LGBT

I came out to my family first at 16 or 17. I remember my sister’s reaction: “Yeah, we kinda knew.”

But I was lucky in that both my parents were college educated and non religious. My mother also had a very out uncle who lived with a man for over 20 years. So it was nothing new.

At that time my mother was also diagnosed with cancer and had to make monthly visits to her oncologist in San Francisco. Maybe it was facing her own mortality and the brevity of life that prompted her to take me with her on a few occasions. Or maybe she was just a really cool woman. She would drop me off on Polk Street and say “meet me back here in three hours, we’ll do lunch”. But we rarely talked about my orientation. The cancer finally took her 18 years later in '88.

My father and I rarely talked about anything.