My Son Called Me And Shared An Unexpected Secret. What Followed Was The Worst Tragedy Of My Life.

“Mom, I think I’m gay.”

The worst tragedy of my life began with those words, though not for the reasons you might think. When my phone woke me, I saw it was my 23-year-old son, Kyle, calling from the other side of the country at 4 a.m.

As a queer person, I thought I had pretty good gaydar, and I imagined my son and I were close, yet his revelation left me open-mouthed.

I’d never had the slightest inkling Kyle might be gay. He’d always had crushes on girls, starting with little Kathy on his favourite toddler show, ”Barney & Friends.” He’d pined over girls in middle and high school and worried over the phone with me about his relationships with girls in college. Now he was calling me from Seattle, where he’d moved for love after following a woman from New York. Never once had he expressed sexual interest in men.

I tried to respond with sensitivity and support. Yet I could barely muster any affirming words — especially when Kyle revealed that when he was 16, he’d started arranging online encounters with grown men who met him in a local park for blowjobs. While I fought back my horror over how unaware I’d been that my young son had been meeting with adult predators, Kyle told me he was wondering if he might really have been gay — or maybe bi — all his life.

I could not have been more shocked, or so I thought, until the other reason he’d called became clear.

“I think maybe I’ve turned to drugs because I’ve been afraid to admit I’m gay,” he said.

I soon realised Kyle was calling for help. He’d been arrested for pot and “party drugs,” such as mushrooms and ecstasy, in high school and college, but had seemed to be doing well the prior two years. He now confessed he’d “tried” crack cocaine and become so uncontrollably addicted he’d spent all his student loan money on the drug and was holed up alone in his apartment, high out of his mind after trading away his PlayStation to get more. He was calling because he was afraid he was about to start trading away his roommates’ electronics too.

Questions about his sexuality fell by the wayside. I suspected he’d only told me about his attraction to men because that felt easier than announcing his addiction to crack.

When I found a rehab that would take him, I cried with relief, thinking all of our problems would now be solved. Instead his fellow rehab residents told Kyle about the ultimate high, heroin, which Kyle later told me he “knew immediately” he’d have to try. A friend from long-term rehab helped him shoot up for the first time a year later, and he spent the remainder of his too-short life in and out of rehabs and halfway houses. He died tragically of an overdose of heroin and meth when he was 26.

Kyle was a poet who wrote love sonnets. He was a thoughtful gift-giver who bought the best presents. He earned the highest score of any student in his high school on that year’s SATs. He did children’s theatre and stand-up comedy. He loved to play games and beat me at Scrabble nearly every time. He was an extreme romantic who once filled a car with balloons for a girl’s birthday. Yet as Kyle stepped into his role as a young man, he engaged in ever more reckless behaviours.

Kyle as a camp counsellor when he was 18. He and his girlfriend wore one another's clothes for a camp talent show. — Kyle as a camp counsellor when he was 18. He and his girlfriend wore one another’s clothes for a camp talent show.

He told me he did LSD 45 times in high school. When he got his driver’s license, he drove his car 100 miles an hour up and off a hilly road in order to “catch air,” slamming himself and his best friend into a tree. (Both boys miraculously walked away unharmed, no doubt increasing their belief in their own invincibility.)

Kyle was not born a risk taker; he was shy and timid as a toddler. Yet as he grew up, he repeatedly risked his safety to prove how tough he was. A 2010 study, “Gender Disparities in Injury Mortality: Consistent, Persistent, and Larger Than You’d Think,” explains boys and men are two to three times more likely than girls and women to die violently and suddenly by injury, accident, homicide, suicide and drug overdose.

Additionally, a research overview compiled by a nonprofit think tank in 2016 found bisexuals are more likely to have mental health issues, attempt and commit suicide, suffer from major depression, and have problems with binge-drinking than either gay or straight people.

Bi people may have the most trouble with self-acceptance and often are the most lacking in community, since they may feel rejected by both the gay and straight communities. Nearly three-quarters of gay and lesbian people are “out” to family and friends, but fewer than a third of bisexual people are, leaving them isolated and unsupported.

