What happens after "that moment" when you realize you're gay?
Why would The Trevor Project need a service that deletes chat history so parents can't see it? It's depressing and necessary and I'm thankful they have it.
I was terrified.
It was 2001, and I was 11. Up until now, I lived a fair uncomplicated life, but I realized from a young age that something was different about me though I lacked the ability to articulate what that difference was. I had a hard time socializing with other boys my age. Even when I attended an all-boys summer camp, I still gravitated toward the few women who worked at the camp. When I was younger, a family friend playing the role of Santa Clause asked me what I wanted for Christmas at a party — I proclaimed that I wanted a VHS of my favorite movie, Sleeping Beauty.1 The stilted reaction from the adults in the room was a clue that this was the incorrect answer. A few years later, when playing Pokemon at my grandparents’ house, I was finally able to catch a Clefairy in Mt. Moon2. I proudly displayed this creature to my grandmother and described it as “cute.” She told me that men don’t describe things as cute. I knew I had said the wrong thing, but I didn’t really know why. I was just being me. I only knew that there was something that seemed different about me compared to my peers in my behavior, expression, and interests.
One of the most likely predictors of future homosexuality is expressing gender non-conforming behavior as a child. Gay men and lesbian women will often share humorous pictures of their otherwise-oblivious childhood selves engaging in some sort of behavior that makes it clear they were gay. When you’re two or three, you don’t have the awareness that doing something like asking for Sleeping Beauty is wrong, even if you don’t know why. Eventually, this obliviousness turns into the tangible understanding that you’re different, but maybe that’s just it: different. There isn’t another word or reason for it yet.
Which brought me to 2001. I was in the basement of my dad’s flower shop using a computer with a 56k modem to google something hilariously benign by today’s standards: “am I gay quiz”. The result was simultaneously surprising and predictable, but more importantly, instilled a sense of fear within me that defined my pubescent years. I finally had a word for the difference I felt during the first decade of my life.
I’ve spent a lot of time talking about what conservatives miss about homosexuality, including that it is not simply an act but an intrinsic part of oneself. But the conservative moral panic against discussions about homosexuality and trans people in schools has metastasized into an even more perverse crusade against The Trevor Project, one of the most successful and important anti-suicide hotlines for LGBT youth.
Conservatives have accused The Trevor Project of hiding information from parents through their chat services that allow teens to quit the chat without anything being saved in the browser history. They have screamed accusations that The Trevor Project is ignoring parental rights, or worse, grooming children into being homosexuals or trans or for sexual favors.
I want to explain why this feature is important and what happens after That Moment.
What do I mean by “That Moment”? That’s the moment when LGBT youth realize that they’re gay, or bisexual, or a lesbian, or trans. Discussions about LGBT youth usually talk about two different but important topics: “how do I know if I’m gay” and then transition to a discussion of “how do I come out?”. Yet there’s a significant amount of space in between those two points in time.
Ideally family is the building block of our personal relationships. We are biologically wired to love — or want to love — those closest to us. We have the term daddy issues specifically to articulate a lingering tension between a child and their father, and a litany of novels, plays, and films throughout history explore the importance of these relationships. The ideal relationship between a parent and child isn’t always realized, and there are plenty of people who are bad parents, but we as a society still strive for the ideal that there should be an unlimited love from parents for their children.
Part of the benefit of this type of love and support is that it provides a bedrock for children as they slowly acclimate to the world as it gets larger and scarier. But the moment you realize you’re gay or bisexual or trans, the boundless nature of that limitless love comes into doubt. Through no fault of the child, there’s now doubt if their relationship with their family will be the same.
Something that makes being LGBT unique is that the moment you realize you’re wherever you are in the LGBT spectrum, that creates a perceived barrier of understanding between you and your family, real or not. Most gay kids have straight parents who don’t understand what being gay is like because it’s an impossibly difficult exercise in empathy and imagination for straight people. The things that bind our families together — shared tradition, mutual understanding, and the ability to help children navigate the world through past experience — are cracked.
