Mama's Boy

All gay men have complicated relationships with their mothers. Though all parent-child relationships can stray towards the disordered, that of a mother and her gay son is particularly special. Some of us count our mothers as one of our closest friends and confidantes, others despise their moms as a cruel and intolerant Joan Crawford type and the very thought of family gatherings makes their blood run cold. Growing up we may identify more closely with our mothers than we care to admit, or like wayward and resentful daughters, we do our best to eschew any semblance of relation or attachment. In either case, this central relationship in our lives figures prominently in shaping the men we become, for better or worse.

Growing up I was driven only by an intense desire to please and impress. Overachieving at everything except sports, I wanted to prove my worth and importance to not only the world, but to my parents. Subconsciously, I felt that my sexuality would be such a profound disappointment that I wanted to make up for it in some way. Good grades, extra-curriculars, and a college scholarship seemed to be my only means of doing so. It was only after I had come out, which completely failed to surprise any member of my family or society at large, that I even began to engage in any behavior that they may disapprove of.

But I know my story is not shared by all of us. There are plenty of gays who feel and felt that they had nothing to prove to their parents and relentlessly pursued their dreams and desires regardless of how their family may think or feel. And they are not wrong for doing so. Our parents gave us the gift of life and hopefully provide us with love and support through our childhood and adolescence but that doesn’t mean we owe them our unending gratitude. Having children was also their fulfillment of adolescent dreams or marriage vows, and the resulting lives they produced are given the freedom to use it however they please.

So why do gays have such polarized feelings about their mothers? Do we emulate them and hope to follow in their footsteps? Do we pity them and wish they could have been elevated above the role of doting housewife and mother, no matter what career success they may also have achieved? Or do we resent their biological ability to create life with their partner and thus recognize they created a flawed human being that is faced with more challenges then they themselves knew?

I’d like to think there was an easy answer to all these questions and that countless hours and dollars hadn’t been wasted on the couches of therapists’ offices in that pursuit, but that’d be a lie. The truth is that our feelings range so widely from love and gratitude to resentment and pity, it’s impossible to define just how significant this relationship has played in our lives. Like our fathers we are men capable of producing life, providing for ourselves and a family, and remaining sexually virile well into retirement. But we can’t perform all the same functions of our mothers, though we may adopt many of them in our relationships. Fundamentally, we will never measure up to what they contributed to our families.

So perhaps that’s where the complications begin. Unable to see ourselves as the same man our father is or was, and unable to ever to fill the role of our mother completely, we are stuck somewhere in the middle. Whether our parents express their disappointment or don’t feel it at all about our sexuality, we can’t help but feel like we somehow burdened them with our biological difference.

My mother turned 60 yesterday and me and my three siblings and their spouses and kids all spent the holiday weekend together to celebrate. Politics aside they all love and support me and will someday be thrilled to be guests at my destination wedding, but they also acknowledge that I enjoy a special privilege. I can stay up late drinking with the boys and go out shopping with the girls when it’s the other group’s turn to watch the kids. I am privy to conversations that wouldn’t occur if a member of the opposite sex was around, and charged with making peace among upset parties.

We gathered to celebrate our mother, a woman who I came out to six years ago in a Ruby Tuesday’s parking lot, and has loved and supported me every day of my life, and now serves on the PFLAG executive committee in Indianapolis, IN. But in a lot of ways I felt like it was a celebration for me as well. After a brief anxiety attack on Monday over the work that awaited me in New York, I sat in my mom’s car by myself. Fingering her keys I noticed she still carried the key chain with a guitar pick attached I’d given her when her purse had been stolen a few years ago. Bright orange and flimsy plastic, it doesn’t go well with her silver cross and multitude of frequent shopper cards. I knew then that though I was far away from her, I was never out of mind. I may not have been the son she expected to have, but I wasn’t for a second, one she didn’t want.

Appeared originally on homo-neurotic.com on 5/27/09