FAMILY OUTING

San Diego print and radio journalist Johnson details the painful metamorphosis he underwent from homophobic child to a mature adult who could accept his mother’s sexual orientation.

At age ten, her ex-girlfriend chose to break it to him that his mom was a lesbian. This surprising revelation tested the delicate family balance established years earlier when his parents had divorced: While his sister raged and acknowledged her feelings of betrayal, Johnson drove his pain and anger deep within. The ensuing period of delinquent behavior put an agonizing strain on his relationship with the mother he had always considered his soul mate. Recalling with self-deprecating sarcasm the vandalism, drug and alcohol experimentation, rampant promiscuity, gay trashing and born-again Christian phases he underwent, the author also examines how he and his sister hurt their mother. “During therapy,” he writes, “my mom explained that we had scared her deep into the closet—past the hamper, past the shoes, into the mental crawl space behind the insulation. Because we called people we didn’t like fags and things we didn’t like gay, she really thought her kids hated homos.” It was only when he was in college that Johnson finally made the decision to accept his mother as she was. Still, he admits, such acceptance is an ongoing process: “There’s no parade where a papier-mâché replica of my old, bigoted self burns in effigy and everyone drinks champagne until we’re happy. We can only do this one uncomfortable moment at a time.” A master of the declarative, the author offers numerous thoughtful observations on the emotive force of family dynamics and how internalized shame can stunt a life.

Revealing, irreverent and strangely tender.