Reprinted from Debrief – Stevie Martin | Staff Writer | Thursday, 19 February 2015
A video which might (should) make you cry!
China doesn’t have the best track record in terms of gay rights – homosexuality was defined until a mental disorder until 2001, and according to numerous reports, there’s still a lot of prejudice in the workplace and at home.
But Chinese LGBT organisation PFLAG (Parents, Families And Friends Of Lesbians And Gays) are combatting this with a short film that made us well up with happytears. And also sadtears. And then just all-the-emotion tears.
This week sees countless children come home, and families reunited for chun jie, as part of the Chinese New Year celebrations – but this can be hard when a child has come out, and is not accepted by their family.
Fielding difficult questions like ‘Where’s your girlfriend?’ and ‘When are you getting married?’ is hard enough if you’re straight, but when you’re gay and your family refuses to accept your sexuality, it can obviously be really upsetting. A lot of LGBT people are flat-out not accepted back into the home, and forced to celebrate Chinese New Year alone. It’s basically the equivalent of not being able to come home for Christmas, if Christmas lasted for way more than just one day.
The video, which has gone viral in China, follows a young gay guy who works up the courage to tell his mum about his sexuality, but finds himself cast out of the family. Then, after a long period of estrangement, his mother comes to him and tearfully accepts him back – with real mothers who have been in this very situation discussing the importance of acceptance, as the credits roll.
The main message for parents is: ‘Accept your children, welcome them home.’ And for children: ‘Don’t give up. Your parents might not understand today, but maybe they will tomorrow.’
We hope every family who has given their child a hard time for being gay, lesbian, bi or trans, watches this video, cries loads and calls them up immediately, to invite them back into their home.
Correction: Christian Parents-Gays story
In a story Nov. 26 about evangelicals with gay children, The Associated Press erroneously reported a statement by the Rev. Al Mohler about same-sex attraction. Mohler said same-sex attraction can’t change through secular therapy but can change through the Gospel, not that same-sex attraction can never change.
A corrected version of the story is below:
Evangelicals with gay children challenging church
Evangelicals with gay children speaking out against how churches treat their sons & daughters
By RACHEL ZOLL
AP Religion Writer
Rob and Linda Robertson did what they believed was expected of them as good Christians.
When their 12-year-old son Ryan said he was gay, they told him they loved him, but he had to change. He entered “reparative therapy,” met regularly with his pastor and immersed himself in Bible study and his church youth group. After six years, nothing changed. A despondent Ryan cut off from his parents and his faith, started taking drugs and in 2009, died of an overdose.
“Now we realize we were so wrongly taught,” said Rob Robertson, a firefighter for more than 30 years who lives in Redmond, Washington. “It’s a horrible, horrible mistake the church has made.”
The tragedy could have easily driven the Robertsons from the church. But instead of breaking with evangelicalism — as many parents in similar circumstances have done — the couple is taking a different approach, and they’re inspiring other Christians with gay children to do the same. They are staying in the church and, in protesting what they see as the demonization of their sons and daughters, presenting a new challenge to Christian leaders trying to hold off growing acceptance of same-sex relationships.
“Parents don’t have anyone on their journey to reconcile their faith and their love for their child,” said Linda Robertson, who with Rob attends a nondenominational evangelical church. “They either reject their child and hold onto their faith, or they reject their faith and hold onto their child. Rob and I think you can do both: be fully affirming of your faith and fully hold onto your child.”
It’s not clear how much of an impact these parents can have. Evangelicals tend to dismiss fellow believers who accept same-sex relationships as no longer Christian. The parents have only recently started finding each other online and through faith-oriented organizations for gays and lesbians such as the Gay Christian Network, The Reformation Project and The Marin Foundation.
But Linda Robertson, who blogs about her son at justbecausehebreathes.com, said a private Facebook page she started last year for evangelical mothers of gays has more than 300 members. And in the last few years, high-profile cases of prominent Christian parents embracing their gay children indicate a change is occurring beyond a few isolated families.
