Love Makes A Family – Part IX - The Big Risk

“Coming out” is a nerve wracking process. At least it was for me in the 70’s. It seems like it should be less traumatic now, in the post-Will-and-Grace era. People today may hate you for being gay, but no one can deny your existence anymore. Of course I realize that it can still be traumatic. Because gay people are more visible in our society today, when teenagers start to realize that what they are going through is not just a phase of experimentation, they are coming out much younger than in days of yore. This has created a tragic subculture in our county, the homeless gay child.

Just one generation ago, no-one in their right mind came out of the closet until they were financially independent. This was partly a function of the fact that there were no gay role models, no “out” gays in positions of power, and no organized support groups. So, you only found out that there were more of you out there when you were in college or beyond and by that time you could support yourself and had a network of gay contacts. Today’s gay teenagers have very few options if their family rejects them.
Today almost every television show has gay characters and there are “out” gays in just about every job, in every company in America. Of course, there are still those bastions of manliness and testosterone where you don’t ever reveal your sexual preference, if it is anything but macho, until after retirement; professional sports for instance.

For the most part, this only holds true for men’s sports. Women in sports were the pioneers in this area. Of course, no one in the locker room at Wimbledon was going to pick a fight with Billie Jean King or Martina Navratilova. But professional male athletes would not survive if they were to come out during their careers. Several NFL and MLB players have come out after long illustrious careers and to a man have said there was no way in hell they even considered coming out while still playing.

As a health care worker, you can have your private life outside of the walls of the workplace, but there is no need for any patient to ever have to hear anything about your private life. It’s just not necessary. Here again we come up against one of those rules of the therapeutic relationship. It’s the patient who is in treatment. It is the patient who should be sharing information and getting the feedback. You are not there to tell your story. You are there to listen and assist them, period.

By the age of 35 I had come out to a lot of folks. Everyone at UCLA knew about Mike and me, except the patients. I have had so many different reactions from people hearing this information for the first time, but honestly, the majority of the people with whom I shared my lifestyle were either not surprised (they wondered why it took me so long to tell them) or they just took a pause and said, “So what? You are still you. You just like guys. I get it.”

I can’t even imagine what it was like for my Uncle Rudy. My uncle Rudy was the Dean of Music at North Texas University in Denton. He was so shunned by my family that I did not even know he existed until I was 27 years old and had been out of the closet for five years myself. When I came out to my great aunt Alta, by then pushing 80 herself, she told my about him. Not only was he an accomplished musician, he was an avid horticulturist and was on the board of the American Iris Society.

Here was this very accomplished, intelligent, well rounded, man of letters, but because he was gay, he was invisible to his family. He got where he got on his own without any support from his family. When I brought this up to my parents they had to really rack their brains to remember how this estrangement took place. They remembered him but confessed they hadn’t thought about him in years and just thought of him as a loner. When I asked why they had never told me about him they didn’t really know; it just never came up.

My aunts and uncles also were foggy about his story. Aunt Alta was the only one who seemed to know anything about him. She said that the distance was more of a mutual, unspoken agreement and that Uncle Rudy preferred it that way; he was very independent. I felt a little better knowing that he chose his path. But still, it made a huge impression on me that the family was so comfortable with this arrangement that I never even heard his name mentioned until I was 27. I couldn’t imagine that kind of separate life from the family that I cherished so much.

Obviously things have changed since 1940. All of my nieces and nephews know they have a couple of gay uncles. They know we live together and love each other. They know we love them and are soft touches for whatever their hearts desire. That goes double for the grandkids. We are putty in their hands. But that’s another story which I will gladly share in a later installment.

Aunt Alta was the wild sister to my Mammaw (straight-laced as they come with a heart as big as all outdoors) and my other great aunt Viola (the intellectual). My Aunt Alta was hilarious, vibrant, loud, mischievous and an alcoholic. She spent some time paying her dues at Big Spring. You Texans know what that means. For those of you in Copenhagen, I will just say, it’s a place with locked doors where you go to get your head together.

