Our Son Is Gay
A Mom and Dad's Page
from Jay and Catherine Lewandowski, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Christmas 1996 · The Months After · Our Faith · Easter · October 1998 · What We Wish We'd Known · Jay's Letter to Fathers · Letters from Parents

Hello, and welcome. My name is Catherine Lewandowski, and I am writing most of this page. My husband Jay has his own page, a letter to other fathers, and I will let him speak for himself there, because he does it better in a few words than I do in a whole afternoon.

We have both lived on the south side of Milwaukee our entire lives. We grew up four blocks apart and were married at the parish where I've been the secretary for nineteen years. Jay is 58 and has been a tool-and-die maker since he got out of the Army. I'm 57. We have two children. Our daughter Melody is 32 and lives ten minutes away with her husband and our two grandsons. Our son Francis is 29 and a physical therapist in Chicago.

Francis is gay. He told us on Christmas night of 1996. This is the story of what we got wrong, what we got right, and where we are now. We are not experts. We are just a mom and dad who love their son and had to learn a lot in a hurry. If you are a parent who has just heard the news, and you're sitting at the computer at two in the morning because you can't sleep, I was you. Stay a while.

Christmas Night, 1996

It was a Wednesday. We'd had the whole family for Christmas dinner, ham and pierogi and my mother's poppy seed cake, and Melody's family had gone home, and the dishes were done. Francis asked if we could all sit down in the living room for a minute. I thought he was going to tell us he was getting married. I actually thought that. I had a little picture in my head of a nice girl from Chicago.

He sat on the edge of the hassock and said, "Mom, Dad, I'm gay. I've known for a long time. I wanted you to hear it from me."

I would like to tell you I said something wise. What I said was, "Are you sick?" Because the first thing, the very first thing that went through my mind, was AIDS. I'd watched the news for fifteen years. I'm ashamed of that now, but it's the truth, and I promised myself this page would tell the truth. Francis was very patient. He said no, he was perfectly healthy, and that wasn't what this was about. It was about him wanting us to know who he was.

Jay didn't say anything at all. He got up, went down to his workshop in the basement, and stayed there. I could hear the grinder going until after midnight. He didn't speak to Francis, or really to me, for two days. Francis drove back to Chicago on the twenty-seventh without his father saying goodbye. I stood at the front window and watched his taillights go down the block, and I think that was the lowest moment of my life.

I know now that Jay wasn't angry at Francis, not really. He was scared and sad and confused, and he didn't have any words, and when Jay doesn't have words he goes to the basement and makes things out of metal. On the third day he came up and sat at the kitchen table and said, "I need to call him." And he did. They talked for an hour. I don't know everything they said. I do know they both cried, which neither of them had done in front of the other since Francis was about nine.

The Months After

The first months were hard. I cried at the grocery store. I cried in the car. I went through old photo albums looking for signs, as if there was something I should have caught, like a fever. (There wasn't. He was a happy little boy who liked baseball cards and the Brewers and his grandmother's kitchen. He still is, more or less.)

I grieved, I'll admit it. I grieved for the wedding I'd pictured and the grandchildren from Francis I'd imagined. A woman at our first PFLAG meeting told me that was normal, that I was letting go of a picture, not a son. That helped more than anything anyone else said that year.

We worried about what people would think. The neighbors, the parish, my sisters, Jay's buddies at the shop. We worried about his safety. We worried about his health. We worried about his soul. We worried about whether we had done something wrong. Everyone who has been through this told us later that they worried about all the same things.

Our first PFLAG meeting. In February, about six weeks after Christmas, I found a PFLAG chapter in Milwaukee. (PFLAG stands for Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.) I told Jay I was going whether he came or not. He came. We sat in the very back row, by the door, so we could slip out if we wanted. We didn't say one word the whole meeting. We just listened to other mothers and fathers, ordinary people like us, from Catholic and Lutheran and Baptist families, telling our story with their names in it.

At the end a couple about our age, Don and Joan Braswell, came over to the back row and introduced themselves. Their daughter came out to them in 1985, and they had been coming to meetings ever since to sit with people like us. Joan held my hands and said, "It gets better. You'll see." Don and Jay talked about the Packers for twenty minutes, which, if you know Wisconsin men, is how they say they care about you. We went back the next month and sat in the middle.

Our Faith

We are Catholic. I mean, we are really Catholic. I work for the parish. Jay ushers at the eight o'clock Mass. Francis was an altar server for six years and confirmed in that church. So of course one of my first fears was that I would have to choose between my son and my Church.

A few weeks after Christmas we made an appointment with our pastor, Father Glenn McElwain. I had worked across the hall from him for years and I was still terrified to say it out loud in his office. We talked for almost two hours. He didn't pretend it was simple, and he didn't hand us a pamphlet and send us home. He listened. He told us the first thing God was asking of us was to love our son, and that we didn't have to have every answer that week, or that year. And he asked us to bring Francis by to see him at Easter, which Francis did.