James Brownson, a New Testament scholar at Western Theological Seminary, a Holland, Michigan, school affiliated with the Reformed Church in America, last year published the book “Bible, Gender, Sexuality,” advocating a re-examination of what Scripture says about same-sex relationships. His son came out at age 18.
Chester Wenger, a retired missionary and pastor with the Mennonite Church USA, lost his clergy credentials this fall after officiating at his son’s marriage to another man. In a statement urging the church to accept gays and lesbians, Wenger noted the pain his family experienced when a church leader excommunicated his son three decades ago without any discussion with Wenger and his wife.
The Rev. Danny Cortez, pastor of New Heart Community Church, a Southern Baptist congregation in California, was already moving toward recognizing same-sex relationships when his teenage son came out. When Cortez announced his changed outlook to his congregation this year, they voted to keep him. The national denomination this fall cut ties with the church.
In the United Methodist Church, two ministers with gay sons drew national attention for separately presiding at their children’s same-sex weddings despite a church prohibition against doing so: The Rev. Thomas Ogletree, a former dean of the Yale Divinity School, ultimately was not disciplined by the church, while the Rev. Frank Schaefer went through several church court hearings. He won the case and kept his clergy credentials, becoming a hero for gay marriage supporters within and outside the church.
“I think at some point moms and dads are going to say to their pastors and church leadership that you can’t tell me that my child is not loved unconditionally by God,” said Susan Shopland, the daughter of a Presbyterian missionary who, along with her gay son, is active with the Gay Christian Network.
Kathy Baldock, a Christian who advocates for gay acceptance through her website CanyonwalkerConnections.com, said evangelical parents are speaking out more because of the example set by their children. Gay and lesbian Christians have increasingly been making the argument they can be attracted to people of the same gender and remain faithful to God, whether that means staying celibate or having a committed same-sex relationship. The annual conference of the Gay Christian Network has grown from 40 people a decade ago to an expected 1,400 for the next event in January.
Matthew Vines, author of “God and the Gay Christian,” has attracted more than 810,000 views on YouTube for a 2012 lecture he gave challenging the argument that Scripture bars same-sex relationships.
“These kids are now staying in the churches. They’re not walking away like they used to,” Baldock said.
The collapse of support for “reparative therapy” is also a factor, Shopland said. In June of last year, Alan Chambers, the leader of Exodus International, a ministry that tried to help conflicted Christians repress same-sex attraction, apologized for the suffering the ministry caused and said the group would close down. At a conference on marriage and sexuality last month, a prominent Southern Baptist leader, the Rev. Al Mohler, said he was wrong to believe that same-sex attraction didn’t exist, but he continues to believe sexual orientation can change through the Gospel. Baldock, The Marin Foundation and the Gay Christian Network all say Christian parents have been reaching out to them for help in notably higher numbers in the last couple of years.
“If it doesn’t work, then parents are left with the question of what is the answer?” Shopland said. “If I can’t change my kid into being a straight Christian, then what?'”
Bill Leonard, a specialist in American religious history at Wake Forest Divinity School, said church leaders should be especially concerned about parents. He noted that many evangelicals began to shift on divorce when the marriages of the sons and daughters of pastors and “rock-ribbed” local church members such as deacons started crumbling. While conservative Christians generally reject comparisons between the church’s response to divorce and to sexual orientation, Leonard argues the comparison is apt.
“The churches love those individuals and because they know them, those churches may look for another way,” Leonard said.
Some evangelical leaders seem to recognize the need for a new approach. The head of the Southern Baptist public policy arm, the Rev. Russell Moore, addressed the issue on his blog and at the marriage conference last month, telling Christian parents they shouldn’t shun their gay children. Mohler has said he expects some evangelical churches to eventually recognize same-sex relationships, but not in significant numbers.
