Support Of Family

Recent vis­its with old friends and chance meet­ings of new friends have reaf­firmed just how spe­cial our fam­i­lies have been to us through­out our lives. From the day we met, through our whirl­wind “courtship” (a story for another post), through our joys and series of health and injury chal­lenges, we have been accepted into each other’s fam­ily as if born into them. For us, this is life as it is and should be. It is easy to take this for granted. We eas­ily for­get just how much strain the lives of many other peo­ple undergo because of the rela­tion­ship with their family.

One friend of ours, who was recently remar­ried, was told by her mother that she was an embar­rass­ment to the fam­ily because of her failed mar­riages. The fact that her last mar­riage failed when her hus­band aban­doned her when she had a dou­ble mas­tec­tomy some­how did not enter into her mother’s thinking.

But the most dis­turb­ing fam­ily rela­tion­ships among our friends is the aban­don­ment of gay and les­bian chil­dren by their par­ents. We know sev­eral that have had rela­tions totally sev­ered by their par­ents upon their com­ing out. We find this incom­pre­hen­si­ble. First, that any par­ent would aban­don a child for being what they are. Sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion, whether a bio­log­i­cal imper­a­tive, a choice, or what­ever, is just a part of what makes a per­son. How could you pos­si­bly love a child one minute and then want noth­ing to do with them the next just because they tell you they are homo­sex­ual or bisex­ual? What has changed about the per­son? Incomprehensible.

What this does make us won­der is just how much strain does a homo­sex­ual or bisex­ual per­son have to deal with in their life that het­ero­sex­ual peo­ple can­not com­pre­hend. If the risk of com­ing out and the reac­tion of fam­ily is so great, what must the risk be with employ­ers and cowork­ers? If you do not come out, what does it feel like to always be con­cerned that your secret life will be dis­cov­ered? We have lived with peri­ods of chronic stress from time-to-time dur­ing our lives. It has been debil­i­tat­ing. How­ever, we have always had total sup­port of fam­ily to help us through these times.

We hope that any of you who dis­cover that you have a rel­a­tive who is homo­sex­ual or bisex­ual, that no mat­ter what your per­sonal feel­ings, you remem­ber how you felt about that per­son the minute before you found out. They are the same per­son they were the minute before. You may not be per­son­ally com­fort­able with any sex­u­al­ity other than het­ero­sex­u­al­ity. That is fine. But if you were com­fort­able with the per­son before, and did not have sex­ual rela­tions with the per­son before, what has changed? You are the same per­son, they are the same per­son, the rela­tion­ship between the two of you is the same. You just know a lit­tle more about them than you did. But noth­ing really has changed.

For that mat­ter, this should apply to a friend, coworker, or employee too.

Is Still Here & Still Here Too