Effectively dealing with anti-Gay parents
Deal decisively with them and don't dither or delay or equivocate.
Introduction
The situation for young Gay people with religious anti-Gay zealot parents has seriously gotten worse. The anti-Gay Christians are developing more sophisticated tactics to undermine young people coming out. This is link to a book for anti-Gay Christian parents who want to continue to be anti-Gay with a Gay child.
http://marycomm.com/consulting/resources/uncommon-love-bible-study/
From the webpage for the book:
This Bible study focuses on God’s Word, and His heart for Christian families facing this difficult and heart-wrenching issue. Parents want to maintain good relationships with their kids, but as Christians, they are torn by the “letter of the Law,” understanding God’s heart for those caught in this sin, the voices of people on every side of the issue, and their own feelings and emotions. It is a complex and harrowing situation for these families, and too often one of two things happen: either the parents blow up the relationship by rejecting their kids or their lifestyle in harsh or inappropriate ways, or they completely compromise their faith in God and their own identity as Christians.
The author also visits Churches and gives classes on how to remain an anti-Gay Evangelical with your Gay children.
https://cottonwoodcreek.org/event/uncommon-love-bible-study/2021-10-14/
In short, this book tells parents how to remain toxic in their anti-Gay religion and stay close to their Gay children to continue a toxic agenda against them being Gay.
I don’t know how many other books like this are slithering around, but it shows that anti-Gay Christians are thinking about how they can be more effectively anti-Gay in more sophisticated ways with young people just coming out and beginning their Gay lives.
The Gay community needs more seriously consider this issue of homophobic parents and not be complacent about it. Not only because of these new anti-Gay tactics, but because since I think it is one area where a lot of Gays have significantly failed or could have done much better even before this new toxic Christian tactic, and it has negative impacts on them and the Gay community in general.
I find it really frustrating since a lot of Gays don’t really get a grip on the situation and let their parents manipulate them or bully them and let the situation drag on rather than deal with it decisively. Worse yet, the LGBTQXYZ establishment social workers not only don’t work to have Gays decisively deal with these problems, but are part of the problem themselves with their goal being the avoidance of conflict and confronting homophobia, and having the goal of some sentimental story outcome at the cost of the Gay person’s dignity and self-respect.
Gays should always understand that what is the situation for straight people for everyday things is often not the situation for Gay people. Straight people don’t have to come out and deal with parents who are hostile, so when they tend to say, “They’re family,” “They’re your parents,” or some other sentimental thing, it is based on their reality and not yours. Assimilationist thinking among Gays blocks Gays from realizing that they have to deal with hostile parents and not based on what how a straight person might.
This paper will provide guidance to young Gays and older Gays who still haven’t effectively dealt with their parent’s antics and tactics.
Why is this important?
When a Gay person first comes out, they have a lot of things they must successfully process. They need to learn about Gay life and Gay sexuality. They have been surrounded by heterosexual models of how a life might be lived and almost certainly their sex education didn’t include homosexuality.
They need to learn and develop strategies to navigate an often anti-Gay world. They need to learn and develop strategies on dealing with straight people, not only the obviously hostile, but the supposedly supportive but subtly toxic straights.
They need to think through strategies of when an employer should know that they are Gay. How to navigate the workplace. When to leave a workplace.
Financial planning is important. A lot of emergency shelters and charities have a family’s first policy excluding Gays, and you really need to be able to deal with financial emergencies.
Most importantly, a newly coming out Gay person needs to develop his Gay identity and value his Gay identity and expect respect for his humanity.
When first coming out, a Gay person is likely to imagine himself as a variation relative to straight men, and also not realize that his life has a whole different set of choices and challenges than straights, even if a hypothetical world without anti-Gay prejudices. He also might learn about Gay history and literature.
Again, he needs to develop a sense of self-worth and an expectation that he be respected and that his needs as Gay person are important. What he also needs to do is to expect more than hoping to be tolerated. Some Gays never achieve these goals.
When a Gay person first comes out, it is often the case that he has merely acquiesced to being Gay, that is accepted being Gay, that is accepted the reality, rather than feel that he was very lucky to be Gay. He likely still has internalized some or most of societies anti-Gay attitudes. It might be that he has engaged in homosexual activity because of the strength of desire, but regards it like some addiction.