Linda Robertson said the mothers who contact her through her Facebook page usually aren’t ready to fully accept their gay sons or daughters. Some parents she meets still believe their children can change their sexual orientation. But she said most who reach out to her are moving away from the traditional evangelical view of how parents should respond when their children come out.
“I got a lot of emails from parents who said, ‘I don’t know one other parent of a gay child. I feel like in my community, I don’t have permission to love my child,'” she said. “They have a lot of questions. But then they’re going back to their churches and speaking to their pastors, speaking to their elders and speaking to their friends, saying, ‘We have a gay child. We love them and we don’t want to kick them out. How do we go forward?'”
This is a Book for Parents of Gay Kids: A Question-and-Answer Guide to Everyday Life
Life for gay teens has changed, but advice books for parents have lagged behind – until now. Zoe Schlanger meets the authors of a manual that even ‘cool’ parents should read
When Kristin Russo came out at the age of 17, her Catholic mother withdrew – for a short spell, anyway. This was in 1998. Like many parents of gay kids, Rose Russo was struggling to reconcile her daughter’s sexuality with her own religious life. Extended family referred Rose to Bible passages. She spoke with her priest, who advised her that “under no circumstances should she close her door to her daughter or anyone else important in her life”, Russo remembers her mother recounting. It helped, but Rose was still grasping for perspective. After a while, she sought advice from a few gay people she found through family and friends.
“My mum would just corner lesbians and just be like: ‘I don’t understand, how did you do this, are you having kids?’ She would ask them a hundred questions, and that was her only information about how my life might turn out,” Russo says. For nearly a decade, any trip Russo took home from college and later New York City ended with her mother bursting into tears. “I think she was just wanting it to go away,” Russo says.
As far as Russo, who is now 33, knows, in those pre-Google days Rose never went to the library to find books on parenting gay teens. Even if she had, the few books available may have made her mother feel worse, not better. Their approach was largely clinical and gloomy, and they escorted parents through a grieving process and toward acceptance, as if their child had been diagnosed with a disease.
Now, in 2014, the internet is awash in parenting blogs. Dozens of books are published each year on raising children and teens, but the literature landscape for parents of gay kids is virtually unchanged. A handful of books, mostly updates of editions written in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, relate stories of parents struggling to come to terms with their children’s sexuality.
Popular culture has undergone a revolution in attitudes toward LGBT people in the past five or so years. A generation is coming out younger, and parents are more willing to embrace them. But resources for those parents have lagged behind. That is, until September, when Russo and her co-author Dannielle Owens-Reid, 28, released a remarkably simple book.
Kristin Russo, left, and Dannielle Owens-Reid
This Is a Book for Parents of Gay Kids is for parents who want to be accepting, but “maybe they aren’t right now and maybe they’re really uncomfortable, and maybe they think their kid is going to hell”, Owens-Reid says. But it is also for a “new breed of parent”, as Russo puts it: those who are so eager to be accepting that they fail to recognise the difference of their child’s experience. “I see it so often,” Russo says. “These parents are so cool with their kid being gay that they don’t ask any questions, either because they think it would betray that they are indeed struggling, or because they think they don’t have any.Their kid is gay, they still love them, case closed.”
Of course, that support is a great start. But, Russo says: “It kind of forecloses the way that you can love your kid if you can’t let yourself ask any questions. It is different to walk down the street as a queer person than it is to walk down the street as a straight person. I think there is a real danger in saying no one is different.”
The book consists of a big, blunt Q&A: “How should I handle sleepovers?”; “How do I talk to my child about safe sex?”; “Who should I tell?”. A glossary in the back decodes the mystifying constellation of words – heterosexism, FTM, queer, genderqueer – that a straight parent is likely to hear for the first time. Personal stories are sprinkled throughout, from kids and parents everywhere on the experience spectrum – gay, bisexual, transgender, religious, bullied, the parent who always knew, the kid who threw everyone for a loop. It is such a necessary resource, it is hard to believe it didn’t already exist. Then again, Russo and Owens-Reid are the duo behind the websiteEveryoneIsGay.com and its corresponding YouTube channel, known to LGBT teens on the internet as the place to go for straightforward advice.
