Parallel Lives, Part 2

So…after posting earlier/venting/pacing around all flustered, I decided to text my mom’s best friend. What I failed to include earlier (but maybe you could have assumed) is that S also raved about her son’s boyfriend and his boyfriend’s parents for half a minute. I choose to focus on that, so I texted:

“I’ve known a lot of people who are LGBT whose parents never/barely mention that their kids are LGBT, much less support them in finding community and love, so it’s wonderful to hear you raving about G’s boyfriend.”

She replied, “Oh, okay.”

I feel that more positivity can come of that kind of response than me whining or stating, “Y’all are unfair!”

And I’ll see a way to say something positive to my mom. Maybe. Maybe I’ll just say what I said in the text to S and just change the “to hear you raving” part to “to hear her raving”. Because, I honestly haven’t thought up a way yet to say “It’s nice that you’ve had dinner with G’s boyfriend” without hurting over the fact that she’s always been busy when I’ve invited her to meet my past boyfriends.

If I do say exactly what I said in the text, it might not hit home to my mom that that’s what I’d like in a parent too but I’ll have suggested it…at least in the most white middle-class suburban way that I know.

Parallel Lives

I’m a little unreasonably frustrated/hurt. Perhaps.

So my mom’s best friend, S (whom I see at least twice a week) has a son who is gay. S mentioned this to me yesterday at brunch while my mom was greeting another friend of hers she’d spotted eating a few tables over. I mean, I saw that he was probably gay when he was a kid (he’s six years younger than me), so no surprise to me. S brought up her son like this: “Did your mom tell you about G? He has a boyfriend. They’ve been going together for about a year and a half now. They’re coming up next weekend so it was just on my mind.”

In a few more sentences, I learned that when G came out, S and her husband started going to PFLAG meetings, to the LGBT church in Dallas occasionally, to the pride parades, to rallies, etc. When their son entered college, they encouraged him to seek out any LGBT student-run organizations. That’s where he met his boyfriend of now a year and a half.

I didn’t show it but I immediately felt left out. My parents never bring up me being gay around me. In college, I invited them many times to the LGBT club I was treasurer of but they were always busy (my mom came once during an LGBT parent discussion panel, then asked me never to invite her again). They never wanted to come to the LGBT church in Dallas that I went to almost every Sunday with friends in Dallas until my car wreck a little over a year ago left me without a car for a while (now that I do have a car, Sundays are filled with working to pay it off…or taking the mothers in my life out for a Mother’s Day brunch). I go with friends to rallies and parades and conferences and etc., telling my parents about them. Or, at least, I used to. They’ve always wanted to change the subject. I’ve had boyfriends who my parents rarely mention and were always too busy to meet.

All of this time, my mom has had a friend who is more the parent I’d want. What surprised me more is that my mom has meet G’s boyfriend a couple of times too, even gone to dinner with them.

“S told me about G earlier today. You’ve never mentioned that you met his boyfriend,” I said to my mom. She said, “It wasn’t my place to tell.”

I guess I understand the logic of not wanting to out someone but she’s been extending the support of a family friend that so far I haven’t received. This is the first time S has ever mentioned the word “gay” in my presence.

In the past 24 hours, I’ve been specifically frustrated/hurt/something and I’m not sure if that’s more directed toward my mom or S for never mentioning G to me. My mom’s best friends (since I’ve known S and others all my life, the better term is probably “family friends”) have known that I was gay since I first came out in high school. Life doesn’t have to be all about me being gay but community is important to most of those who are LGBT and I’ve always had to find community outside of my family and family friends.

Now to discover that there has always been a community of sorts within my family/circle of family friends has left me feeling…left out. I don’t know what I want to do though. To mention this to my mom. To mention it to S. To meet now-college student and now-committed G again with his boyfriend. I wonder if I ever encouraged G to feel more comfortable about himself. I was pretty sure that he was gay, as I said, and when I would see him sometimes at family friend get togethers, I would mention a boyfriend-at-the-time or that I went to a pride parade or just anything to reveal that someone else in his immediate world was gay just in case there wasn’t anyone else. And also, that someone else who was gay who didn’t really have a supportive family around him still did alright in the world.

As frustrated as I am right now about our parents (especially our mothers), a small part of me today is disappointed that I didn’t get to witness him coming out and/or find community. I didn’t have to be asked. That’s not why I mentioned that I was gay to him. I hope that long ago me coming out to him in person never came across as weird, never made him uncomfortable.

I’m happy for him.

And I feel a little selfish for wishing that I knew why he gets the support from the same family friends, though. Hmmm.