There is quite an extensive list of things that a Gay person needs to learn in the first few years after they start having some type of Gay activity.
When they are the most vulnerable, and most needing to learn being Gay, they don’t need to be putting a lot of time and energy into a relative or parent with a self-serving agenda and who is engaged in emotional blackmail.
The impact might be that the Gay person never fully realizes becoming a strong Gay person, or continues to have toxic anti-Gay behaviors that are harmful to himself but also, with others like him, harmful to other Gays and bring down the Gay community.
A Gay person realizing that they need to deal with these anti-Gay agendas of their parents, realizing how self-serving their anti-Gay parents’ agendas are, realizing how the excuses for their parents anti-Gay agendas are nonsense, and given advice and tactics know how to deal with these types of parents, can spend a lot less time dealing with anti-Gay parents and move on with life.
The fundamental question is, “When are you going to start living your life?” and not the life that others, such as your parents or anti-Gay society, want you to live.
Physical Safety
The first thing to consider is that you need to be independent of your parents. If you aren’t, the anti-Gay parent will use this to their advantage. Also, if you are living with your parents, you might be subject to physical abuse.
The cities of America have homeless Gay youth on the streets because they were subject to abuse by their anti-Gay parents and had to flee or were thrown out of their home.
Further a Gay person who is not yet independent needs to save their money and have a plan B considered. Could they stay with a friend or a relative? Or maybe they need to quietly wait until they are independent.
Specific Anti-Gay Rhetorical Tactics to Resist
I am going to review some of the words and rhetorical tactics used to undermine Gay resistance to anti-Gay parents and to enable anti-Gay parents.
The word “understand,” is commonly employed to undermine Gay resistance and enable anti-Gay parental antics. Often it is sentences like these, “You have to understand they come from a conservative Christian background,” “You have to understand their background,” “You have to understand that this is new to them and is a shock,” “You have to understand the social pressures they will face.”
Of course, who doesn’t want to be “understanding,” so the person is pressured to be “understanding” as it is used in these sentences. However, “understanding” used in these sentences really has the meaning “indulge” and also not to critically consider what is really the basis of the anti-Gay parent’s behavior, but instead accepts the bad behavior and makes excuses for it.
Also, this use of the word “understands,” denies the anti-Gay parents’ responsibility for their actions and beliefs, they are represented as uncritically behaving like robots directed by their Evangelical beliefs or emotionally driven persons without rational reflection driven by their Evangelical beliefs. They are relieved of responsibility of making decisions as adults about their beliefs and behavior towards their Gay son.
In the technical sense of the word, you do understand that your parents are members of some anti-Gay church and that is related to their behavior, but that doesn’t mean you have to accept that as an excuse for their bad behavior.
Let’s take the case where the parents are members of an anti-Gay Evangelical Church and so are ranting and raving about Jesus and you going to hell.
The Gay son does understand that they are members of this anti-Gay Evangelical Church.
Consider that it is now nearly 2023 or later and the anti-Gay parents are still wanting to be members of an anti-Gay church. The Gay movement has been around since the 1970s, there are now a lot of Gay people living openly, the anti-Gay myths have long since been demolished, and it has been really clear for decades that being Gay isn’t a choice. There are a lot of Christian groups not hostile to Gay people.
Yet, the parents have chosen to be members of an anti-Gay church and have adopted anti-Gay beliefs despite all this. What type of people do that?
It might be considered that the parents have chosen this religious belief since it serves to give a divine reason for their prejudices and hostilities, and not just in regard to Gays, without having to explain or justify them, they can just blabber “Jesus” or something to shut down the discussion. This self-indulgent behavior of the parents is challenged by the realization they have a Gay son and self-indulgent people are usually upset when they aren’t indulged and their vanities demolished.
They are persisting in upholding these anti-Gay religious beliefs despite finding out that their child is Gay. What type of people do that?
They chose their religion possibly as a solution for their anxieties about modern life, or maybe to be feel really special about themselves as the chosen ones who are just extra-holy. Perhaps they enjoy some special status in their church. They chose this church with its anti-Gay beliefs as opposed to churches which aren’t anti-Gay and have stuck to it into the present times, even though, or because, Evangelical churches are quite active in their anti-Gay agenda in the present.
