“I did not know how to react,” recalls Gabriela, who was 15 when her mother came out to her in 1996. To live in truth may be a fine and necessary thing, but when that truth breaks up a family the consequences can fester for years, even decades.Ī few weeks ago Talia Herman asked her daughter, Gabriela, if she had finally forgiven her for leaving her father for another woman. Although it was fiction, Leavitt’s novel underscores the dilemma for the gay parent who comes clean. David Leavitt explored it powerfully in his debut novel, The Lost Language of the Cranes, in which a young man’s coming out serves as a spur for his father to follow suit, leaving his wife feeling powerless, betrayed and alone. Stigmas around sexual orientation have subsided dramatically in the past two decades, but it is one thing to come out at the beginning of one’s adult life another thing entirely after you have created a family. That story has been told less often, and is in many ways a lot more complicated. But what about parents who must come out to their children?
A lmost everyone who is gay remembers the profound experience of coming out to their parents, the terror and anxiety of telling people you love that you are not who they think you are.
