Way Out Parenting: Gay Idioms You’ll Need to Teach Your Straight Children—Part II

In Part I, we learned that your straight children are second language learners when it comes to the language of your gay heritage, and we learned how hard it is to master the idioms of a second language.

In this part, we’ll look at another obstacle your children face—and that is developmental readiness.

Remember that understanding idioms requires an ability to think abstractly. Even some adults who have achieved high office struggle with abstract thinking their whole lives. So you can imagine the challenge for young children who have not reached Piaget’s formal operations stage of development. Let’s take a look at a gay idiom guaranteed to confound your concrete thinkers.

Idiom • Come out of the closet

Child-friendly definition • to tell people you are gay

Synonym • friend of Dorothy

Sample sentence • “Mommy and Mama had to stop hiding and come out of the closet when you were born.”

Helpful Hints • Nothing you say is going to help your young child distinguish between the metaphorical gay closet of your past and the closet in their bedroom.

To you as a gay person, the closet represents a confining but safe haven from all the forces that want to vilify and persecute you. To your straight child at the concrete operational stage, the closet is a fearsome, dark place inhabited by monsters and the occasional witch. And the idea that their beloved mommy or daddy actually came out of a closet is absolutely terrifying. The fact that your children are still concrete thinkers, doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of basic deductive reasoning, and their thinking will go like this: “Monsters live in closets. Daddy came out of a closet. Therefore, Daddy is a monster, too.”

Assure your child that you are not a monster, and explain that some closets are in fact safe hiding places that protect us from invisible monsters that lurk in the open. If your child looks at you funny or says, “I don’t understand,” conduct a simulation using the steps below:

1. Locate a closet big enough to accommodate you and your child.

2. Step inside the closet with your child and close the door.

3. Tell your child: “We are hiding. There is a monster outside who does not like gay people. I want to come out of the closet but I cannot come out until I am strong enough to slay the evil anti-gay monster.” (Note: Under no circumstances leave your child alone in the closet. Hold your child’s hand at all times, and end the simulation immediately if you observe any symptoms of panic or agoraphobia. These include sudden asthma attacks, heavy breathing, clammy palms, and moaning.)

Most parents find this simulation to be an effectivea teaching strategy. Some report, however, that their children have subsequently gone into the closet fearing those invisible monsters lurking in the open.