Raising a gay kid didn’t bother Connye, but as Brad’s mother she dreaded the difficulties her son would face in life. The possibility of AIDS worried her. The reality of discrimination angered her. She mourned that her son might not ever have the American Dream life that all parents want for their children: a happy home, a constant love, an engaging career, friends and acceptance and family. Me, I was still oblivious enough to the cruelty of life that these things didn’t cross my mind at first. I didn’t yet fully accept the reality of violent and bigoted idiots. I heard news stories about Matthew Sheppard being beaten and left for dead tied to a Wyoming snow fence, but didn’t imagine gay bashing could happen to my stepson even though I had been threatened on a Seattle city bus once by someone who thought I was gay because I was wearing a tie and leather shoes.
I’m sure that for most of my high school years my mom suspected that I was gay. I didn’t take wood shop or auto body class. I didn’t date, but had female friends that I could talk with for hours on the phone. Much of my free time I spent with other guys from the swim team. We wore those skimpy Speedo swimsuits. For big meets at the end of the season, we shaved off all our body hair not covered by suits or caps. In truth, I was shy in high school, somewhat earnest and bookish, and as clueless as Brad was gifted about popularity and clothing and gossip. I didn’t have a girlfriend until halfway through my senior year, although I had plenty of crushes on girls. Homework and sports and church and family kept my life busy enough to enable my emotional repression, or cowardice, however one might term it.
If I had stopped to think, I already had a reference point for the experience of growing up gay. When I worked at Microsoft in Seattle, I mentored Mike, a guy who grew up in Tennessee as the gay only son of a Southern Baptist family. High school had been hard for him. He slept with his male French teacher. Ick. His only friend had been the one openly bi-sexual girl in school; she wanted to sleep with the French teacher. My future apprentice grew up to be a disguised alcoholic. During the workweek he appeared smart, dedicated and professional. On weekends he would call, drunk, and slur away until he fell asleep on the phone. His mental agility helped him continue to drink while hiding from doctors, counselors and himself, and exhausting the rehab benefits of two different health insurance plans. Finally, addiction counselors put him on the maximum dose of Anabuse, a prescription drug that turns alcohol extremely toxic in the body. While on medication, Mike decided to drink a bottle of red wine and watch an episode of Seinfeld. He spent the next three days in the hospital recovering and convincing chaplains that he wasn’t suicidal. At least that’s what he repeatedly told me. I still wonder whether he didn’t protest that point too much.
I could accept Brad and care for him as Connye’s oldest son, but because he and I were so different, sometimes it was hard for me to understand him. Brad had a genetic desire for a big-budget lifestyle, in contrast to my frugality. As a boy, he printed out sheets of fake checks on the family computer and then made them out to himself for bazillions of dollars from famous people like Walt Disney and Michael Jackson. I started a savings account when I was seven and only deposited money, never withdrew. While growing up, I watched football games and war movies on TV; Brad watched E!, the fashion channel. I built model airplanes; he drew dress designs. He blew $160 on one pair of designer jeans; every day of high school, I wore the same banana-colored sweatshirt under my orange-and-white letterman’s jacket. Spending two consecutive nights at home made Brad claw the walls; usually two nights out in the same week exhausted me. Maybe Brad’s attraction to glamour and fashion, in part, explained why Connye wasn’t surprised when he came out to us two days before our formal wedding. She had occasionally, privately, suspected that Brad might be gay.
At first, I told myself that Brad’s sexual orientation was inconsequential to parenting. Raising a gay kid shouldn’t be much different from raising a straight one. Connye and I still had to teach Brad good values, manners, and habits. We had to worry about setting rules and curfews, when to let him start dating, whether he wore a coat when it was cold or applied himself at school. In the end, our job as parents was to raise Brad to be a principled and independent person, gay or straight. The only difference, I thought, would be who called for dates on Friday nights.
Occasionally Connye and I discussed Brad with Rob, the former landlord for the newspaper we owned. Connye hoped Rob, who was gay, could be a role model for Brad. Rob was smart and industrious, building a small empire in Spokane real estate. Over lunch one day at the downtown mall, the three of us talked about raising a gay son. I interjected my philosophy about raising all kids the same. Rob corrected me. Gay kids lived in a subculture with harassment, confusion, and self-loathing, even drug habits and suicide. Ignoring that fact would be perilous, and probably impossible.
