October 22, 1995, I received a phone call telling me that my daughter had just tried to hang herself for being gay. It was a Sunday evening at twilight in Texas. My daughter was at an all girls school in Toronto, Canada.
What they did not tell me at the time was that the school had not called me for 7 and a half hours and that she was already determined to be brain dead.
I am writing this story after ten years because I want people to understand what Prop 8 here in California really means.
It is the politics of personal destruction.
I am not an attention addict and this is still the most painful aspect of my life. It is because of my deep belief that issue really needs to be looked at and finally laid to rest that I write on the last night before this proposition is voted on. So please I have heard it all and I still cannot take the pain of people who justify the behavior of the Mormon church and its cohorts. You have the right to feel this way but please share it in another diary.
When I was told my daughter was gay I was shocked. I never ever thought she was and then, if she was, I never thought she would not tell me. I also never thought she would think I would not accept her for who she was.
The most pain for me was that it was a total surprise. I think that as a parent I should have been atuned as well as attached to my child. I never thought my daughter was gay, in fact, I always thought she was a man's baby with all the precosious baby womanly wiles. She went to her Dad and Grandad always first.
I was told my daughter made a pass at another girl and upon being rejected ran to her room, locked herself in, and hung herself from her bunk bed. My daughter was five foot eight which meant that she had to hold her knees up until she passed out in order to hang herself from her bunk bed. The horror of seeing that much pain that she could have that much determination rendered me incapable of much speech for almost a year.
How could my daughter be gay and I not know it? How could she think being gay was so horrible she could not talk about it? What does being gay mean to a young girl? My daughter was 13 years and 10 months old exactly.
We had three funerals--one in Los Angeles, on in Toronto, and one in San Antonio. The one in Toronton at the school where she died, we were not allowed to attend but we were sent copies of the service. The one in Los Angeles was Jewish and highly attended since my husband was a past synogoge president among other things. We never told the truth and the Rabbi comforted my husband by telling him his daughter was out of her mind. She was buried in Los Angeles with the rest of the family. A year later my husband was laid beside her. The one in Boerne, Texas was an attempt at resolution. It was known that my daugher was part of a suicide pact and that she had been jeered for some time about being a bull dike.
A year later, I began a long study of what it means to be a lesbian and a gay teenager today. I spent a lot of time with Children of the Night in Los Angeles. I went to a lot of lesbian events and I interviewed a lot of old lesbian women.
Even within the community, there is about a 50/50 split of whether it is DNA or a choice. What is universally agreed is that who you love, how you express it, and your freedom to do so is the deepest aspect of your humanity. To have that choice disparaged is to be ripped internally of your right to be you and nothing, NOTHING, is more painful.
What I wanted to know in the beginning was it is true that everybody knows almost from birth? I certainly never thought about it. I never saw it in her development. Does not knowing mean I chose not to know and that itself is painful.
One of the major ads playing here in California is what our kids will be taught in school. That for young children being taught about being gay gives them thoughts and options they would have never thought of on their own.
From the older lesbians I interviewed many of them never heard the word lesbian until they were young adults and already married. Having never heard the word and having no concepts in which to understand themselves, they kept their feelings and their fears private and as secret as possible. It was their private agony until it became almost unbearable and when it was they divorced and said nothing. Many of these women came out in their 50s to their adult children.
One of them that is now a counselor and gave me a lot of her time. She had four children, two boys and two girls. All of them straight but the youngest daughter. All of them understanding and having no problem with their mother but the youngest who is gay has multiple problems and is very self destructive and suicidal. She blames her mother for passing this on to her by DNA and feels her mother should have never had children. However, this woman felt she never had a choice because she had no knowledge about sex and all its variations in society.
About 70% of the Children of the Night are gays and lesbians who have been thrown out of their homes--most of which are identified as evangelical christian. There is no ability to discuss any aspect of this in their families.
In talking to these kids, I am not sure that all of them are gay. The first person I kissed and got excited over when I was 13 was another girl. I just thought I loved her. It was exciting and it was scary--like I think all first loves are. But since I never heard the word lesbian either I did not think I was some aberant terrible person. I just thought I had a longer drawn out cootie aversion to junior high boys--which seemed then and now to be perfectly rational.
The idea that we label and ostracize kids based on who they love as teenagers is truly mean and malicious. It is done to destroy the weak and the different. It is now done so thoughly that the idea that this too shall pass no longer seems a possibility.
About a year before my daughter's death, she told me she was being called a bull dike. I feel terrible that I blew it off. What I told her had always been true for me. In Texas, women who would get in a man's face and tell him he was wrong about anything was always called a bull dike. I had been called that and at the time was still being called that by my neighbors. My sister had also had the same experience.
My daughter was the youngest person to compete in the Olympic Modern Pentathalon which is running, swimming, fencing, shooting, and show jumping on a horse. At 12 years old she was running a mile in 5 minutes and 5 seconds and she was beating almost all boys her age in swimming, and in fencing she was defeating college guys because there are so few fencing matches on the lower levels it is a free for all. From being such an athelete, she did have broad shoulders for a young girl but she was still growing.
What I experienced is that the jealousy over my daughter's intelligence, bravery, and boldness was used to label her and cause her to doubt her own dreams.
In Toronto, there was another little girl involved although I was never allowed to know the depth or what actually happened. She was the one who rejected my daughter. She was sent to a mental hospital before my daughter was flown to children's hospital. She asked to see me and she asked for my absolution. Yet, her first words to me were I hated your daugher from the moment I laid eyes on her. I gave her absolution and my blessing because what she had done--the least being desiring my daughter's death--was karma I would never want to live with much less make myself her judge--leave her to heaven.
This unreasonable and irrational hatred underlies all forms of both sexism and racism. God created a spectrum of human beings, not superior and inferior forms of humanity.
I am not asking for a tip jar and I do not know if I can comment on this.