Coming Around: Parenting Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Kids (16 page)

Dr. Cecily Knight, a longtime researcher of children’s social-emotional development, says that resiliency has three components: emotional competence, social competence and futures-orientation.
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Emotional competence is having good self-esteem, being autonomous and having a sense of humor. People with emotional competence also believe that they are in control, rather than believing that they are victims to forces outside of themselves—having an internal locus
of control rather than an external locus of control. People who are socially competent have good communication skills, empathy and a benevolent stance toward others. This helps them maintain supportive relationships that serve to insulate them from negative influences. Futures-oriented individuals are optimistic, spiritually grounded, critical thinkers, flexible, adaptive and proactive. In essence, they are good problem-solvers. They use these skills to set goals and move toward goal completion. This gives their lives meaning and purpose.

Resiliency is associated with connectedness to school and family. When children feel safe in a setting and when they feel supported at school and at home they are less likely to suffer from depression and less likely to commit suicide.
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In fact, family and school connectedness may reduce the risk of teen pregnancy.
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Researchers have begun to study how having the quality of resiliency affects LGBTQs as they function, meet obstacles and mature. They have found that resilient LGBTQs do a number of things better than their less resilient counterparts:

       
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Resilient LGBTQs make friends with other sexual minorities.
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Gay youths need a range of relationships to help them successfully manage stigmatization, oppression and bullying. Those who have gay-affirming family and friends fare better than those who have family and friends who reject them because of their sexual orientations. A lack of family support is associated with higher rates of depression and attempted suicide. It is not enough for family to be supportive about other aspects of an LGBTQ’s personality. LGBTQs need support specifically related to LGBTQ issues if they are to manage sexual minority stressors. The opportunity to develop friendships with gay peers is important for all gay youths but especially for those who don’t get support at home or from heterosexual friends.

       
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Resilient LGBTQs cope with mental health issues before they multiply.
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Adversity experienced in adolescence, such as discrimination, increases the risk of depression, anxiety, substance use and participation in unsafe sexual behavior in later life. When these problems co-occur, they have a synergistic effect on one another. The greater the number
of psychosocial problems, the more likely gay men are to engage in unsafe sex and the more likely they are to be infected with HIV.

       
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Resilient homeless LGBTQs display certain survival skills.
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°  They avoid fights and conflicts with police.

                 
°  They are able to identify safe locations, places to sleep and places to go in bad weather.

                 
°  They are able to get around, get the things they need and find food without having money.

                 
°  When they need money, they find a way to get some.

                 
°  They are able to deal with agencies and services.

                 
°  They identify and avoid people who might steal from them.

                 
°  They identify and keep in touch with people who will look out for them and people from whom they can learn.

                  
Researchers found that, unfortunately, after six months on the street, these resilient behaviors begin to degrade. More work is needed to explore how survival strategies can be supported, maintained and perhaps taught to homeless children.

       
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Resilient LGBTQs are psychologically prepared to come out.
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Coming out is consistently associated with mental health benefits, but adolescents who come out need to be ready and need to have supports in place. Suicide attempts are highest among gay adolescents within the first year of coming out. For each year’s delay in homosexual self-labeling, the odds of a suicide attempt decrease by 80 percent. This tells us that early adolescents may have a harder time coping with stigma, discrimination and rejection than older adolescents and adults. If your child has come to a resolution about his or her sexuality during early adolescence, you should be vigilant for how important people react to his or her coming out. A positive reaction from parents goes a long way.

                  
Peer reactions matter as well. When I was coming out, a wise gay friend told me that my discovery that I was gay was a gift to myself and that I could enjoy that gift, privately, for
as long as I needed or wanted before sharing it with anyone else. Ultimately, coming out is a healthy choice, but one has to be psychologically prepared to manage reactions. If your child is struggling with negative feelings about being gay, it may be best to delay coming out to some or all people until self-esteem is stable.

       
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Resilient religious LGBTQs find supportive spiritual homes.
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Gays who belong to religions that view homosexuality as sinful tend to suffer more psychological distress than those who belong to gay-affirming religions. In addition, a gay-friendly environment encourages LGBTQs to come out of the closet and benefit from the support a religious community has to offer. For those whose childhood faiths condemned sexual orientation, being a part of an accepting faith community can be tremendously healing.

The goal of the oppressor is to extinguish hope. Once hope is snuffed out, it is easy to get people to submit to whatever treatment is given them. Once hope is gone, there is no reason to set goals or plan a future, because there is no future. Be sure that your child never loses sight of the good things that life has to offer. Encourage him or her to trudge on, even if the present is fraught with difficulty. As long as your child maintains an eye on the future, s/he will be able to endure what comes his or her way today. By the way, hope is catching. If one person has hope, he can breathe it into many. If many have hope, they can change the way the wind blows.

