Another turn of another decade in the
years of my life,
and still, my mother cannot openly love me, her gay son.
By Rev,
Stephen Parelli
January 24 and 25, 2013
Bronx, New York
As a gay activist and son, I finally,
openly reflect on my mother's inability, after 15 years, to escape her
homophobic religious surroundings in which my father, her husband who
is a lay-pastor, dominates her life, manipulating her landscape
through
the grid of his own dreaded, hidden, secret homoerotic feelings.
Yesterday my
mother refused to speak with me on the phone when I
called her on my
birthday. All she could say, in a soft-spoken voice,
was "OK" to each
of my several awkward small-talk comments. Then
she said "I love you,
I always have," and hung up. In 15 years times -
since I came out and
entered into a same-sex union with my lover in
1997 - my mother and I
have spoken perhaps 5 or 6 times.
like
an epiphany, that we gays – by virtue of our omnipresence, if
nothing
else – are not sinners from whom to separate. Ostracism is
one of the
worst forms of abuse a person can suffer, so psychologists
tell us.
We gays are people to love just as we are, not off-spring to
disown
and disassociate from, to discharge as if suddenly we become
still-born
when publicly coming out as gay.
I don't know why God made me this way
. . . but I am . . . and I wish
they could all love me unconditionally
(just as they once did): That my
parents and my children and my
college friends from Bible college and
seminary days, and my former
clergy peers and church friends since
my childhood, and my ex-wife (who
knew before we married), -- that
they could all love me now, love me
still.
God is my witness: I did not choose this! So, I will live it
with gusto and
thanksgiving, honoring the God who blesses me with
it.
Yes, I am gay and I am blessed with a husband of 15 years who holds
me in his arms at the end of each day and is lovingly, passionately
dedicated to our union. I hurt. He loves me, oh so tenderly, when I
hurt. With sympathetic eyes, he looks deep into mine while holding
me.
They - my (former) family, (former) friends and (former pastor)
associates - are missing out on some of the greatest ventures and
accomplishments of my life. I miss them, but I cannot go back. I pray
they will, with love and affirmation, at long last step into the light with
me, and embrace me, and rejoice in God's creative diversity - so
obviously, universally attested to.
"I love you, I always have,"
my mother said as she silently hung up the
phone, shutting me out of
her life again. How sad that she cannot live
the love she testifies
of: the love for her first-born, a love she keeps
swallowed up in her
breast. What religion is this that loves but does
not love?
I
live the love I know, the love I have, the gay-love God has given me
that I, too, should live to the fullest. The moment is mine, it belongs to
those who love. I'm gay. I love. I’m present. I’m alive.
It is my
mother who is still-born, tethered to a by-gone, man-made
church-based
heterosexist moralistic era from which she cannot now
escape, forever
closed-off to her son, knowing only the heart-beat of
her own lonely
heart, making the choice to never see, or hear from,
her
son.
She hurts.
And who is he who loves her, my mother, oh so
tenderly, when she
hurts; who with sympathetic eyes looks deep into her
own? It is my
father who late in life became a popular lay Baptist
pastor in Central
New York, who became enamored with a new found
prestige and
power, who when I said, as a married adult with four
children, that ‘I
must tell my mother I’m gay because someone who loves
me must
know,’ said to me, grabbing my throat with both his hands and
raising
me bodily two inches completely off the floor by the strength
of his
rage, “I will kill you if you tell your mother.” It is he, my father, who
comforts her, my mother, with goodly words like “Follow me as I follow
God.”
A year or two will pass before I call again and say, as I did
yesterday, “I
just wanted to hear your voice, mom.” “OK” she will
manage to say.
And just before hanging up, without the slightest hint
that my one-way
conversation with her is over, will whisper “I love
you, I always have.”
The phone will go dead and she will go on dying
one day at a time,
believing she is honoring God and honoring her
husband by aborting,
again, her mother-son relationship, believing she
has made this holy
choice of abortion on her own accord when in reality
she is tethered.
Tethered to an out-dated God who is majestically
ascribed by some
worshipers as “the same yesterday, today and forever,”
misappropriating the sacred text to shield themselves from whatever
changes in society or in life they cannot face.
It is my father who
cannot face life as he knows it. He is a homophobe
for reasons, he only
knows, found deep in his dark heart. Reasons he
attempts to hide from
others. What is it that makes him especially
hateful towards gays that
he would say to his own son “I will take a bat
to your head if you
attend your grandmother’s funeral?” or “All gays
should be taken out
and hung” or “Your ten-year old son should never
see you, or your
partner, again – what all gays ever do is molest
minors” or “If you
ever tell your mother you are gay I will kill you” or
“I've told your
children [ages 10 – 16] what kind of deviant, pervert you
are, and I am
not sorry for having told them.”
Such hateful statements are as telling
as they are hurtful.
Many argue that such hatred for gays is really a
hatred of self because
of one’s own homoerotic feelings. It is not
unthinkable that my father
falls into this category: a self-hating
closeted bisexual or gay man. His
refusal to attend his granddaughter’s
wedding (on the basis that it
would amount to adultery, being her
second marriage); his refusal to
be his brother’s best man (same
reason, a second marriage and
therefore legalized adultery); his
refusal to acknowledge a shower for
his new-born grandchild (because the
live-together parents had not
yet decided to be wedded and so they are,
therefore, living in
fornication); and his insistence that his
grandchildren should separate
from the man their sibling sister was to
marry because he was outside
of the faith, all point to a hyper
vigilance, and in most cases to a hyper
vigilance for moral or sexual
purity.
It is not hard to see how my father’s hyper vigilance for
sexual purity
and his open hatred for gay men may indicate a
preoccupation with
unwanted homoerotic feelings.