Then in the fall of 1997 the U.S. Catholic bishops put out a message to parents in exactly our situation. It's called Always Our Children. Father gave us a copy and I read it at the kitchen table with my reading glasses and a box of tissues. I'm not going to quote it here. I'd rather you read the whole thing yourself, and your parish office or diocese can get you a copy. I'll just say that it was written to parents like us, it urged us to keep our children close and not to cut them off, and I cannot tell you what it meant to me to hear that from the bishops of my own Church. I have given out more copies of it than I can count.

We still go to Mass every Sunday. I still pray my rosary every night, and Francis is in every decade. I don't have all the theology worked out, and I've stopped thinking I have to. What I have is a son I love and a God I trust, and I've decided to let the two of them sort out the rest.

Not everyone at the parish has been kind. One woman I'd known for twenty years stopped speaking to me after she found out. But many more have been kind, more than I expected, and three different people have come to my desk, closed the door, and told me about their own son or daughter or brother. You are never as alone as you think.

Easter Dinner, 1998

For a year Francis came home alone. In the spring of 1998 he asked if he could bring Ted to Easter dinner. Ted Kinsler is the man Francis shares his life with. I said yes before Jay could say anything, and then I went in the bathroom and had a little panic, and then I went to the store and bought too much ham.

Easter Sunday came, and Ted walked in with a pot of yellow tulips for me and a bottle of wine, and he was so nervous that he dropped his coat twice. I recognized that nervousness. It was exactly how Jay was the first time he came to my mother's house in 1962. Ted helped with the dishes without being asked. After dinner, Jay said, "You want to see the shop?" and took him down to the basement. They were down there an hour. When they came up, Ted was holding a little brass candleholder Jay had turned on the lathe. It's on their kitchen table in Chicago now.

Ted has been to every family dinner since. Our grandsons call him Uncle Ted. My mother, who is 84, calls him "that nice young man of Francis's" and saves him the end piece of the poppy seed cake. That's all I'll say about Francis and Ted, because their life is theirs. But I wanted you to know that the day I dreaded most turned out to be one of the happiest Easters we've had.

October 1998

In October of last year, a young college student in Wyoming named Matthew Shepard was beaten and left outside the town of Laramie in the cold. The news said he was attacked because he was gay. He died in a hospital in Colorado on October 12. He was twenty-one years old.

I watched it on the evening news in my kitchen and I had to sit down on the floor. He looked like any boy from our parish. He looked like Francis did at that age. Jay came in and found me there, and he sat down on the floor next to me, and we called Francis right then. He was fine. He was making supper. He was gentle with us and said he knew we were scared. We told him we loved him about six times each.

I don't want to frighten any parent who reads this. Most of our children are safe, most days, and Francis lives a quiet, happy life. But I learned that October that loving your son out loud isn't only something you do for him. Every parent who stands up for their child makes the world a little bit safer for everybody's child. We went to a candlelight vigil that week with our PFLAG friends, in the cold, by the lake. I prayed for Matthew Shepard and his mother and father. I still do.

What We Wish We'd Known

Your child is the same person they were the day before they told you. Francis didn't change on Christmas night. Only what I knew changed.

It took courage for them to tell you. Francis told us later he'd tried four Christmases in a row and lost his nerve each time. He told us because he loved us and didn't want to hide from us anymore. That's a gift, even when it doesn't feel like one.

It's nobody's fault. Not yours, not theirs. You didn't cause it by anything you did or didn't do.

Your first reaction doesn't have to be your last one. Jay's two days of silence weren't the end of the story. If you said something you regret, you can call tomorrow and say so. We did.

It's okay to grieve. You are letting go of a picture, not a child.

Find other parents. Go to a PFLAG meeting. Sit in the back row if you want. Just go.

Talk to a priest or minister you trust. You may be surprised.

Let them tell people in their own time. It's their news to share. Ask before you tell your sister.

Ask questions, and then listen. I spent the first month talking. I should have spent it listening.

Love wins out over fear, if you let it. It just takes some of us a little longer.

Where to Turn

PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) has chapters in cities and towns all over the country, with monthly meetings, a listening ear and booklets for parents. Look for the chapter nearest you in the phone book or at your local library, or ask at a community center. It changed our lives.

Two other pages here that we recommend:

• Coming Out to My Parents: A Letter Collection, letters people wrote to their own parents, shared with permission, with advice from people who've been there. Reading them helped me understand what Francis must have gone through before Christmas night.
• Late Bloomers, by a mother in Columbus, Ohio, who came out at forty-three, for anyone coming out after forty. She writes beautifully about her children, too.