My mother sent me to a psychologist to cure my homosexuality. I couldn’t wait to go. We had very different ideas about how this was going to end.
How to Un-Gay Your Gay: Spoiler Alert—You Can’t
Let me begin with my position on homosexuality.
I am gay.
Very gay.
Pro-gay.
I have been gay for as long as I have been capable of knowing whom I was attracted to.
I have also been a hairdresser for most of my adult life, so I’m not exactly sitting on the fence professionally either.
At seventeen, however, my mother had another theory.
She believed something had gone wrong.
Perhaps I’d been influenced.
Perhaps I’d been confused.
Perhaps my boyfriend Chuck had somehow taken an otherwise perfectly heterosexual teenage boy and turned him homosexual.
Which, considering the teenage boy in question was me, remains one of the more ambitious theories my mother ever developed.
Her solution?
A psychologist.
And when she told me, I thought:
YES!
Finally! My Own Shrink!
This was not the reaction Mom anticipated.
You have to remember that I grew up watching talk shows.
Dick Cavett.
Mike Douglas.
Dinah Shore.
Merv Griffin.
Famous people were constantly talking about their analysts.
“My analyst says…”
“My therapist told me…”
“My shrink thinks…”
To teenage me, seeing a psychologist didn’t mean you were crazy.
It meant you’d arrived.
Movie stars had therapists!
Hollywood people had analysts!
And I wanted to be in Hollywood.
So when my mother dramatically announced that I was going to see a psychologist because I was gay, I had to suppress the urge to leap from my chair and hug her.
Hollywood, here I come! I have a shrink!
There was just one problem.
Mom thought the psychologist was going to fix me.
I thought the psychologist was going to fix Mom.
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So I Made a Deal
I agreed to counseling immediately.
But teenage Jon-David wasn’t stupid.
Manipulative?
Frequently.
Devious?
When necessary.
Stupid?
No.
So I negotiated.
I told my parents I would go to the psychologist they selected.
But if, after an agreed-upon number of sessions, the psychologist determined that I was mentally healthy and that being gay was simply part of who I was, my parents had to accept it.
And they had to let me see Chuck again.
Mom agreed.
Dad agreed.
I agreed.
We shook metaphorical hands.
And each side walked away believing it had just won.
Mom thought:
The psychologist will make Jon-David straight.
I thought:
The psychologist is going to tell Mom she’s wrong.
This was less family therapy than the Treaty of Versailles with better hair.
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There Was Nothing to Cure
After about two months, we eventually had our final meeting with the psychologist.
And the verdict was…
Drumroll, please…
I was gay.
Shocker!
Also:
I was healthy.
My relationship with Chuck wasn’t evidence that some horrible psychological catastrophe had occurred.
There wasn’t a broken heterosexual trapped inside me desperately trying to escape.
I wasn’t suffering from an acute shortage of girlfriends.
I was a gay seventeen-year-old boy who had a boyfriend.
That’s it.
I remember feeling vindicated.
Mom?
Not so much.
The Psychologist Had Failed—By Agreeing With Me
On the ride home, Mom was furious.
She’d gone into this arrangement believing the psychologist would confirm her diagnosis:
Something was wrong with Jon-David.
Instead, the professional she’d selected essentially told her:
Your son is gay.
Your son is okay.
Those two statements can exist in the same sentence.
Mom wasn’t ready for that.
So, naturally, she began questioning the psychologist.
Maybe he was gay.
Maybe he was incompetent.
Maybe he hadn’t understood the situation.
Maybe we needed another doctor.
Maybe there were medications.
Maybe military school.
Maybe some kind of camp.
And then things became frightening.
She began talking about shock treatment.
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This Is Where My Funny Story Stops Being Funny
I can laugh at parts of this story today.
I laugh because humor is how I’ve processed much of my life.
But I don’t laugh at conversion therapy.
And I don’t laugh at frightened kids being told there is something fundamentally wrong with them because they’re gay.
My mother’s thinking wasn’t unique to her.
For generations, gay people were treated as though our sexual orientation were an illness, moral defect or psychological malfunction.
And people tried to change us.
Through counseling.
Religion.
Shame.
Isolation.
Medication.
Behavior modification.
And, historically, far more extreme interventions.
Some of those practices have acquired the umbrella term conversion therapy, although calling them “therapy” gives them more legitimacy than they deserve.
Modern mainstream psychology and psychiatry do not consider homosexuality a mental illness.
And efforts intended to change someone’s sexual orientation aren’t supported as effective treatment and have been associated with serious potential harms.
In other words:
You cannot un-gay your gay.
I Was Lucky
Something important happened to me that doesn’t happen in every story like this.
The psychologist my parents chose was good.
Think about that.
My mother was looking for someone to prove I was broken.
Instead, the professional refused to do it.
He didn’t validate her fear simply because she was the parent paying the bill.
He didn’t promise to manufacture a heterosexual son.
He didn’t turn me into a patient because my mother was uncomfortable with my sexuality.
He treated me as a person.
I appreciate that more today than I possibly could have at seventeen.
Because other gay kids were not so lucky.
Being Gay Was Never the Part That Needed Therapy
This is what I wish families understood.
A gay kid may need therapy.
Absolutely.
A straight kid may need therapy.
I certainly benefited from having someone to talk to.
But there’s an enormous difference between:
“Let’s help this young person understand himself.”
and
“Let’s change this young person into somebody else.”