Prohibition did not stop Aunt Alta. She knew where all the speakeasies were and she never missed a Saturday night out dancing. Guess who her running partner was? That’s right, Uncle Rudolf, the pretty boy who could dance till the bar closed and then dance some more. Uncle Rudy loved music and he loved the night life. He loved life in general and he did not care who thought he was a little off because he wasn’t into hunting and gathering. He became a scholar, and then a teacher, and then a professor, and then a Dean, and then an Emeritus Alumni, and so on. Uncle Rudy was not a drinker at all. But like most gay people (stereotyping in full effect here) he gravitated toward the party people. It was never a family secret that Aunt Alta in her younger days loved to party.

My point here is how far we’ve come in our acceptance level of alternate lifestyles in just two generations. My coming out to my parents was as strange as it was difficult. I was in my final year at University of Houston. It was 1971 and that was the year that the National Association of Psychologists and Psychiatrists voted to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Mental Health Professionals use this manual when working with patients in order to better understand their illness and potential treatment. The book is typically considered the ‘bible’ for any professional who makes psychiatric diagnoses in the United States and many other countries. So, it was a big deal that a national association of doctors who use it were recommending it be abridged in this fashion.

There was a news item in the Houston Chronicle reporting this suggestion by the mental health community that perhaps homosexuality was not a disease and I had cut it out and tucked it into my suitcase when I was packing for my trip home to see the parental units during the holiday break. We had a very nice visit and just before I walked out of their house to drive back to Houston, I left that article on the night stand in my bedroom. I thought it was a good way to get them thinking about the subject. At least that’s what I told myself. It was a cowardly move on my part. It had an almost immediate effect.

I stopped along the way back to Houston to visit friends from high school and college. I spent several days in Lubbock and a couple of days in Dallas. When I got back to Houston there were two letters in my mail box; one from Mom and one from Dad. One expressing disgust and claiming nausea, the other was just a newsy letter that ended with the very telling conclusion, “I hope you and your friends have a happy and prosperous New Year”. If you are thinking it was my Dad that was disgusted and nauseous, you would be dead wrong.

My mother was the one that totally freaked. The next time I visited, at spring break, she cried me a river. She literally got down on her knees, tears streaming down her face and invited me to join her in prayer, begging for forgiveness and that I would change. After going through that I was wondering how dad was going to behave, even with the positive tongue in cheek comment he’d made in his letter to me.

My Dad had the diametrically opposite reaction from my Mom. He had done his homework. He accepted me and loved me and told me stories about the Air Force and how he had come to terms with it through a friend in the service that was leading a double life. His stories held me captive because I was so stunned he was sharing this type of information.

It’s that old adage about how stupid your parents are when you are going through your teens and then, miraculously they become smarter and smarter the older you get. I was so blown away by how worldly and wise my Dad seemed at that moment. He knew someone in the service who was on the down low and he didn’t rat them out or try to kill them. He kept their secret, remained their friend and went about his business of being a belly gunner during WWII. He just wanted me to be happy and to know that he didn’t love me less because of who I loved.

I had a really close friend in college, a fraternity brother in fact, who didn’t take the news well at all. He told me I was making a terrible mistake and that I needed to get myself into therapy or I was going to die lonely and alone. People just have varying degrees of understanding and he just wasn’t there yet. Maybe a month later I introduced him to my very first boyfriend, ostensibly to reassure him that I was not going to be alone. It wasn’t exactly the right move at the time, but at least it let him know I wasn’t going back into the closet. We went through a period of estrangement, but eventually the circle turned and we became best friends again We never lost touch and in fact we are as close now as we ever were when we saw each other every day.

Now, the most important "coming out" of my life was looming. I was going to have to deal a double barrel revelation to Cari and Anna. “Hey girls, I have a spouse, but guess what…..?”

I was leaving UCLA and would be spending every week-end visiting them until they became emancipated, or some alternative disposition could be worked out. Mike wanted to get involved and was chomping at the bit to meet them. We had gotten the okay from Pat and Suzy for both of us to visit. Mike had taken the necessary classes to become a childcare worker.

Of course, we had told Pat and Suzy we were already exploring if there were any possibilities we could get custody of them. We hadn’t told the girls anything because we didn’t want to dangle something in front of them that had a chance of falling apart. We had jumped through lots of hoops just get to visit them and didn’t expect the rest of the process to be easy. We had nixed the idea of trying to adopt them directly because it would take years and it would be very expensive due to legal fees.