Your parents might ultimately be supportive of you, but you don’t know until you know. What if they throw you out of your home? What if they say they love you but not your lifestyle, whatever that means? What if there’s a facile understanding of the situation but you still sense that their relationship with you has dulled? Will they ever actually understand you?
That’s a huge emotional burden for anyone to grapple with. But it’s an even bigger burden for an 11-year-old who still watches Saturday morning cartoons. A child that age should never have to wonder if their parents will still love them because of an innate part of themselves they can’t do anything to change.
So why was I terrified that day I took that quiz? Because of this. I was a member of my family beforehand and then I was alone, a member of my family with an asterisk. The what if — what if everything changed? There’s no way it wouldn’t. But that moment was a horrifying realization that my life and my relationship with my family were now filled with unknowns. I did not want to carry that weight by myself, but I had to.3 The moment you realize you’re LGBT, you’re alone.
One of the strangest commonalities I’ve noticed among LGBT people is that they often remember specific times when their parents expressed some homophobic or transphobic comment, usually between the moment when they realized they’re gay and when they finally came out to their parents. It doesn’t need to have been something incredibly malicious, like calling someone a fag (though it could be). It could simply be a side comment that their parents made in passing that those parents forgot about in the same way that I don’t remember the conversation I had with my barista a few days ago. But LGBT kids are looking for any augurs of what their parents’ reactions will be once they come out. Any actions like that, however small, increase the sense of anguish and anxiety about what will be an inevitable conversation.
Life is hard enough in middle and high school. You’re figuring out your body and becoming a teenager and trying to understand and navigate friendships and school and social media and the internet and homework and sports and parties and on top of all of that, you’re carrying these burdens.
This is why what The Trevor Project does is important. Sometimes, a kid just isn’t ready to come out to their parents but needs to talk to someone.4 Or they might believe that their parents will never love them again and they’re willing to end their life. You need services like Trevor to tell kids that they have value no matter what, that none of this is their fault.
When I see Libs of TikTok and other large accounts with huge followings demonize The Trevor Project, I’m struck by the lack of empathy for the anguish of LGBT youth. Coming out sucks. I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone else. It’s freeing and liberating in its own way but it’s also terrifying and often it requires patience and time. Why would a child need to have a way to talk to a counselor at Trevor without their parents finding out? For exactly these reasons. Sometimes a child isn’t ready to come out to their parents and feels scared and alone or is concerned their parents might react negatively. It’s a real concern.
I’m not asking for much. What I am asking is for conservatives to understand that I am not lying when I say that I’ve always known that I’m different. I’m asking for one moment to at least attempt to understand the fear of being 11 and being at dinner with your parents and pretending everything is normal when it’s clear that something is wrong and not knowing if your parents will ever love you the same way again. I’m asking you to understand how hard this is for a kid to deal with. And then I’m asking you to please turn down the rhetoric on grooming and insinuations of recruitment and pedophilia. You’re going to get someone hurt. Or worse.
And if you are a parent and you are struggling to understand your child who you suspect might be LGBT, I implore you to think about how scary this can be to feel like they’re going to lose everything. Make sure they know they won’t.
gaaaaaaaaaaaaay.
Clefairy only has a 6% spawn rate in Pokemon Red and Blue so this was a legitimate W for Tyler.
I want to stress I have a fantastic relationship with my parents, who probably get annoyed that I call them so much.
One of these people might also be a teacher or a guidance counselor but Republicans seem deadset on making sure that kids can’t access those resources to come out. Thanks, guys. Great work.
This was my fave piece so far. Thank you for sharing this.
Progress is a fight.
It still hurts my soul that the percentage of Queer teens considering suicide is INCREASING year to year.
We've supposedly been in the 'last, final death rattles' of homophobia for 20 years.
And now the leaked Alito opinion says he'd okay overturning Obergefell.
Overturning Lawrence v Texas!
I thought that was settled when I was twelve. Between one jerkoff session and the next the things I wanted to do to Hugh Jackman were no longer a crime.
And now it might be again. What a time.