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Talking tolerance Richard Rankin relays his experiences being the parent of an 'out' daughter and a member of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) in the bible belt in southern USA. “This probably won’t come as a huge surprise to you, but I’m bisexual. I have a girlfriend and her name is X”. It isn’t what a father normally expects to hear from his 17-year-old daughter on a beautiful Sunday morning, but life is how it happens, not how you expect. Possibly unlike most parents, I was pleased and relieved with the news. I have suspected for years that my daughter was not going to be happy as a heterosexual. But I wasn’t sure that she would come to grips with it and accept it herself. Adult life can be difficult enough without having to try and fight or hide who you really are. Years of living in Manhattan, where a large portion of the people I knew were GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender) taught me that you don’t have to be ‘straight’ to be happy. Her acceptance of herself raised a wave of hope in me for her own happiness. But within minutes of the relief and hope came fear as well.
So far, my daughter has had a pretty non-threatening life ‘out’. She is in Australia and in a small private school. She has some problems with her peers but seems to be in no danger of physical violence. She has friends, has always lived in that community and has GLBT friends as well. It won’t always be this simple I know, I may know it more than she knows it herself. Although a dual citizen of Australia and the United States, I grew up largely in the US south. I practiced nuclear bomb drills under my desk at primary school, watched the Cuban Missile Crisis, watched President Kennedy being shot in Dallas, watched Robert Kennedy fall to a bullet. I watched coverage of Martin Luther King’s last day, I protested the war in Viet Nam, helped integrate subdivisions, have tried to support equal rights for women, assisted East Timor when Indonesia ran havoc a few years ago and watched out the office window while the Twin Towers fell. I know that this can sometimes be a dark and unfriendly world. To learn how I could support my daughter, I began going to meetings of a group called PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays). PFLAG is an offshoot of a movement which begun 1972 when one day Jeanne Manford watched the TV news and saw her son being tossed down an escalator during a gay rights protest while the NYC police stood by and watched. Now PFLAG has over 500 chapters and hundreds of thousands of members around the world. There are chapters in 10 other countries, including Australia. I am currently living in the USA in a part of the country, which calls itself ‘The Heartland’. The closest PFLAG chapter to me was 150km away, so each first Thursday of the month, I trekked off for a meeting. Initially, I had no idea what to expect- having never been in any sort of group claiming to be a ‘support group’. I had to wonder if we were going to sit around and say things like ‘My name is Bill and I’m an alcoholic’. The desire to learn more about supporting my daughter ultimately won out over all the easy reasons I could find to not go. I now regularly attend multiple PFLAG chapter meetings. What I found has changed me. I have never seen such pain openly shared in public or such absolute love and acceptance as was reflected back from the group. A variety of people attend the meetings, from teens to people in their 70’s or 80’s, straight and GLBT, couples and singles, sons, daughters and parents. I met a man in his 30’s who had come out to his parents only a few months before. He was choking back tears as he tried to express his feelings about his parents’ reaction to the news that he was gay, and how they are now trying to hide his identity from the rest of the family. He was raised to believe in the support of his religion, but his church denounces homosexuality. Another young man told of his parents’ threats to send him to ‘gay camp’ and ‘fix’ him. The rage and feeling of betrayal rose from him like a physical presence. I met a man who came out to his parents three years ago. They haven't spoken to him since. Another man joked about the fact that he came out to his parents 17 years earlier and they still think he is ‘going through a phase’ I met a man who comes to the meetings even though his gay son died of AIDS several years ago. His head hangs and he says nothing else, but the pain of regret seems palpable. I met me, with real fear that my daughter might meet the wrong person or persons at the wrong time under the wrong circumstances and that her sexual identity will make her life more difficult. There are still people who need tolerance and acceptance. I cannot save my daughter from future pain that I know she will suffer for being bisexual. I know it and I hate knowing it. I hate knowing that I can neither stop it nor lessen it. There is no real way to prepare her for it. A parent with a lesbian daughter has joined me in starting a PFLAG chapter in our town. We’ve had our first public meeting and it was encouraging. Our hope is that, even in a town with such a fundamentalist religious base, we can offer an hour or two of acceptance to someone who needs it. It may be a miniscule step towards making the world a friendlier place, but at least it is a step that we can make. And hey, my daughter told me she is proud of me. I didn’t get involved in this for accolades, but even so, there could never be a higher one than that.For more information on PFLAG visit: http://www.pflag.org/ |
Even in this 21st century, a non-heterosexual identity is still controversial, and politicised by those with agendas to push. We all know the smilingly destructive faces of our national leaders- fronting as caretakers but performing as pimps- pandering to a misguided but well financed, intolerant and incredibly vocal few.