What should you do if your teen “comes out” to you as gay or you suspect that your teen might be attracted to the same sex or experimenting with sexual orientation? If you want to build rapport and trust with your teen, which is the foundation to having a successful relationship with your child far into his adulthood, then you will approach conversation with your teen about sexual orientation the same way you would approach any other conversation – using the three essential steps to building rapport and trust with your teen: respect the life stage called adolescence; remember what it was like to be a teen; and accept that your child is becoming an adult.
Let’s start with the last one: accept that your child is becoming an adult. This advice is especially helpful if you are struggling with your child’s homosexuality. This is your child’s life; your child has to live out the choices he or she makes. Whether you believe that homosexuality is innate or a choice, sinful or acceptable, your teen, who is becoming an adult, is making a very real adult choice to break a social taboo in order to act on something that he or she feels is very essential to their personhood: their sexual orientation. Many gays will say that they no more control their orientation than they control the color of their eyes – it is simply who they are. What they do have control over is if they are going to live a life in which they can freely be themselves or try to suppress that person.
If your child has come to you with the revelation that he or she is gay, regardless of your own fears or beliefs about homosexuality, your only option if you want to build rapport and trust with your teen is to react from the perspective that your child is almost an adult, this is his or her life to live, and that your child, not you, is responsible for the choices he or she makes. That does not mean that you can’t share your concerns with your child or your beliefs about homosexuality, but if you reject your child, damn him or her to hell, or go into denial about the announcement, you will be damaging the rapport and trust between you and your child, possibly for years to come.
Why Rejecting Your Gay Teen Makes Matters Worse
Gay teens also need guidance and mentoring from their parents in the area of body image, dating, and sex. Like all teens, they have anxieties about body image, they fall in love, and they too will be sexually curious. If you shame your teen about his or her sexual orientation, you will set up zero opportunity to help mentor your teen through all the other inevitable experiences he or she will go through as an adolescent with regard to body image, dating, and sex. Your teen will most likely take on your shame and feel unloved. Your teen will then be needy in the quest for love, driving him or her into the arms of unhealthy relationships. And most likely your teen will possibly engage in risky sexual experimentation out of the notion that homosexuality is a perversion. All behaviors you helped reinforce with your rejection of him.
But if you accept your child’s sexual expression, you will bring your child closer to you, which will provide you with the opportunity to mentor your child through the hard times with body image – when other students in school are picking on your child because he or she doesn’t fit the mold of “normal” gender roles. Your gay teen also needs you to be there when he or she experiences the first romantic loss. The same advice I give when it comes to accepting that teen love is real love, I give when responding to your gay teen’s love and love loss: remember what it was like to be a teenager, and then accept that when your gay teen loves, that is real love too. Trend lightly and be supportive if you want to have a successful relationship with your gay teen.
And yes, it is perfectly acceptable to talk to your gay teen about sex. The same conversation you would have with your straight teen, with a few adjustments of course, you should have with your gay teen: communicate your values about sex, encourage your child to wait to be sexual until they are mature enough for the responsibilities of healthy sexual relating and don’t be too “in your face” about the details: keep it short and factual.
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