The quickest way we could get them out of the group home and out of the system was to get a foster care license. This was not going to be easy because we lived in an apartment and, oh yeah, we were two men. So, we needed to buy a house and make it a safe, stable home and somehow convince the department of child protective services that we could be good parents.

Luckily, it was a buyers market in California in 1986. Prices were down. I had an annuity at UCLA I could cash in and Mike had some money in a savings account which added up to just enough for a pretty good down payment.

Fortunately we found a rental fixer upper for sale. It needed a lot of work, but it fit our budget and we qualified for the loan. We got it and went to work. The social worker from L.A. County was now taking us seriously and actually encouraged us to do a good job on the renovation. We took this as a sign that they were not going to throw out our application. We became very hopeful. Some time during the renovation we got word from the social workers from both counties that our application for a foster care license was likely to be approved. Both counties vowed that they would not throw any roadblocks in our way.

It was time to have “the talk” with the girls. We had a lot to share with them and their reaction to it was paramount. Mike and I went to SB together that Saturday and I left him sitting on a blanket in the grass by the east beach volleyball courts while I went to pick up the girls. We had picked this Saturday because none of the other girls in the group home were going to be available to go on an outing, so it would just be me with Cari and Anna.

So, I went to the group home and got the girls, and we drove back to the beach and I laid down a blanket just about 10 feet from where Mike was sitting. The plan was for him to observe and listen. If the conversation went as I expected, which was that the girls would not care at all that I was a homo, then I would give Mike a sign, or say loudly, “ Heeeeeeere’s Mikey!!”. Just kidding. Actually, I wanted him to be able to have a sign for me that would let me know he had seen us interact and he was still all in.

I had told Cari and Anna on the way to the beach that I needed to have a talk with them. That did not set off alarms for them at all because they just came out of an environment where someone always wants to have a talk. I knew they were already very attached to me, but I wanted to make it okay for them to reconsider. I gave a long preamble about how I was telling them something very important and they had the right to react however felt right and to only consider their own feelings and no one else’s, meaning mine.

When I told them I was gay, to my surprise, while they seemed slightly shocked, there was also some relief in their faces. It had never occurred to me that they would be “relieved” that I was gay. But it makes a lot of sense. If they had ever had unspoken fears, or worse, desires regarding sexual feelings about me, they were now totally irrelevant. I then looked over at Mike and waited for his signal. He was smiling ear to ear and gave me the thumbs up, and when the girls asked me if I had a boyfriend, I said, “Yes, and there he is”.

I sat back and watched as the three of them laughed and talked and hugged. They were getting acquainted with such ease. It was really remarkable. Any worries I had about them not hitting it off were laid to rest immediately. They were like three old friends chatting it up. But then that’s Mike’s way. He is so gregarious and such a good listener that people just like talking with him. He knows all our neighbors seven houses down on both sides of the street by their first names! I know like three.

After an hour or so of Q and A Mike and I told the girls we had one more thing, a question we needed to ask them. “Would you be interested in having us work to get custody of you?” On the drive up to Santa Barbara that morning we had looked at each other and thought, what if they say thanks, but no thanks. Well, at least we would have our first home. But for me, it would have been a very empty place if that happened.

Their reaction was explosive. They didn’t even ask if we were kidding or were we sure. Anna screamed and almost tackled Michael. Cari broke out into tears and crawled across the blanket and gave me a long hug. They both cried and hugged us repeatedly and revealed that they had been talking for a long time about what it would be like to live with me. It had been a fantasy for a long time. And now that they knew that I had a partner and that we wanted to make a family with them, they were overwhelmed. They said that for the first time in a very long time they felt that maybe their luck and their lives were about to change.

Love Makes A Family – Part VI

In a discharge planning conference, Cari’s UCLA therapist, social worker, and the Santa Barbara county social worker all agreed that unit staff should keep in phone contact with her and Anna. They also recommended someone on the staff make supervised visits every other week, if possible, as part of a transition that was going to be difficult at best. It was a little bit of a diversion from most discharge plans.

