The Wedding: A Family's Coming Out Story (4 page)

That’s how it’s always been. On the rare
occasion that my mother supported me and my father didn’t, she would work on
him until she won him over.

Between the two of them, they’d never let me
feel rejected, so I had reason to expect they would take this news in, and
everything would work itself out. I thought my father would be a bit
uncomfortable at first, but that he would adapt quickly.

Just like I
thought
he had adjusted to
the news that I was gay. I came out to my parents almost seven years before,
and we all seemed to make it through that trial unscathed. At the very least, I
figured they’d put a happy face on it for me, since it’s pretty obvious that
when you announce your wedding, you expect people to express joy for you.

When I called my parents, Doug stayed in the
bedroom, and I headed for the kitchen. My mother answered.
Or, at least,
that’s how I remember it
.

Like many other weekend mornings, my father was
out playing tennis. This felt like good news, since my mother is the one you go
to when there’s a topic to discuss that’s more on the emotional side than the
financial. I thought she’d be pouring with enthusiasm. If anything, I was
afraid she’d get off the phone, find my father, and coach him on how he ought
to feel about this news before I’d get a chance to talk to him myself. And if
she couldn’t change his feelings about it, I figured she’d at least try to
program how he’d respond to me, to be sure he’d sound supportive.

I told her right away. “Doug proposed. We’re
engaged.”

It’s not that she went into cardiac arrest. But
given what I expected, it was a letdown. It’s just that there was no pretense
of happiness for
us
. There is a clear difference between “
I’m
thrilled,” and “
You
must be very excited.” I didn’t hear either. I
didn’t hear support of any kind. And there was a hint of hesitation, even
discomfort. It was a short, quiet phone call.

DOUG   
Andrew looked discouraged, even
depressed, but not dismayed. Though he hoped for more, he said his father’s
response was typically muted, and thoughtfully restrained.

That’s right,
Sheldon’s
response. That’s
who
I
remember Andrew said he’d spoken to. Roslyn wasn’t home, so Andrew
told Sheldon.

SHELDON   
I also recall that I was
the first to hear the news. It was a Sunday morning, around mid-March 1995.
Roslyn was out, and I picked up the phone. Andrew gave me the news right off
the bat.

“We exchanged rings.”

I had to think about it. Back in our day, when
Roslyn and I first dated, you gave a girl a pin. It didn’t mean anything more
than you wanted to go steady. So it was no surprise if they wanted to give each
other rings - they’d been living together for over a year.

“That’s nice,” I said. “But what does that
mean?”

“We’re engaged,” he says.

Then I asked what seemed a logical question. “Engaged
to be what?”

For a moment he didn’t answer, so I went
further. “Where’s it going to lead?”

He said their intent was to go through either a
marriage or a commitment ceremony, depending on what you call it, and it would
be in a year and a half. So my initial reaction - I didn’t say this to him -
was,
“Well, a year and a half away, there’ll be a lot of water under the
bridge by then. Maybe it’ll be watered down, f it doesn’t disappear altogether.
I don’t have to give it too serious a consideration.”

It’s not that I thought they were kidding, it
was just so far in advance.

Maybe I looked at it from that angle because of
my training, the experience I had as a counselor at camp, when I was in my
teens. If a kid came down, and said, “I want to go home,” - he didn’t like camp
- you’d try this approach: Give it a shot for a few days, come back to me, and
we’ll see what happens. And somehow, in the interval, an experience occurred
that made him more comfortable. Maybe the kid made friends, or the fear he had
was forgotten. Usually the problem straightened itself out, and I wouldn’t have
to deal with any further complication.

I was hoping this would turn out the same way. I
almost felt that if I let time elapse it would just disappear by itself. Here
it was March, and they were talking about Labor Day of the following year for
their ceremony. So I just thought it would melt away and be forgotten.

I did make the leap of imagination, and tried to
picture what they meant by “getting married”. The only way I could see it was
in the surroundings they had established for themselves. It seemed logical to
me that the circle of friends they had was in New York, and it would take place
there.

