About a week before Christmas one year, my brother called home to ask my parents if he could bring a friend home for the holiday. A boyfriend. My parents told David they’d think about it, then called him back and said absolutely not. My brother felt hurt and rejected, and when he came home, relations between him and my parents were strained. Then he and my father got into a fight on Christmas Eve, and David took an early flight back to school. Christmas Day was sadder and lonelier that it had ever been.
I called David a few days later. “You can’t rush them,” I said, feeling guilty for defending them.
“It’s been three years,” David said. He was frustrated, which I understood. So was I. I didn’t understand why my parents couldn’t just get over it. It seemed simple. Every time my mother asked me how a date had gone or said she liked a boy I’d introduced to her, I thought, what’s so different between me and David? Don’t you want him to be happy, too?
But David’s patience paid off. My mother joined a support group for parents of gays and lesbians, and soon she was succeeding in dragging my father with her to the meetings. She was even asked to speak at a conference for high-school teachers about being unbiased toward homosexuality in the classroom. Time passed. My parents eased into not only accepting the fact that David wasn’t ever going to be straight, but also that it wasn’t bad thing at all. That for David, it was a very good thing.
Then they did the craziest and most wonderful thing. I still laugh when I think of it. They made a list of all the people they hadn’t told about David, including old friends, siblings and their own parents, and they planned a three-week road trip across the country. They had news to deliver, and they wanted to deliver it in person and do some sightseeing in the meantime. They’d gotten this idea in their heads that it wasn’t enough for David to come out of the closet. He would never feel they’d truly accepted him until they came out of the closet, too, as the loving parents of a gay son.
David’s apartment was the last stop on their journey, and I took an airplane up to meet them when they arrived. We took another family walk, and David told us about his new boyfriend and I told them about mine. Finally, after so much pain and hard work, my brother’s two lives started to merge.
Danielle Collier
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Where the story came from...
The story of "what sibling know" is from one of the chicken soup books collection. The book of this story is from "Chicken Soup for the teenage soul on tough stuff", we'd like to notify that we're giving the credits of the story to the original publishers, the way it should be, but we published one copy of the story for it's contents on a LGBT issues that might help our readers to relate and find more gay-common and related materials that offer a sense of support.