I think most of you know that I have two children that I
believe to be the two finest children that ever lived. This rant is on behalf of my son, LJ. Most of you also know that LJ is gay. He told me a few days after he turned 14 and
now, at 24, he has matured into an absolutely incredible young man.
I also have an 18 year old nephew who is gay. His parents have not been exactly accepting of
this news. They haven’t thrown him out
or anything, but he truly feels unaccepted much of the time. As someone watching from the outside I see so
many things his parents are doing wrong and I see many ways my nephew is
making everything worse. Both sides could
behave better.
I took off to campaign at the polls against amendment one
here in North Carolina last Tuesday.
Unfortunately the amendment passed, but I’m still glad I tried. My nephew came and stood with me for a
while. He told me he was going to NYC
for a short trip and that he had made arrangements to stay with LJ and his
boyfriend Colin. In the course of the
conversation he shared with me something his mother said, it was that, while
she accepted that fact that LJ and Colin had a relationship, she didn’t really
want her son to be around their ‘lifestyle’.
I remember him saying it, it caught my attention, you know when you hear
something that just hits you ‘wrong’. I
wasn’t really mad when I heard it, but the longer I’ve thought about it I’ve
begun to do a slow burn.
The lifestyle. Excuse me, the lifestyle? She wants to talk
about my son’s lifestyle? I can tell her
about it. His lifestyle included
graduating from college with honors, and following his dream to move to New
York City. His ‘lifestyle’ includes,
working two jobs in addition to auditioning whenever possible and working with
his friends to get a fledging theater company off the ground. It included
working every single day in April; taking
extra shifts at the coffee house to help cover for a co-worker whose father had
died, while at the same time taking over for his supervisor at the park who had
gone to pick up the baby he and his wife were adopting from Ethiopia.
His lifestyle includes working, buying groceries, cleaning
the apartment, feeding the cats, going out to eat with friends, sending his mom
flowers for Mother’s Day, and accompanying one of his best friends to her doctor
appointments now that she is eight months pregnant because her husband is
working out of town. And it also
includes living with the man he loves. They have been together for nearly eight
years now. It hadn’t been Colin’s dream to live in NY, but he gave up his life
here and moved there because he knew it was LJ’s dream. Their lifestyle is just like any of ours,
they work, pay bills, pay taxes, live and love. I believe my SIL’s (and many
others) image of a ‘gay lifestyle’ has him running around in leather chaps
attending orgies. People need to wake up
and see reality.
I love my SIL, we’ve been friends since 1978, since before
we met either of our husbands. But this
hurt me. I’m not say anything about this
to her just yet, although I will eventually.
She’s had a rough few years. We
lost her oldest son, a boy we all loved very much, to a drug overdose just
after he turned 20. He was five months older than LJ. He had gotten his girlfriend pregnant and
since she’s got drug problems too, my BIL and SIL are raising the child. You know, maybe it’s not LJ’s lifestyle she
needs to protect her son from.
