Please don’t feel you have to answer this right away. I have never consciously done anything to hurt you. There’s not much else I can say, except that I’m the same Michael you’ve always known. It has brought me into the family of man, Mama, and I like it here. It has given me people whose passion and kindness and sensitivity have provided a constant source of strength. It has shown me the limitless possibilities of living. Being gay has taught me tolerance, compassion and humility. It’s not judging your neighbor, except when he’s crass or unkind. It’s not fearing your body, or the pleasures that God made for it. Like family and decency and Christianity. I know I can’t tell you what it is to be gay. All I know is this: If you and Papa are responsible for the way I am, then I thank you with all my heart, for it’s the light and the joy of my life. In the long run, I guess I really don’t care. You’re asking yourself: What did we do wrong? How did we let this happen? Which one of us made him that way? I can’t answer that, Mama. Yes, it’s all right for you to like me too. And their message is so simple: Yes, you are a person. Their attitude is neither patronizing nor pitying. They are shop clerks and bankers and little old ladies and people who nod and smile to you when you meet them on the bus.
I know this may be hard for you to believe, but San Francisco is full of men and women, both straight and gay, who don’t consider sexuality in measuring the worth of another human being. I had to find it out on my own, with the help of the city that has become my home. Most of all, though, you can love and be loved, without hating yourself for it.” But no one ever said that to me, Mama. You can succeed and be happy and find peace with friends-all kinds of friends-who don’t give a damn who you go to bed with. You can grow up to be a doctor or a teacher just like anyone else. I wish someone older than me and wiser than the people in Orlando had taken me aside and said, “You’re all right, kid. No, Mama, I wasn’t “recruited.” No seasoned homosexual ever served as my mentor. Revulsion, shame, disbelief-rejection through fear of something I knew, even as a child, was as basic to my nature as the color of my eyes. I know what that feeling is, for I felt it for most of my life. Not for what I am, but for how you must feel at this moment. That, more than anything, made it clear that my responsibility was to tell you the truth, that your own child is homosexual, and that I never needed saving from anything except the cruel and ignorant piety of people like Anita Bryant. I wouldn’t have written, I guess, if you hadn’t told me about your involvement in the Save Our Children campaign. I hope especially that you’ll see this as an act of love on my part, a sign of my continuing need to share my life with you. I hope their doubts are based on parents who loved and trusted them less than mine do. I have friends who think I’m foolish to write this letter.
That would be O.K., if I loved you any less than I do, but you are still my parents and I am still your child. Every time I try to write to you and Papa I realize I’m not saying the things that are in my heart. “DEAR MAMA, I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to write.