Maybe if I had to suffer, if you want to call it
that, through a particular day, it would be with a handful of relatives or
friends, ten or so. I couldn’t see just everyday friends of mine picking
themselves up from Montreal to go to New York for something called a commitment
ceremony.

I knew this term
commitment ceremony.
But
I wasn’t really aware of other rituals that would mirror a heterosexual
marriage, with a traditional sort of ceremony (with the obvious amendments to
the verbiage) and the same kind of sit-down dinner, dancing and rest of it. I
saw a more private type of ceremony. When I say private, I don’t mean just
immediate family, but say, including friends, as much as fifty or sixty people.

If you want to take it to the extreme, I imagined
a commitment ceremony might amount to a couple on top of a mountain under the
moonlight, exchanging vows in their own way. But without utilizing the clergy
in any form.

I’m not saying that’s what I thought Andrew and
Doug wanted. And that’s not the kind of ritual I would ever want for them,
either. But you could definitely say I pictured the average commitment ceremony
as more than a little far out.

I conjured up these images, basically, because
of inexperience. Where was I supposed to witness something like this? At that
point, I was sure that there hadn’t been any ceremony of same-sex commitment in
the Jewish community in Montreal. I knew of one commitment ceremony that took
place elsewhere, of a Montrealer’s daughter, but I didn’t know of one other
ceremony that took place in our community. Not one.

ROSLYN   
Like my husband, and
Doug as well, I remember Andrew told Sheldon first. But there the similarity
ends. As I recall, Sheldon got the news at his office.
Why
, I asked
myself.
Why did Andrew call Sheldon at his office to deliver news like this?
I didn’t even
find out
about the proposal, and the wedding, until
Sheldon told me after he got back home from work on Monday night.

It’s not that I minded hearing it second hand so
much. It was more because I’ve always been the one everyone in the family would
turn to for a supportive shoulder to lean on. And surely this was news you’d
want to deliver to a friendly ear.

A
proposal
... The concept of something
similar certainly wasn’t a shock. But it was surprising that Andrew described
it using that specific word. This terminology was so heterosexual that it did
kind of strike me, like...
“Oh wow, they’re doing what we did.”

At first I said to myself, “Well, you know,
what’s the difference?”

It sounded romantic, and it sounded wonderful.
To me, it was a natural outcome of their love for each other, and they wanted
to formalize it in some way.

But then, I chewed on those words again...
Proposal
.
Fiancé
. When I repeated them again to myself, they reminded me of what
marriage had meant for me since earliest childhood. When we grew up, you were
conditioned, you got messages. Everyone models relationships. And at that time,
the rules were, you were brought up by parents who were obviously heterosexual.
Your uncles, aunts, got married, had children. Marriage was seen as the union
of a man and a woman who had children, had a family, and all the traditional
things that went with that. Father being a breadwinner, mother staying home,
taking care of the family. Sure, it all sounds cliché, but it became a cliché
by being
true
.

After all these years, I’ve learned the hard way
that the rules of the game change all the time. But sometimes it happens so
slowly we hardly notice. Marriage meant one thing to my mother, another to me.
And of course it means something altogether different for most young women
today. In the context of this never-ending change, the news of the engagement
didn’t seem so dramatic.

But when I stopped thinking theoretically, and
got down to hard reality, I got scared. Because I knew that it wasn’t going to
be easy. And a little further down the road, when I got an inkling of what
really lay ahead for us, I felt that we were embarking on a kind of journey to
some serious place. I didn’t know how this was going to change us, but I knew
we’d have to change.

ANDREW   
Doug was hovering around
me in the kitchen. He wondered about their reaction.

“My mother didn’t have much to say.”

That was a half-truth. I didn’t have much to say
either. Buried feelings were rising to the surface.
Am I ready for a
lifetime commitment to one person? What would that be like?

Those fears were magnified by cultural myths.
I’d hear the old cliché about gay people not being able to maintain an
exclusive commitment. Logically, I know stereotypes like that exist because
society discourages our relationships. But myths are powerful. Like it or not,
they burrow inside your head. And for the same reasons, the concept of marriage
doesn’t have a place of priority in most gay minds.