Let’s consider the excuse that finding out that their son is Gay and as a consequence that they are shocked and their behavior as shocked individuals is acceptable.
Evangelical Christians have been finding out that their sons are Gay all the time and they have been finding this out for decades back into the 20th century. Why did the person’s anti-Gay parents not expect that their child might be Gay? The answer is that they thought they were just so extra-special, which is one of the chief attractions of Evangelical belief, that you are God’s favorites, and with their really Christian household they wouldn’t have a Gay son. With the child coming out a whole set of vanities implodes.
The anti-Gay parent often choses their religious beliefs over their Gay son. They have embedded themselves in this Evangelical Christianity rejecting rational thinking, such as evolution, and embraced it for emotional rewards and to feel really special, and to assuage their anxieties about life. They chose their religious beliefs and their psychic rewards over their child. They have long since lost the ability to mentally exist outside their beliefs or critically evaluate them.
Maybe their church has had attached themselves to a drama of crusading against Gays, and the parents feel compelled to behave in the context of this drama since otherwise it would mean giving up their church.
The parents being imbedded in delusions and frequently using the word “Jesus” to shutdown thinking or a discussion about some issue, they are also prone to adopt delusional thinking about having a Gay son. They think it can be prayed away. Or that a Gay person might give up their existence as a Gay person by being celibate and negativing their own existence.
When someone says to a person that they have to understand their parent’s religion, that person needs to “understand” that their parents have adopted a religion that is in opposition to critical thinking, delusional, enabling of prejudice, for their own self-serving reasons, and have persisted despite everything and have made the self-aggrandizing decision to commit to their self-serving behavior over their Gay son.
This attitude towards a person’s parents may seem hard. However, in the end, you need to choose to live as a Gay person, you need to decide that you won’t accept the actions intended to annihilate you as a Gay person, which is what your parents are attempting to do.
Of course, this type of self-indulgence isn’t limited to Evangelical Christians, it might be other types of anti-Gay Christians, or other types of anti-Gay religions.
An old-style Marxist household would see homosexuality as a result of the decadence of capitalism, they actually did commonly think this way. They might see accepting their Gay son as representing a failure to be a revolutionary or something.
A Gay person isn’t responsible for the homophobia of others or obligated in any way to concede or indulge it. The parents need to be morally responsible for their anti-Gay views. Anti-Gay views don’t just spring out of the soil or drop out of the sky, they are constructed and promoted and your parents have accepted and clung to them for their own agenda.
Grandchildren
It could be that the parents were really hoping for grandchildren. We all have hopes in life that aren’t realized. Grown adults accept this. Your parents might have some unconscious feeling that their lives are given meaning by grandchildren continuing on the family. You aren’t responsible to make them accept the realities of life.
If they point out that they raised you and did so much for you, that is supposed to be something parents do for children they bring into the world. Babies don’t create themselves out of thin air. If they persist in this argument, just ask them if they would have strangled you in the crib had they known you would turn out Gay.
It is always useful for anti-Gay parents to realize that their manipulative arguments, might bring a very sharp reply.
Shutting down their anti-Gay antics and tactics
You have to absolutely not accept disrespectful or negative behavior from your parents. What you might do as a “compromise” or accepting a situation is about accepting the compromise of yourself. In your behavior you establish by your actions exactly how much you respect yourself as a Gay person to others and yourself. If you accede to some bed behavior because it might be difficult or awkward to deal with it at the time, you merely establish a low value on yourself that you expect respect when it is convenient and not too much trouble. Your anti-Gay parents will pick up on this very quickly. It will be like blood in the water.
You need to make it clear that the only discussion about your being Gay is to explain what being Gay is. Even in that, you have to absolutely not accept verbal subterfuges, such as “I am just concerned that,” or some other verbal tactics to criticize being Gay.
If they are on the phone with their antics, you just say, “I have to go now,” and even if you are talking over them to say that, just say that and hang up. Don’t wait for a break to tell them, or explain why you are hanging up, just do it. If it is at their house you need to leave immediately. Even if it is a Christmas meal at your relatives and they start doing that, you demand an apology and if it is not forthcoming leave immediately.
