather obvious. I’d hate to see their reaction if they were to discover that their only son was one. I have never even been out on a date with another man for fear that my folks will find out. Two years ago I attempted suicide over this.
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But here’s my advice, LIT: Stop whining. There isn’t an out gay person alive who didn’t have to tell his parents–which means your dilemma is depressingly common. The solution is equally common: You sit your parents down, you say, “I’m gay,” you deal with the fallout, and then everyone gets over it. In my case, dad was an Irish Catholic deacon and a Chicago homicide detective, mom was a lay Catholic minister, and my dad had said antigay things in front of me when I was a child. Guess what? I told them, they cried, they got over it. And if my parents could get over it, LIT, so can yours.
But they can’t start getting over it until you tell them, so why not get the getting-over-it process started? But before you can do that, you’re going to have to stop wallowing in self-pity, stop contemplating suicide, and stop using your parents’ disapproval (or their anticipated disapproval) as an excuse to sit on your ass and do nothing. You also might want to stop fantasizing about living in a world free from bigotry and hatred–that world doesn’t exist and never will.
But I must say I’m surprised that you didn’t find a way to overcome your “extreme dread,” if only to save your marriage. (Perhaps some time with a blow-job-positive shrink might have made them seem less terrifying?) Your story reminded me of Henri of Navarre, a 16th-century French nobleman who converted to Catholicism so that he could become king of France. “Paris is worth a mass,” Henri famously quipped. Wasn’t your marriage worth an occasional blow job?