But it was more than that. It’s the same thing
many people - men, particularly - go through when it comes time to take a stand
about commitment. Daytime television is filled with talk shows where women
lament the inability of men to commit. And I know plenty of straight women with
the same hesitancy.

So I was feeling something I’m sure most people,
straight or gay, can relate to. But on top of it were layered cultural
prejudices and internalized homophobia. And on top of that, I started to
picture a sort of epic coming out ahead of me. If we were going to get married,
it would be a public announcement of my homosexuality that I wasn’t sure I was
ready to make.

If Doug was ready to ask me to tie the knot, he
must have made peace with these issues, or maybe he didn’t even have these
qualms in the first place. For now, I kept my fears to myself.

ROSLYN,
SHELDON,
AND
ANDREW

1960-1990

ROSLYN   
When I first suspected,
Andrew was sixteen. His behavior had changed. He became very troubled, and
stalked around the house, crabbing constantly. It seemed he never cracked a
smile. At least not around me. Something specific was weighing on him.

The second he stalked through the door on his
way home from school he’d start putting me down. One day I had re-decorated the
entry way. “I don’t like the color of this chair.” When I failed to rise to the
bait, he asked, “What are you making for supper?” “Macaroni and cheese, your
favorite.” “Oh, I hate that.” You name it, he hated it.

Since we were already redecorating, I said he
could do his bedroom over. First he asked for dark green wallpaper, and then he
insisted on painting the ceiling red. I blanched at the thought. “It’s my room,
and I’ll do it the way I want. And I want it red,” he announced gleefully, with
a sadistic laugh. In a few weeks, up went the wallpaper, and then the dreaded
paint. It looked like a brothel at Christmas time. It made me ill every time I
walked in. (The first thing I did when Andrew moved out after college was
repaint the ceiling. And let me tell you it wasn’t cheap: it took six coats to
cover the red with beige).

Nearly every day when Andrew came home he’d
glower at me, make some derogatory critique and head downstairs to Sheldon’s
office to study. I knew his behavior wasn’t an attack on me, but a reaction to
some problem he couldn’t discuss. And I wanted
him
to know that
I
knew. So I tried to reach him through his stomach. I’d climb downstairs with a
tray of his favorite chocolate chip cookies, and - yes it’s true - a glass of
milk. I kept my words to a minimum. He grunted and looked up indifferently.
That was it. I knew this was meant as thanks, but I wasn’t going to get the
satisfaction of hearing the words. We both knew there was something eating at
him, but he didn’t want to acknowledge it to me. And when I tried to
acknowledge
that
, and comfort him, he pulled away.

I know, every mother describes their teenager
like this. But, to paraphrase Tolstoy, happy teenagers are all alike, but every
unhappy teen is unhappy in his or her own special way. It took a long time to
identify what it was that distinguished Andrew’s acting out from other kids’
garden-variety teen angst.

SHELDON   
It was obvious to me
that something was bothering him, but I had no idea what the source of his
anxiety was. In hindsight, Andrew’s behavior could be directly linked to him
struggling with his sexuality, and maybe I should have seen whatever signals he
was giving us to that effect.

You see, several years earlier, our oldest
child, Mitchell, told us he was gay. But the circumstances for him and Andrew
were quite dissimilar. Mitchell had long been different from most other kids,
with a whole other set of interests from the average teenager. Intellectually,
he was at a completely different place from the rest of his friends. He read at
a much higher level. Simply, he was much smarter. He was atypical in so many
other ways, that when he told us, somehow it didn’t come as a very big
surprise.

ROSLYN   
Not long after Mitchell
came out to us, I had my first serious foray into gay studies at school. While
working toward my Bachelor’s degree in Applied Social Science at Concordia
University, I was enrolled in a year-long course on human sexuality. We spent a
couple of classes talking specifically about homosexuality, and looked at some
films depicting gay relationships. It wasn’t pornography certainly, yet it was
eye-opening, with same-sex couples touching, holding hands, holding each
other... in the nude. It helped desensitize me, removing some of the shock
value from gay sex.