After that lunch, Connye and I worked harder at understanding Brad’s role as a gay teen. We let him hang out with other gay kids, but no dating. We debated whether running a weekly newspaper left us time and energy to dedicate to the local chapter of PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians And Gays). We strove to accept that our family story was different, like when other parents asked if Brad had a date for the prom or speculated about grandparenthood potentially just a decade away. And then there was “the talk.” How does a heterosexual parent talk with a gay child about sex? Connye managed this brilliantly. She did her homework as any good journalist would. She also felt very comfortable with her own sexuality. When she found gay skin magazines and DVDs in Brad’s room, she didn’t freak out like Brad’s biological dad had. She told Brad that porn wasn’t healthy, but to her it seemed safer than him going God knows where to engage in sexual exploration with strangers. But please, she asked, keep the pictures and gadgets away from his little brothers.
Despite this combination of accommodations and boundaries, which seemed very generous parenting to me, Brad’s behavior deteriorated. He began sneaking out at night through a smallest, highest window in his bedroom. Then he started taking the family station wagon on his excursion, even though he didn’t have a license and wasn’t old enough to drive. If he wasn’t out roaming the streets, he had strangers lurking through our basement at two a.m. Many mornings, we found some of Connye’s Oxycontin gone. During the day, he yelled and cussed at his two younger brothers.
One afternoon Connye and I grilled Brad about his behavior. Connye lay on the living room couch. She spent most of her time there lately, fatigued from her illness and its treatment. I sat in an armchair, also worn out. Working 12-hour days and then spending nights caring for Connye and chasing Brad left me exhausted. We tried to get him to talk about where he was going and what he was doing late at night. He wasn’t the Brad we knew. What happened to the student body treasurer from middle school?
Brad paced between the living and dining rooms, or stood at the back of the couch near the front door. He denied taking Connye’s pills or using drugs. He played dumb about sneaking out, even when we pointed to the scuffs marks on the wall underneath his window. He denied taking the station wagon, even though I’d find the driver’s seat pushed back way too far and the radio turned up way too loud on a rap station I’d never choose. He disavowed having strangers in our house. He blamed his brothers for the verbal abuse he heaped on them.
“You absolutely can’t use,” Connye told Brad. Not just because drugs were bad, or wrong, but because of the possibility of porphyria. She had the disease, which meant he had a 25 percent chance of inheriting it. All sorts of drugs—illegal, prescription, over-the-counter—could kick off porphyria. “Believe me,” she told him, “you do not want this.”
He groused that he hated living in our house, with all the stress and no one ever home.
Connye answered that she was home all the time now, but couldn’t do much. She needed his help around the house since she was sick and I was working so hard.
Brad told her, “I don’t want to have to come home and care about your fucking life.”
At that moment I made a very conscious plan to lose emotional control, or at least seem to. Brad couldn’t say that without consequences. I slammed my hands on the chair’s armrests, launched out of my seat, and crossed the room faster than either Connye or Brad expected. I thrust out my chest and bumped Brad backward with it. Although he stood a few inches taller than me, I stuck my face in his. “If that’s your attitude, you can just leave.”
I took a gamble. I brushed past him, pulled opened the front door, and held the glass storm door wide open. “Go on, leave.”
“So now you’re kicking me out?” Brad huffed.
I felt oddly calm. I had chosen my emotional state. “No. If you can’t care about your own sick mother, then you don’t really care to be part of this family and you can leave.”
“I will.” Brad stomped back into his room. I heard him slamming doors and drawers.
My outburst stunned Connye. She’d never seen me like this. “That’s not helping, Matt. We don’t need him out on the streets.”
“I don’t think he’ll leave. I want him to see that he still needs his family. He needs to know that a roof, a bed, and three meals a day is hard to come by.”
Brad came out of his room carrying a small gym bag. He was crying. “I’m leaving. You guys don’t love me. You don’t care about me.”
“You don’t care about anybody but yourself right now,” I shot back, “and if you’re going to treat your mother that way, you might as well leave.”
As he approached the open door, Brad walked slower and sobbed harder. He stood on the welcome mat, the storm door pressing on his back. He stayed there with his bag dangling in front of him, his head tilted up, tears rolling down his cheeks. He didn’t make it to the first step off the porch. After a moment he came back in and went to his room. At that point I knew that we hadn’t completely lost him.