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t’s difficult to say what percentage of the population is gay. Even when surveyors promise anonymity, LGBs who hide their identities may lie about sexual orientation due to fear of being outed. People who engage in same-sex relationships but identify as queer may resist being labeled as lesbian, gay or bisexual. Famed tennis player Martina Navratilova, a homosexual, commented, “Labels are for filing. Labels are for clothing. Labels are not for people.” Those who suffer from high levels of internalized homophobia may deny their sexual orientations even though they experience same-sex attractions. It’s important to keep these limitations in mind when considering the accuracy of sexual minority population estimates.

According to the National Health and Social Life Survey and the General Social Survey, 4.7 percent of adult men and 3.6 percent of adult women have had at least one same-sex partner since age eighteen. When asked about their current relationships, 2.5 percent of men and 1.4 percent of women reported having same-sex partners within the past year.
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While these statistics reflect relationship status, they don’t indicate sexual activity outside of relationships nor do they include gays and lesbians who are not in relationships but who nonetheless identify as LGBTQ. There were no general population-based
studies on the prevalence of transgender orientation as of 2011, though one large Internet survey found that 0.2 percent of respondents described themselves as transgender.
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For more detailed estimates of homosexuality and homosexual behavior across the lifespan, we turn to the work of American biologist Alfred Kinsey. His works,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
and
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,
published over sixty years ago, were best sellers and are still regarded as perhaps the finest research on sexuality to date. At a time when sex was not considered an appropriate topic for conversation, Kinsey and his colleagues conducted face-to-face interviews with a cross section of the United States population, twelve thousand men and eight thousand women, asking detailed questions about sexual behavior. He then had the temerity to publish the results.

According to Kinsey’s findings, about 4 percent of US males and 2 to 3 percent of US females reported having exclusively same-sex partners throughout their entire lives. About 8 percent of males reported having sex with only men for a period lasting at least three years. Kinsey estimated that somewhere between 3 to 10 percent of the US population is engaged primarily in homosexual activity at any point in time. Until this point, it was supposed that homosexuality was rather rare in nature. Kinsey, an animal biologist by training, knew this to be untrue:

       
The impression that infra-human mammals more or less confine themselves to heterosexual activities is a distortion of fact which appears to have originated in a man-made philosophy, rather than in specific observations of mammalian behavior…Sexual contacts between individuals of the same sex are known to occur in practically every species of mammal which has been extensively studied. In many species, homosexual contacts occur with considerable frequency…Every farmer who has raised cattle knows, for instance, that cows quite regularly mount cows.
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Perhaps most astonishing, Kinsey found 50 percent of the male population surveyed was exclusively heterosexual throughout adult life, about 4 percent were exclusively homosexual and nearly half,
46 percent, engaged in both heterosexual and homosexual activity or reacted sexually to persons of both sexes in the course of their lives. In fact, 37 percent of all the men surveyed and about 12 to 13 percent of the women surveyed reported having a same-sex sexual encounter resulting in orgasm at some point in their lives.

Based on these findings, Kinsey concluded that there was no “homosexual personality.”

Instead, homosexuality was a part of normal sexual behavior for a large portion of the population. In addition, he argued that sexual activity was more fluid and changing than previously described. Homosexual and heterosexual, he asserted, were adjectives, not nouns:

       
The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior, the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.
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To capture the observed range of sexual orientation, he developed the Kinsey Scale. On the Kinsey Scale, one can fall anywhere on a continuum between 0, extremely heterosexual, to 6, extremely homosexual, with degrees of bisexuality falling between the two extremes. Kinsey’s successors at the Kinsey Institute have suggested some changes to the scale, such as adding separate scale factors for love, sexual attraction, fantasy and self-identification. They also point out that sexual orientation may change over time and that those who use the scale should not see an individual’s score as predictive of his or her future sexual behavior or sexual identity.
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The scale, perhaps with a few alterations, is still in use today.

Some people found Kinsey’s work offensive. Political pressures ensued and Kinsey lost his funding. He died shortly thereafter, in 1956, but not without making his mark. Kinsey’s work unveiled a hidden world of sexual behavior.

Among those who followed Kinsey and his work was Shere Hite. Like Kinsey, Hite surveyed a massive swath of the US public. Unlike Kinsey, she used an anonymous written questionnaire. She presented her results to the public in essay form, rather than Kinsey’s quantitative approach, relying heavily on quotations from the study participants.
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Though her survey took place several decades after Kinsey’s, her results are quite similar to Kinsey’s findings. She found 43 percent of men surveyed had same-sex encounters in their youth.
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The occurrence of a same-sex encounter did not predict sexual orientation later in life. In terms of population estimates for homosexuality, Hite reported that 11 percent of men preferred sex with men; of that 11 percent, two percent also had sex with women.
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Because of Hite’s style of reporting results, we have the unique opportunity to hear from many individual men directly. Reading their words, it seems that the adolescent openness to same-sex connections has been replaced by a radical homophobia. When Hite asked, “Do you embrace or kiss men in friendship?” the overwhelming answer was no. Here are few of the responses:
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•  “I can’t bear any kind of physical intimacy with a man beyond just shaking hands and that feels clammy enough to me.”

       
•  “I may be the victim of hang-ups, but I really cannot stand even being touched by another male (except for an occasional handshake).”