The Outcomes Project

Terry, now 37, grew up in Michigan, in a small town of a few thousand people called Caro. As Terry describes it, being gay in this isolated and conservative enclave was a terrifying experience. “Gender was policed with violence,” Terry recalls. “There was one kid that I had sort of a secret relationship with on and off for years… he was beaten. Like, weekly. Just for being effeminate.”

Terry even recalls guilt at the way he treated his own friend. “I can honestly say that I didn’t treat him much better than other people, in that I just pretended that I didn’t know him.” Terry speaks a lot about the façades he had to build, even as he knew the truth about himself — “so, so many layers of dishonesty… pathological dishonesty, really.” He dated women in high school and college, even though he knew he was gay. “The most toxic part about it [is] that you end up involving other people in that kind of dishonesty.”

To hear Terry describe it, he lived in a different world from his more conservative family, and wouldn’t dare tell them about his sexuality. “I’m just very different, I mean, from my family… I have a brother in the Michigan Militia, and there’s just deep, kind of rabid conservatism.”

“My parents didn’t graduate from high school,” he recalls. “My mom had me when she was much older. They had a very, like, 50s mindset… very rural, conservative.” As a result of this disconnect, he says he could never feel very close to them; the difference led to distance, and the gulf grew wider.

The moment he graduated high school, Terry was determined to move away; living in the closet in his hometown was suffocating him. “I couldn’t even wait the summer before college,” he says. “I subleased a place in Ann Arbor, and it was such a world of difference.” At college he relished the diversity and the chance to really grow into himself. “Ann Arbor was such a liberal place, the ideas — and I was an English major so all the lit theory, feminism… as soon as I got there everything became a lot clearer.”

He also admits that the things he learned in college made him less generous in his perceptions of his family. “That was my fault too, just the egotism of fear, [the notion] that ‘I’ve got this figured out,’” he recalls thinking. “I reduced my parents’ belief systems to kind of distance myself from having to really engage.”

The emotional distance from his family grew deeper; although he still spoke to his parents, he avoided ever mentioning aspects of his private life. Cordoning off his sexuality and keeping “the secret” is, he says, what helped him keep control in situations that might have challenged their tense stalemate.

“Our relationship got frozen in time, and then I bailed, and went on to have the rest of my life.”

At one point, during Terry’s ten-year relationship with another man, he recalls the extreme expressions of denial he had to adopt to avoid coming out to his parents. “There was this stupid conversation we had about my roommate, who’s clearly not my roommate,” he remembers. It felt wrong, but he continued with the pretense. “It was really a joke that we were even going though the motions of that conversation.

When Terry’s dad died a few years later, his mom decided to visit him in Texas, where he had moved. Terry was 31; his relationship with his boyfriend was falling apart, and his mother wanted to come visit him in Texas. He finally felt compelled to tell her the truth. It was the day before she would step on an airplane for Austin, and he told her the situation she was about to fly into.

But like many parents, she’d already had some inkling.

“Initially her reaction was like, ‘So what? I already knew…’ I think she experienced grief and shame and responsibility; there were certain things where she tried to explain it in her own mind with a really limited toolkit.” But in the end, he concluded that his mother’s reaction was not the one he imagined and feared when he first left home. He realized his image of her, too, had been frozen in time.

“My mom’s reaction changed a lot. Ultimately it was a lot more sophisticated and mature than I thought it would be.

Soon after this disclosure, Terry’s mother was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s Disease; Terry and his sister shared responsibility for her care. As she approached the end, Terry and his mom were able to share emotional intimacies that would have been impossible had he not decided to come out of the closet and trust her ability to accept his sexuality.

Able to share his heartbreak over the disintegration of his ten-year relationship, he was for the first time able to speak frankly about his emotional life life with the mother who raised him. He also learned things about his mother that helped him feel compassion for her too.

“My father and her had really, kind of a tempestuous relationship. She was 50s woman, my father was the only man that she had ever done anything with sexually.

“She made a joke about it,” he remembers. “Sucks for you to be in love — or want to be in love — with men, because they’re kind of a drag.” Coming to this point so late was bittersweet; Terry found a tenderness and an openness with his mother, but it took a lifetime to get there.

“Maybe I underestimated them,” he sighs. “In retrospect, I feel like I did. I just assumed that they, because of where they came from and what they experienced would never get it or never be able to accept it, so I just kinda moved on with my life.

“There was a lost opportunity, I think, for us to grow together as people.”