At last I found the courage to ask myself the
question...
Is Andrew gay too?
If it were true, it explained a lot. Like
how he didn’t seem to hang out with “the boys”. And when Andrew was sixteen I
found out that Lorne, one of his few close male friends, was gay.

Lorne had come over one afternoon. He’s always
been a live wire, bouncing around like a pinball, talking your ear off. On that
day, he slipped right up to Andrew’s room, visibly disturbed. He told Andrew,
although he wasn’t sure what was wrong with him, he was afraid he might be gay.
He wanted Andrew’s advice: Should he tell his parents? After Lorne had left,
Andrew came into my bedroom for what amounted to a consultation.

“This isn’t about me,” he qualified immediately.
“And don’t tell anybody. I think Lorne is gay. What should I say to him? How
can I help him?” Typically, Andrew was anxious to help a friend. The irony was
he didn’t know how to help himself.

I struggled to come up with some words of
wisdom. Then I got stuck on something Andrew said.
“This isn’t about me.”
It had the ring of denial, like,
“I’m not a crook.”
He repeated
variations on that theme at least three or four times in our conversation. “I’m
not talking about me... I’m asking for my friend...”

Preoccupied with what Andrew was saying, or more
accurately, what he wasn’t saying, I couldn’t think what guidance to give.
Except for one suggestion. And maybe, subconsciously, I intended it for Andrew
as much as Lorne. “I think it would be best if Lorne could tell his parents. No
matter how difficult it might be, it’s the only way they can hope to
communicate honestly.”

Once Andrew had left the room, all I could think
was, Andrew’s best friend is gay... his other close boyfriend, Peter, is
different
...
(
different
turned out to mean
gay
, when I learned Peter had also
come out, about five years later), and the closer I looked, it seemed Andrew
was shaping up to be pretty different too.

As I sat down on the edge of the bed, I thought
about the girls in Andrew’s life. Now I began to see those relationships in a
new way. Suddenly it seemed he was
trying
to be heterosexual. It looked
like work. And it looked like it wasn’t working. He would go out with girls,
like Diane or Maxine, his closest girlfriends. He was even Diane’s escort at
her sweet sixteen. I can still see them all dressed up like a bride and groom -
literally! Diane, in her faux bridal gown, arm in arm with Andrew in his tux.
It looked like dress up in more ways than one. Everything about it was
artificial
.
There wasn’t a single spark of sexuality between them. Or between Andrew and
Maxine. Here he was, this tall, handsome kid, with dark curly hair. I got to
thinking about the other girls who were interested in him, and there were many,
yet he wasn’t interested back. Then it occurred to me... He’s got this special
relationship with two different girls. Why not just
one
?

The clues were adding up.

Immediately I hopped onto a see-saw, bouncing
between “Aha! That’s what it is!” and “Oh, forget about it, for heaven’s sake.
It’s too painful even to
consider
.”

One day, not long after, Andrew and I went out
to lunch together at a little cafeteria downtown. Sitting opposite each other,
I sensed that he needed to talk. But he couldn’t articulate what was really
going on.

“I’m having trouble with relationships,” he
said. “I don’t feel like being with anybody. I’m not happy. Really, I’m
miserable.”

I tried to coax some specifics out of him,
without success.

When it was clear we weren’t getting anywhere, I
said, “Look, I can’t be your therapist. I’m your mother. I’m concerned. I’m
worried. I think you should get some help. Let me get you the name of somebody
you can see. What do you think?”

It wasn’t the first time I’d made this
suggestion. This time he didn’t say no, he simply didn’t answer. Translation:
I’ll think about it.

A couple of weeks later Andrew announced to me
that he would give therapy a try. I was ready with the name of a psychologist
who had been highly recommended by a friend of mine. Through the several months
he saw this man, Andrew never told me how badly it was going. He just quit. It
was five years before I found out the truth behind his terminating the therapy,
and the disturbing story of his next experience with a mental health
professional, this time a prominent, respected psychiatrist.