One of the most
telling accounts of my father’s fear of his homoerotic
feelings is
this: When I was in seminary studying to become a pastor,
my father –
much to my surprise – became a lay pastor (as I stated
above). This
was in the early 1980s. He was in his late 40s. He had no
education
beyond high school, no formal training in Bible or
counseling. I was about to be married. He wanted to give me some
father-to-son, pastor-to-pastor, advice about the marriage bed. He
told me this: “Let me tell you what I tell all the couples I counsel before
marrying them. I tell them not to practice oral sex on the male partner
for this reason. It will only increase the husband’s desire to look
for
more of the same outside of the marriage and he will find himself
seeking out
men who will provide the
service.”
I was shocked to hear my father tell me he was giving this
advice to
couples he marries, that, in fact, according to him, the
heterosexual
marriage bed would, in deed, in this one case, foster
desires on the
part of the husband for same-sex sex.
How
un-insightful, on the part of my father, to fail to know that, at this
juncture of the counseling session, he was telling on himself! For all
his hiding and hyper vigilance to keep his homoerotic feelings unseen
and in tow, it was here in the counseling chambers of the pastor’s
office that he completely, unwittingly, let his secret escape him, telling
it
to couple after couple.
So, yes, it is in this homophobic context that my mother squanders out
the last days of her life, living in mindless religious isolation with
her
moralizing, parading, husband, separated forever from her
gay son,
tethered to a homophobic God who is made over in the image of
the
man who impregnates her with decades of his
self-loathing,
self-hating, because
of his homoerotic
feelings.
If time allows, and if I can muster it, I will phone her again
months down
the road, and she will quietly say as she prematurely hangs
up the
phone, “I love you, I always have,” while beseeching her asexual
God
to forgive her once more for having bestowed a mother’s love upon a
despicable, God-forsaken son.
I will hear her words of love; I
will be thankful for it; yet I will always
carry an amount of sadness
that life, in her case – in our case, could
not be lived to the fullest
as parent-child, as God had intended when
he
created family.
Although my father's
homophobia overshadows and beclouds my
mother's ability to clear her
head and think, there are her own long-
standing, debilitating fears
that play into my father's homophobic
disdain for his son.
From what I know of her puritanical
lecturing over the years, this must
be added: it would
appear that my
mother's mother-son
miscarriage is
due, in part, to an irrational fear she has
of sexual misconduct
occurring in others, especially in others close to her. She spoke of this repeatedly, in one form or another, over the years.
So now, when you tie religion into all of
this, you have both
father and
mother, man and woman, paralyzed before a wrathful Edenic God who
created
humankind as sexual beings and who, subsequently, sent
them out of the garden because of their disobedience. Sex, God and
their complex,
internalized fears, all tied to gather, complicating their
relationships with others.
My parents always were their own, unscripted, abiding moral
guides. The father, homophobic, forming his world and life view
during the McCarthy era, was very much guarded - obviously
so - as to what is and what is not masculine in himself and in
his two sons. The mother, truly
doomsday shocked, since the 50s and Elizabeth Taylor and Alfred Kinsey, at
the new norms society was forging and re-forging, became the house spoksperson in the
sex-revolution 60s
for moral
awareness,
for what is sexually right and
wrong.
Now enter their seminary graduate,
preacher-boy son, father of four,
divorcing his
wife, openly gay, openly
celebrating his new-found same-
sex lover.
My parents immediately resolved, without
discussion or further
thought, and as a matter of course, due to their good Christian
character (rooted in their irrational respective sex-laden fears), to
never accept their son again, to never see him, to never talk with
him,
to never acknowledge him. He is, after all, what they each fear
most:
sexual misconduct in others (my mother) and dreaded homoerotic
feelings
(my father).
A pervasive, long standing
fear, or any negative emotion that rules
us,
is a hard
taskmaster, crippling
our ability to freely love ourselves and
others. That was and is my
parents. Throw in religion, and now you
have my parents unknowingly
disguising themselves from themselves,
preventing themselves from
seeing themselves.
It brings me some comfort, however, to know that,
while they are not
able to love me, neither are they able to love other
people like me,
including other immediate family members, who openly
cast off
traditional moral values. Such people with "immoral life
styles" bring
my parents too close to their own gripping fear that
their own marriage,
or their own standing in religious society, could
be compromised, some
day, some way, at some unguarded moment.
My mother's words, as important and as significant as they are to me,
that "I love you, and I always have" fail to empower her to actually
live
in a loving relationship with her son, her fear of sexual
misconduct in
others overpowering whatever feelings she may have for
her son.
She must address her gripping fears, along with her husband's
fear of
the homoerotic, and only then, I feel, will she free herself to
openly
love me unconditionally and others like me who do not adopt her
moral
values as their own.
My husband and I, we would, of
course, welcome unconditional love
from my mother and father, but with
every passing year it seems less
likely, especially knowing that
religion, in their case, is their enabler,
that is to say, their brand
of religion permits them, encourages them,
reinforces them, celebrates
them in their resolve to disown their son
and his partner and others
like us, gay or straight, who compromise my
parents' standard of moral
integrity.
Essentially, It is their kind of religion that leaves them
little to no room
for self-reflection or self-analysis as to what are
the real factors,
rather than their religious code, that may be
pushing them towards
cutting off all dealings with significant others.
It is their sort of religion that leaves them with no ability to adapt
to society's changes around them, so that to say "I love you, I always
have" is, sadly, a window to the past, a lamentation of what once was,
a polite way to say "This is the parting of our
ways."
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By clicking here, this article can be viewed at Other Sheep Exec Site, the site where Steve Parelli and Jose Ortiz share their stories, especially the stories of their travels for Other Sheep.