On video, the pair lip-synch to pop songs and respond to questions from viewers, such as “How do I get the person I’m interested in to know I’m queer?” or “I want to talk to the other gay girl at my school without being awkward. Help?” Other questions illuminate darker worries: there’s the caller who is worried she might be going to hell for being gay, or the guy who isn’t sure how to come out, because his sister already came out as gay and their parents turned out not to be accepting.
Even when the advice gets serious – when addressing questions about homophobic parents, for example – there is still humour.
“We still keep things very light-hearted. Because I think before you talk about anything, it feels so heavy. But once you do it, you’re getting over that little hump,” Owens-Reid says.
Russo and Owens-Reid never really meant to start an LGBT advice empire. In fact, their site began as something of a joke. At the time, in 2010, Owens-Reid was stocking a Tumblr called “Lesbians Who Look Like Justin Bieber” with, yes, photos of lesbians whose aesthetic and swoopiness of hair resembled those of the boyish pop star. The blog attracted attention from media outlets such as the New York Post, and from lesbians who were offended.
“There were people who were fans of the site who would be asking me questions about love and heartbreak, and then there were a huge chunk of people telling me I was stereotyping the community and making lesbians look bad,” Owens-Reid tell me. They began EveryoneIsGay.com in 2010 as a place to respond to the Bieber Tumblr criticism. “We didn’t really have any intention of doing anything past, like, sassily talking back to some people and answering some advice that was funny and very light-hearted,” Russo says. The first request was “How do I know if my dog is gay?” It was submitted by Russo’s sister.
Soon, the requests for advice came pouring in, and they weren’t all light-hearted. “It was like, ‘Oh, this person is afraid to come out to their family because they might get thrown out of their house’. That was a turning point for us. And so we sort of looked at each other and decided to try it,” Russo remembers.
In the autumn of 2010, within a matter of weeks, four American teens between the ages of 13 and 18 killed themselves after enduring harassment from peers for being gay. The news shed new light on the pressures faced by gay teens. By 2011, colleges and schools began asking Russo and Owens-Reid to speak in their classrooms and auditoriums. Bullying of gay students had gone unaddressed for so long. Now, schools knew they had to talk about it, but didn’t know how. The pair have been to more than 100 schools to date.
Meanwhile, Russo and her mother, Rose, have come a long way. Rose, 61, now accepts and embraces her daughter, and her daughter’s wife. “I don’t know exactly what happened. The only thing I can tell you is that in 2001, I was very sick,” says Rose. “A gall bladder operation went wrong. I could have died. You have these near-death experiences, and afterward you reflect. Kristin was my biggest reflection. I didn’t know if she would have known how much I loved her, if I passed away.”
Rose recalls feeling deep regret for the years of strife. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, how could I have done that to her?’ I’m almost ashamed of how I was. I thought, ‘This is my child; if I can’t accept her for who she is, I’m not such a good mum’. I just didn’t care any more what people thought. That totally changed things for me.”
It was a number of years before Russo felt that her mother had fully come around. Six years ago – 10 years after Russo came out – she says she could tell for the first time that Rose felt comfortable around Russo’s then-girlfriend. “I would say 27 was the age,” Russo says. “That was when I could go home without her sitting me down and bursting into tears.”
But now, Rose says she’s proud of Russo and Owens-Reid’s work with LGBT youth, and wishes something like This Is a Book for Parents of Gay Kids could have existed then.
“I was struggling so badly then with her being gay, and I didn’t know if I could ever overcome that. Now, I look back and can’t believe I went through all that turmoil,” Rose says. “She’s a wonderful girl. She really is. To me, the book is a wonderful thing. It’s all coming full circle.”
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