57-Year-Old Man Comes Out, 90-Year-Old Father Disowns Him
Jake McPherson came out to his wife and children, told his mother and he thought she had also told his father. In an essay, McPherson recounts the phone call he got from his 90-year-old father earlier in the year, where he had just found out he was gay and had called to disown him.
“It’s about this homosexuality. Your mother and I can’t condone that. You are not to contact us in any way ever again,” he says his father told him when he picked up the phone. “Am I making myself perfectly clear?”
When McPherson said he was, his father hung up the phone.
He says his mother was “horrified” when he came out to her in 2001. She met a man he lived with and despite being “polite but distant” during the visit, he never imagined she hadn’t told his father.
As ‘LGBTQ Nation’ reports, for almost 20 years, he thought his father was just keeping the peace by not bringing up the subject and McPherson did the same.
“At one point my 24-year-old daughter called me in tears and asked if I would ever disown her. She honestly wondered if she could do something that would cause me to stop loving her,” he wrote. “I began to cry too as I made sure that she knew my love for her is and always will be unconditional. I do not know if I can ever forgive my parents for the trauma they have inflicted on my children.”
Still, McPherson ends on a somewhat positive note. His mother now suffers from dementia, but for his birthday she sent him a card. Inside, it simply said, “We love you.”
“There was no preaching. No venom. And, even more incredibly, it was the first time in my life that she used the word ‘love’ without being prompted,” he wrote. “Because of her dementia, her critical self has disappeared and, at the age of 89, it appears she’s turned into the loving mother I never had.”
“I’m going to keep this beautiful card as a reminder that somewhere inside of her, she holds love for me and that, maybe, it’s never too late to find and receive and send out love into the world ― exactly as you truly are.
“Despite everything we’ve been through, that feels like a gift. I think I’ll accept it.”
Read related myGwork articles here:
Read The Emotional Letter Of Regret A Mother Sent Her Gay Son After Rejecting Him
Parenting: What it's like being an LGBTQ+ Parent
A Man Offered ‘Dad Hugs’ At Pittsburg Pride To Kids Rejected By Their Parents
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