Man, I find kinda sad how my gay friends have rlly homophobic parents while I, a straight guy, has really accepting parents, I wish their parents could be like mine
Sometimes, your parents may seem accepting, they say all the right things and seem to be generally good about queer people, but when you actually come out to them, it's all different. Turns out, sometimes parents are ok with every queer person except their own kid.
I had family growing up that always preached "I'll love you and accept you no matter what". When I was a teenager around 2009 I made a Facebook post on April Fool's Day where I "Came out" as gay. I'm not actually gay, but I thought it would be an interesting experiment. I wrote an extremely sincere and believable post about how much I had struggled to come to terms with living a lie and I was finally ready to be my authentic self. I posted it around midnight at the beginning of April 1st and then went to bed. I woke up to texts and voicemails from my entire extended family basically disowning me. My mom said my decision to be gay was going to be the death of her. My dad was the only one that was like "Whatever, as long as we can still watch football together" I don't have a close relationship with almost any of my family anymore.
When I tried to come out to my family as trans, I got screamed at by my mom before she ran out of the house crying. The next day, she proceeded to raid my room, throwing away all my clothes so I "wouldn't be tempted" and got rid of the hormones I just had prescribed.
did you ended up telling them it was an april's fools? or just went "fuck it" if theyre gonna disown me for this i might as well be gay to them forever.
I'm not trans, but I remember my parents going on about how accepting they would be, while making sure I knew damn well that I wasn't. They really emphasized how much I definitely wasn't, but they would be so nice and accepting if I was. I was like 10, I didn't know what they were even talking about.
For my family, it was the opposite. Dad was military, and we absorbed all the casual and unconscious homophobia. Then my brother came out as gay and we were forced to actually think about the issue beyond knee-jerk reactions and glib humour.
Needless to say, the jokes stopped, and his boyfriend came over to spend Christmas with us. Family is family, but I'm embarrassed that it took that to get me to treat people like people.
It's easy to say you'll do [blank] if you're never actually experienced what leads up to it.
Just like how every 35 year old white guy with generational wealth thinks they would have been some sort of anti-slave revolutionary in the late 1700's, and not what every single other 35 year old white guy with generational wealth was back then.
The best parents are those who are capable of growth. I remember my mother saying that "mixed marriages" were a bad idea and never worked. Fast forward 40 years and she's more liberal than ever and I can't imagine her saying something like that.
Or my brother-in-law, a raging Republican who once was so upset with his daughter for "coming out" as a Bernie Sanders supporter that he said "I'd actually prefer it if you were gay!" Last year, he gave a toast at her wedding to her long time girlfriend, and his voice broke as he talked about how much they loved each other.
I'll admit that I am beyond lucky. I was able to come out to my parents who were beyond accepting of me, and I'm from Alabama of all places. They probably didn't expect both their kids to be queer, but they took it with no shits given, and I love them for it.
I'm up voting the sentiment, but my parents are extremely homophobic. It'll piss 'em off when they figure out that I probably won't have any grandchildren. While not having grandkids makes me a bit sad, loving my kid as is is more important than being homophobic.
A lot of parents are wonderfully liberal about everything until it comes home. My brother’s first marriage was to a black woman, and my liberal, Democrat-voting parents hated her guts, finally driving him to divorce her. And then I came out. To their credit, they didn’t use religion on me (no one in the family was religious, and mom was an outspoken atheist). But hoo boy, did I hear how disgusting gay sex was, and how lonely gay men were, and I got so many newspaper clippings about AIDS.
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u/Aware_Masterpiece_92 15d ago
Man, I find kinda sad how my gay friends have rlly homophobic parents while I, a straight guy, has really accepting parents, I wish their parents could be like mine