Usually, no post-discharge contact between staff and patients is allowed for several months, if ever. It would be counterproductive to have the kid still hooked into their relationship with staff when they needed to focus on their relationships outside the hospital. But usually, the discharged adolescent is going home to a family and friends that are anxious for them to return. It is not unusual for adult patients to be discharged to a halfway house, but it was very rare for adolescent patient’s to be discharged directly to a group home.

I was on board with the discharge plan, because I had made the promise to Cari that I would never lie to her, and in the course of her treatment when she would ask what would happen after she left the hospital, I told her I would just be a phone call away. Ex-patients had always been allowed to call the pay phone on the ward and staff was allowed to talk with them for a predetermined time allotment.

Cari and Anna had both been avoiding thinking about leaving because they thought they would be there for several more months. That was the original plan. Now everything had changed. In those last two weeks as in-patients a lot of time went into reassuring them that support would be available and that they were not being thrown out and forgotten; a feeling that they had experienced repeatedly.

Meanwhile, at home I had been talking to Mike in generalizations about the situation at work. Because of patient confidentiality I couldn’t say anything really specific or use their names, but he knew I was frustrated and angry about the two sisters and how their family had abandoned them. He had once again said to me, “It’s a shame we can’t help them.” He understood that I had to follow the discharge plan and that any deviation from it could be bad for them and also I had to protect myself. I did not want to lose my job.

Except for that year during transition from Dallas to LA, when I worked as a waiter, I had been doing this work for 9 years. I loved the work because I learned so much about people and behavior, and myself. When I started at Timberlawn I was so nervous and excited. I couldn’t wait to get the education and training they offered to get the privilege to work with the in-patients, and I thrived in that environment.

In the nursing meetings and the treatment team meetings there were epiphanies on an almost daily basis, and many times those revelations were occurring inside me. When you work in psych, you have to hold up the mirror to your own life and your own childhood. You begin to look back at your relationship with your parents. You start to recognize the developmental markers in your own life and how your family played its part in making you who you become.

There are several jokes about newbies working in psych over-identifying with sets of symptoms and experiencing self image crises. Usually, you hear these after you yourself start to wonder, “Am I passive-aggressive…stuck in the anal/oral/fill-in-the-blank phase of development…..being controlling…..manipulating….being too defensive….rationalizing….etc”. The truth is, most healthy people can identify some behavior in themselves that is mentioned as a component of a psychiatric diagnosis. But just because you can check one on the list doesn’t mean you have that disease.

Honestly, what I learned about myself was that my psyche was quite well defended. A little too well defended for my liking. I found that I wanted to change some things that I learned about myself. I wanted to learn to be more direct and not let my behavior, or situations that I could manipulate deliver messages for me. I wanted to be more honest in my relationships and less evasive. I needed to learn to accept my shortcomings and stop trying to compensate for them. These are only a few items on my “work list” that caused me a lot of angst as a teenager, and I still work on them to this day.

By working on these things in myself, I found I was able to be a more effective Mental Health Worker. I longed to be able to build therapeutic relationships and inspire kids to strive towards becoming strong, confident individuals. I wanted to become as good at it as Karen Gossett.

I told you about Roberta, my mentor at UCLA. At Timberlawn it was Karen. She was the charge nurse on the adolescent girls unit at Timberlawn, and she was amazing. She had long, straight, mahogany brown hair to the middle of her back and dark blue, feline like eyes. Besides having a brilliant mind and Roberta-like empathy, she had that sparkle that you associate with someone that you know will be a star in whatever they decide to pursue. She had a laugh that just made you happy. When you told Karen about a problem, her body language said, “Let me help”. You would immediately be disarmed when she would engulf you with those eyes and without ever touching you, you felt the warm embrace of her compassion.

We had this sweet, little wisp of a girl on the unit named Rebecca, who was admitted for “hysterical conversion reaction”. This is a syndrome where a person develops a physical symptom or illness as a response to inner psychological turmoil. The physical symptom appears real and affects the patient in a real way, but there is no physiological reason for it. Simplistically put, the patient cannot understand or talk about their inner turmoil, so they develop the secondary “psychosomatic” condition as something real that can be seen and felt and takes the focus off of the inner pain.