One begins with curiosity.
The other begins with rejection.
If a gay teenager is depressed, help with the depression.
If he’s anxious, help with the anxiety.
If she’s being bullied, help with the bullying.
If they’re frightened of losing their family, work on making the family safer.
If they’re struggling with identity, give them someplace honest and compassionate to explore it.
But homosexuality itself isn’t the pathology.
Sometimes the suffering surrounding it is created by the world reacting to it.
My Mother Thought She Was Saving Me
This is difficult for me to say because of how angry I became at her.
I believe my mother thought she was saving me.
That doesn’t mean she was right.
Love doesn’t magically make harmful decisions harmless.
Parents can love their children enormously and still be terribly wrong about what those children need.
My mother had a picture of my future.
Wife.
Children.
Grandchildren for her.
A conventional family.
And suddenly that picture disappeared.
Instead of grieving the future she’d imagined and getting to know the son who was actually sitting in front of her, she tried to restore the picture.
She wanted the old future back.
She wanted me straight.
But I had never been straight.
There was nothing to go back to.
“Why Can’t You Just Not Be Gay?”
Because that’s not how it works.
Being gay isn’t a bad habit.
It isn’t smoking.
It isn’t biting your fingernails.
It isn’t something you picked up from the wrong boyfriend.
You don’t eliminate homosexuality through positive thinking.
You don’t pray away sexual orientation.
You don’t become straight by avoiding gay people.
And you don’t manufacture heterosexuality by teaching a gay kid to behave in a way that makes everyone else more comfortable.
You may teach someone to hide.
That’s different.
And I already knew how to do that.
I’d dated girls.
I’d kept secrets.
I’d lived separate lives.
I’d tried to give my mother the version of me she wanted to see.
That didn’t make me straight.
It made me a gay kid who was good at keeping secrets.
Today, I’m Not Merely Okay With Being Gay
I’m glad I’m gay.
There.
I said it.
Pro-gay.
Not because gay people are better than straight people.
We’re not.
Believe me.
I’ve met us.
We’re capable of being every bit as ridiculous, selfish, wonderful, generous, irritating, brilliant, boring, loving and screwed-up as everybody else.
Equality!
I’m pro-gay because I refuse to begin the discussion from the premise that heterosexuality is the ideal condition and homosexuality is something unfortunate we should graciously learn to tolerate.
My being gay shaped my life.
It shaped my humor.
My friendships.
My loves.
My career.
My creativity.
My community.
My losses.
My survival.
It put me in rooms I might never have entered otherwise.
It introduced me to extraordinary people.
It also meant that I lived through a period when an entire generation of gay men was being devastated by AIDS.
Being gay has brought me joy and heartbreak.
In other words:
It gave me a life.
My life.
I Don’t Want the Straight Version
This is perhaps the biggest difference between seventeen-year-old Jon-David and the man writing this today.
At seventeen, I wanted my mother to understand that being gay wasn’t bad.
Today, I don’t need to make the defensive case.
I don’t need to say:
I’m gay, but I’m still a good person.
No.
I’m a good person sometimes.
I’m an asshole sometimes.
I’m generous.
I’m vain.
I’m funny.
I’m stubborn.
I’m loving.
I’m occasionally impossible.
And I’m gay.
These things are not competing facts.
They’re just Jon-David.
If somebody offered me a magical pill today that would make me heterosexual, I wouldn’t take it.
Absolutely not.
What would I even wear?
Maybe Mom Finally Gets It
My relationship with my mother became much more complicated after those months.
There was anger.
There was hurt.
There were decisions that changed our relationship for years.
Those stories are part of How I Killed My Mother.
But decades later, after her death and while writing this memoir, I find myself revisiting that frightened mother sitting in a Ford van trying desperately to solve a problem that wasn’t a problem.
I wish I could reach through time and tell her:
Mom, stop trying to fix me.
I’m going to be okay.
I’m going to love.
I’m going to be loved.
I’m going to have my heart broken.
I’m going to break some hearts.
I’m going to build businesses.
I’m going to write books.
I’m going to have adventures you can’t possibly imagine.
I’m going to meet people whose pictures you might have clipped out of movie magazines.
I’m going to screw up.
A lot.
I’m going to survive.
And one day, when I’m an old bald gay man who still flips imaginary hair when he’s making a point, I’m going to tell this story.
Not because you failed to turn me straight.
But because eventually I understood:
There was never anything about being gay that needed fixing.
The only thing that needed changing was the belief that I did.
— Jon-David
A Note About Conversion Therapy
This part isn’t just my opinion or my memoir.
Major psychological and psychiatric organizations reject the premise that homosexuality is a mental illness requiring a cure. Contemporary evidence does not support sexual-orientation change efforts as effective therapy, and research has associated these practices with risks of psychological harm.
Supportive therapy can absolutely help someone experiencing conflict, anxiety, family rejection or distress surrounding sexual orientation. The goal is not to dictate someone’s identity. It is to help the person live safely, honestly and with dignity.
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How I Killed My Mother is my memoir podcast about family, forgiveness, identity, humor, grief, spirituality and the complicated business of understanding our parents after we’ve finally become old enough to understand ourselves.
Listen to the podcast and join my mailing list at HowIKilledMyMother.com for new stories, bonus material and updates about the upcoming memoir.
You don’t need to become somebody else to become worthy of love.
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