Kyle was a brilliant, sensitive young man, yet what he wanted more than anything was to fit in as one of the guys, which led him to engage in ever-more-troubling behaviours. Indeed, he seemed more concerned with impressing people with his machismo than many of his peers. I now wonder if this was at least partly because of his shame over his sexuality; was he overcompensating to make sure no one suspected?

Despite all his outrageous, attention-seeking behaviour, my son guarded his one secret closely. While publicly dating girls in high school, he was having multiple secret, sexual encounters with grown men, encounters I consider child abuse, but which may have been the only way my son knew to explore his sexuality without anyone finding out.

Kyle’s secrecy about his sexuality is even more puzzling because I am queer. I had a girlfriend in high school, then was married to a man for 20 years and am now married to a woman. Kyle’s sister is also queer, an identity Kyle encouraged her to embrace with pride. Our family is about as accepting as a family can be, which made it all the more shocking when Kyle came out to me.

Still, he reminded me during that phone call that I’d idiotically told him and his sister I didn’t believe men could be bisexual, which Kyle explained was why he’d never discussed his sexuality with me. He feared I’d insist he was gay, which he didn’t really think he was. (He wound up concluding that night that he was in fact bi, not gay, though he found “bi” harder to say.)

My unknowing rejection of my son’s identity is a mistake I have the rest of my life to regret. But a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests my disbelief is sadly common. The article begins, “There has long been skepticism among both scientists and laypersons that male bisexual orientation exists. Skeptics have claimed men who self-identify as bisexual are actually homosexual or heterosexual. (The existence of female bisexuality has been less controversial.)”

Kyle in his last rehab, less than a year before he died.

Kyle needed mental health support for the shame society made him feel about being bisexual as much as he did for his addiction, but we only focused on what seemed like the more life-threatening problem, his substance-use disorder. Further, many therapies in rehab are done in groups, and Kyle never felt comfortable discussing his sexuality in those hyper-masculine, gender-segregated rooms.

We tried to get Kyle to talk further about this, but he resisted, insisting he was “mostly straight.” He appreciated that I revised my opinion about whether men could be bi, and I told him repeatedly I believed he could have a happy life as either a straight or gay man. (I didn’t realise until I was writing this that even in trying to encourage him, I avoided the word bisexual.)

The think-tank research I referenced earlier shows both gay and straight people have a bias against bisexual people, for whom “stigma, discrimination, and invisibility … create serious negative outcomes.”

Bias against bisexual men is so bad, only 12% tell those closest to them they are bi. Bisexual youth are more likely to be bullied, to smoke, to drink, to do drugs, to feel hopeless, to be homeless, to have eating disorders, and to be the victims of violence and sexual assault than either gay or straight youth. Bisexual adults are more likely to suffer from mood disorders and poor health, to have a substance-abuse disorder, to be rejected by their families, and to suffer from depression in their older years than either gay or straight adults.

Sharing what Kyle kept as his deepest secret feels on the one hand like a betrayal of how he wanted to be perceived. But the more I’ve learned about the hardships faced by bisexual men, especially, the more I’ve come to believe Kyle’s shame around this facet of himself may have been a factor in his early death. My son may have been taught by our culture to feel ashamed of who he was, but in sharing his story, I am saying I will not be ashamed of this part of him anymore.

I’ll never know how much Kyle’s feelings about his sexuality contributed to his drug addiction, risk-seeking behaviours or early death by overdose. I wish I could have gotten him to talk to a therapist about his sexuality, and the potentially traumatising encounters he had with grown men when he was a kid, but I don’t think he ever did. (He was an adult in therapy; I didn’t have much input.)

I can never undo the damage I did by telling him I didn’t believe bisexual men existed. But I hope other parents reading this will think twice about the messages even supposedly accepting families might be sending their children. I wish I could go back and tell my son instead that he could live a happy, healthy life as a bisexual man. I pray we can all work together to build a world where that is true.

Lanette Sweeney’s collection, “What I Should Have Said: A Poetry Memoir about Losing a Child to Addiction,” was published by Finishing Line Press in 2021. The book includes poems by her late son and is available wherever books are sold; ask your local bookstore to order you a copy. Sweeney lives with her wife and their four, shin-high pets in Western Massachusetts.