This sweet, unassuming little 14 year old girl appeared to have a deformed right ankle and foot. It looked like her right ankle made a left turn at the end of her leg. She walked, with a limp, on the outside edge of her right foot. Every pair of shoes she had was almost worn through on the right side of the right shoe. She walked slowly; dragging her turned under foot, and never grimaced or indicated she was in pain.

The parents, believing she had some kind of late onset polio, had thought Rebecca would need orthopedic surgery. They took her to an orthopedic surgeon who examined her ankle and couldn’t detect any anomaly in her bone or tissue structure. X-rays of her ankle showed that, except for the posture, it appeared to be normal. When confronted with the normal x-rays, Rebecca would just shrug and insist that she was unable to straighten out her ankle and even claimed it was excruciating when she tried. She had been walking this way for two years when she came to Timberlawn. Her orthopedic physician told her parents that she would do permanent damage if something was not done to correct her “posture”.

She was a very smart kid, but she was also very guarded. She didn’t give up information very easily. Luckily, Karen took a special interest in her and began to spend time talking with her when they both had free time; building the trust, getting her to let go of all the scary secrets that held the pieces of the puzzle that made up Rebecca’s defense system.

I was there, in the day room that afternoon, playing backgammon with one of the girls, when Karen and Rebecca were having one of their impromptu talks. There were a couple of other kids in there also, just lounging and reading. I think we all sort of became aware at the same time that both Rebecca and Karen were sniffling softly and had tears slowly tracking down their cheeks and falling on the plastic sofa cushions. We all tried not to stare, to let them have what privacy they could, with all of us sitting there listening and watching, afraid to move in fear we’d disturb them.

What Karen had gotten Rebecca to come to terms with was a profound memory she had kept locked away, her twisted foot holding the door to that memory shut tight. Karen had convinced her that although her ankle deformity was born in her unconscious, she could find the root cause through trust and inner strength, if she really wanted to get better; and Karen pledged that she would be there for her to help her deal with facing the real cause. Once Rebecca made the commitment to trust Karen, it all streamed out of her tightly cinched up memory. She had wanted to appear less attractive; she wanted to be a pathetic “cripple” so her father would stop molesting her.

None of us in the day room that day had heard all the details. We just saw Karen stand up, wipe her eyes, walk across the day room, turn around and extend her arms toward Rebecca. Rebecca, now sobbing loudly, stood up and took one step on her tucked under right ankle, stopped, straightened out her ankle and walked straight into Karen’s loving hug. I felt I had witnessed a miracle, and so did the other people who witnessed it. Rebecca had just taken a giant life changing step toward insuring her safety and her own mental health. It changed my life as well.

These types of very successful interventions and “miracle” cures are few and far between. But it only took one, and I was hooked. I admit it. Whenever I was able to see a kid start to open up and reach for the resources in their life that would take them toward health, I got a lot of secondary gain out of it. It made me feel better than any drug. I know that all my co-workers had the same need and got the same rush when one of their patient’s would hit one out of the park in therapy. It becomes so much a part of how you see yourself that you can’t imagine doing anything else.

With Cari, I had laid the foundation, it was starting to happen and now all the rules had changed. We were working on plan B. I hadn’t gotten to have my “Rebecca and Karen” moment with Cari yet, and I desperately wanted it; probably as much as I knew she wanted it.

The day finally came when the girls were to be discharged and sent to a group home in Goleta, the small town adjacent to Santa Barbara. The girls had said their goodbyes to all the staff and to all their friends on the unit. Cari and I had been having daily discussions about how the transition was going to work, with me reassuring her not to panic and her being unsure, but trying to be brave. We had a couple of tearful sessions in the days leading up to this day, pledging to each other that we weren’t going to cry in front of everyone and make a spectacle on discharge day.

A social worker from the county was there to drive them to their new “home”. They walked down the long hall to the door and when they turned to wave one last goodbye, Cari turned and ran back to embrace me and began to sob uncontrollably. In my ear, through gulps of air and tears, she whispered, “I can’t lose you. Please don’t forget about me.” I pushed her away and held her at arms length and made rock solid eye contact with her. “Trust me”, was all I said. She stood up straight and stared at me for a second, wiped her eyes, gave me one more hug, and marched out the door.