Coming out to immigrant parents
My friend Matt Thompson grew up in Orlando, and like many of the shooters’ victims, he’s gay, a person of color, and a child of immigrants to the US. His wonderful essay grapples with the shooting and tries to untie the fear and risk and hope and community that’s knotted up in those identities.
My own parents were the very last people in my life I was out to, years after I’d been out to friends and colleagues. I didn’t know how they’d react to the fact of my sexuality, and among my friends, there was often impatience with that uncertainty. If they’re good parents, these friends would say, they will love you without conditions and without hesitation.
But this reaction was rare among those of us who grew up, like me, knowing that our parents left their homes and settled here mainly in pursuit of visions of what their children’s lives would be. They had imagined their sons as men with wives, and their daughters as women with husbands, and cultivated these visions throughout our adolescence and beyond. Some of our parents had tended to these visions so zealously that they missed all the signs that these weren’t, in fact, the people we’d become. When we came out, they were forced both to reckon with these people they no longer recognized and mourn the visions of us they had nurtured all those years.
“I can’t stop thinking about the possibility that someone like us was hurt or murdered at Pulse on Sunday morning,” Matt writes. “outed in the very worst way, in a phone call every family dreads. For some parents, such a call would be a double heartbreak.”
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