Soon after Andrew quit therapy, I shared some of
my suspicions about Andrew with Sheldon for the first time. Sheldon didn’t
comment. He just listened.

SHELDON   
I honestly can’t
remember ever discussing the possibility that Andrew might be gay. Years
before, Roslyn and I had talked about Mitchell, but I never recall considering
the possibility Andrew might also be gay until much later.

I do remember Andrew entering therapy, and the
conflicting thoughts I had about that. On one hand, I was not the greatest fan
of social science, primarily because I’ve always found it hard to call it a
“science”, it’s so inexact. I believe any intelligent, sympathetic, patient
person willing to serve as a sounding board probably could serve the same
purpose as a therapist in many cases. On the other hand, I knew Andrew was
interested in psychology, and Roslyn was in fact a social worker, so if that’s
what Andrew wanted, I thought it better not to upset both of them. When he
stopped therapy, I wasn’t concerned. I thought maybe he’d worked through his
problems.

ROSLYN   
For the next three
years, I teetered between the reality I feared and the fantasy I prayed for. It
was a precarious balancing act.

All the while, I was looking for a hopeful sign.

When Andrew told us he was going to Greece with
Diane, I thought I’d found reason for optimism. They were nineteen.

Great! This looks promising!
I told
myself. Once they started planning their trip, I convinced myself that maybe
there
was
something between them after all. Although I wasn’t knitting
baby booties, I continued looking for good news wherever I could find it.

When they’d been gone for a week, Andrew called
home.

 “Are you having a good time?” I quizzed.

He sounded good, and I could tell he was having
fun.

“Did anybody rob you? Is your money belt on at
all times? Did you put your sun block on? How is your stomach tolerating Greek
cuisine? You’re sure nobody mugged you?” I ran down the Jewish Mother’s
checklist.

Andrew confirmed the typical traveler’s dietary
complaints. Then he moaned about Diane being fussy. He said they didn’t always
agree on rooms.

While we’re on the subject of rooms,
I
thought,
how many
beds
are there in your room?

In fact, the closest I got to asking if they were
sleeping together was when I asked Andrew suggestively, “Are the beds big
enough for you, with your long legs?” I can be nosy, but I have my limits.

While they were still gone, I ran into Diane’s
mother, Rhoda, on the street in front of our house. At the time we were
neighbors. Our little corner of Hampstead is pretty, and comforting, in a
Father
Knows Best
kind of way. It’s a suburb, though not in the current
connotation of the word, just some speck in a massive urban sprawl. It’s only a
stone’s throw away from the city proper, and its character isn’t much different
from many residential areas within Montreal’s city limits, except that it’s
almost one hundred percent Jewish.

Standing on opposite sides of our little
Hampstead street, the setting was so homey I might as well have been going over
to ask Rhoda if I could borrow a cup of sugar. Rhoda was one of Andrew’s
biggest fans. (Forgive a mother for bragging, but he really did have what
amounted to a fan club.) Over the last few years, as Andrew and Diane had grown
closer, Rhoda would often extol on Andrew’s virtues, nearly always concluding
with “He’s so special!

That particular summer, we always checked in
with each other as soon as we got a phone call from Greece. “Have you heard
from the kids? Where are they now?” Rhoda inquired.

“Mykonos. They seem to be having such a good
time together!”

Rhoda smiled warmly.

“I’m so happy for both of them,” I blurted.
Filled with hope, I’d overflowed.

She looked at me oddly.

Then I let my enthusiasm take me right over the
edge. “Wouldn’t it be funny if they got married, and we ended up
machatunim
?”
(That’s a chummy Yiddish expression for in-laws). I probably beamed.

Rhoda couldn’t even look at me.

Then she made an excuse for leaving, gave me a
look that said,
You poor thing, you don’t even know,
and took off in a
hurry.

I felt my face flush, and my hands were clammy
in an instant.

It was at that moment I realized that she knew
something I had suspected for a long time. Andrew was gay.  She had been told,
and I was, after all, only his mother. Why should I have been told?