One effective tactic is to go to a boyfriend’s house for holiday meals if they are better people and not having your parents and his parents meet.
Likely in situations where you leave their house or holiday gatherings your siblings and relatives will be irritated with your parents
There needs to be a full demand for respect at all times regardless of consequence. For example, you and your boyfriend are visiting for the holidays, and you find that your sister and her husband get a room, but you and your boyfriend are expected to sleep with your brothers, or in the living room. Even if it is past midnight and you have no room reservations at a hotel, you must pack-up your stuff and get in the car and leave. Any type of arrangement where you and your lover aren’t sleeping together privately because your parents have an agenda is intolerable.
Once your parents realize that there will be no tolerance of bad behavior and emotional blackmail won’t work, the antics of anti-Gay parents often stop. If they don’t stop, you had already made it clear what the consequences would be, and so you have severed a negative relationship without them or anyone else having any basis to blame you. All you will have lost is a burden.
If a Gay person comes up with some rationalization to not fully demand self-respect, they are through their actions making a statement of how much they value themselves as a Gay person. For example, if in the case of a holiday meal at a relative, and the parents make a statement and not apologize for it, a Gay person might state, “I am not going to let them ruin my Christmas.” The fact is that they have ruined it already, by establishing that you don’t deserve respect at holiday meals with relatives, and the holiday meals are now established as events where you aren’t entitled to respect.
Further if the parents get away with their behavior at one holiday meal, they will do it again, since it has no consequence to them, and does diminish the respect due to as a Gay person and is a venue to grind down the Gay identity of the son. Each meal where you tolerate this, makes a statement to the relatives that you don’t expect much respect.
If the anti-Gay parents get away with one aggression, or antic, they will try other antics. First the holiday meal, then a suggestion to see the Christmas pageant at the anti-Gay Church.
There will be a temptation to not fully demand respect. They are the Gay person’s parents. The Gay person has just come out and doesn’t have a strong sense of being a Gay person and has inside still some anti-Gay views. There are siblings who might want the whole issue of conflicts to go away and have a steady supply of excuses for the parents and blame the Gay person.
The Gay person’s sibling can be told off if they persist on defending parents or not support the Gay brother’s expectation of respect. If the sibling turns out to be this type of problem, they really weren’t all that supportive of you in the first place and you aren’t losing anything. I know one person for whom having anti-Gay siblings means they won’t and can’t borrow money. Anti-Gay siblings are likely to have more than one problem.
In facing these challenges, the Gay person is establishing with not only with his parents, but with himself, how much respect he expects to be treated with, and where he compromises, by his actions and actual practice are instructing himself on how much self-worth as a Gay person he has or allowed to be diminished. As a Gay person he will be facing enough challenges as it is, he doesn’t need attacks from the rear. As a strong Gay person, he will be better able to face the challenges a Gay person will face in life for he will believe his life is worth fighting for.
If a Gay person is compromising, his boyfriend may not accept this whittling down of his own self-worth to please his partner’s anti-Gay parents. It will also make it clear to the boyfriend how much the relationship is valued. If being Gay is not valued, how valuable can the relationship be valued by the person who doesn’t value being Gay?
The Benefit to the Community
If Gays more effectively dealt with anti-Gay parents, the Gay community as a whole would be stronger. Anti-Gay parents will have a stronger incentive to examine their beliefs and change behavior and so there might be fewer anti-Gay persons.
Young Gays with anti-Gay parents won’t be wasting time on them, and will be able to focus more on what they need to learn as new Gay people and achieve these learning objectives earlier, and being stronger Gay people, help make up a stronger and more positive Gay community.
In dealing with anti-Gay parents, the person is forced to not be just a Gay who acquiesced being Gay or just accepted it. Instead the Gay person to defend himself from his parents’ aggressions, will be driven to develop a sense of self-worth as a Gay person and an identity as a Gay person.
With this more strenuous development of self-respect by Gays, Gays will treat other Gays better.
Conclusion
When are you going to start living your life?
It might as well be immediately, and living your life will require being committed to living your life and doing what is necessary.
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