When Heather Grows Up

(Originally published in Bay Windows, June 26, 2008, with minor variation.)

Two new works and one re-release share the real and fictionalized stories of teens with LGBT parents, shining a light on this often-overlooked part of our community.

Tru Loved, now making the rounds at LGBT film festivals, features an all-star cast including Jasmine Guy, Jane Lynch, Alec Mapa, Nichelle Nichols, Alexandra Paul, and Bruce Vilanch. Najarra Townsend, who plays the title character Tru, is a relative newcomer, but has already won two best actress awards for her work in the film.

Tru is a high school sophomore who moves with her lesbian moms away from San Francisco and her gay dads to conservative, suburban Southern California. She befriends gay, closeted football star Lodell and decides to start a gay-straight alliance (GSA) after hearing homophobic remarks from classmates. She falls for one of the first members, Trevor, a straight boy being raised by his gay uncle. Tru has, however, already promised Lo she will pose as his girlfriend. Can she stay true to both herself and those she loves?

Writer/director Stewart Wade and producer Antonio Brown are partners in life as well as film, and are themselves raising a 14-year-old son. Their family, and the other gay families they know who have teens, were part of the motivation for the picture. “I hadn’t seen any movies that represented those kids,” said Wade.

Brown also noted that he and Wade are an interracial gay couple like Tru’s moms. “There’s a little bit of us in that film,” he said. “It’s really about tolerance and acceptance on so many levels, and that acceptance begins with self-acceptance.”

In addition to drawing on their own experiences, they reached out to COLAGE (Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere), PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), and the Gay-Straight Alliance Network to help create “an authentic world for Tru and her friends.” Part of Wade’s purpose for the film, was to make people aware that the growth of GSA’s “is a real movement.”

Despite the input of these advocacy groups, Wade says he worked hard to avoid preachiness. “That was very, very important to me. … It’s really more like a contemporary Disney film, a family film, except the families in this case happen to be gay and lesbian families. … I think the comedy is what helps people get it. It isn’t beating you over the head.”

The couple is working to secure a theatrical release for the picture.

Meema Spadola’s Our House: a Very Real Documentary About Kids of Gay & Lesbian Parents, profiles five actual gay and lesbian families with teens or pre-teens. First released in 2000, it has just come out on DVD, along with bonus footage of the families today. Spadola, who was 10 when her mother divorced her father and came out, made the film because, like Wade and Brown, she wanted to see representations of families like her own. “I felt really isolated,” she explained. “If I had been able to turn on the television and see a program about kids with other gay and lesbian parents, that would have radically changed my life. … I very much set out to make a documentary that was going to reach out to those kids.”

In looking back at what might have helped her better adjust to her mom’s coming out, Spadola said, “I always felt like honesty was key, being really direct and open. … I think [my mother] was scared. She didn’t know quite how to talk to me about what it meant that she was a lesbian.”

Troy Johnson’s new book Family Outing: What Happened When I Found Out My Mother Was Gay is a scathing, funny, ribald case study in what can go wrong when that honesty and openness are missing. At 10 years old, in the middle of the Reagan era, Johnson found out his divorced mother was a lesbian when her ex-girlfriend outed her. His descent into juvenile delinquency, alcohol, and heterosexual promiscuity might seem like proof of the ultra-right’s assertion that LGBT people shouldn’t have children, but Johnson makes it clear the root causes were the secrecy, homophobia, and shame imposed by society, not his mother’s sexuality itself.

The book chronicles his journey to this realization without sugarcoating his own initial bigotry. Instead of “feel-good psychobabble about ’embracing our differences’” he says, “someone needed to say exactly what a shallow, self-absorbed teenager thought about the situation while he was experiencing it.” He spends most of his adolescence trying to reassure himself he is not also gay. His chapter on COLAGE is titled “Freaks Everywhere.” Even in the early chapters, though, he weaves in pointed observations about homophobia and religious bigotry that hint at a transformation to come: “One day you’re nodding along [at church], going ’Yep, they’re going to hell. Yep, them, too. Fry those suckers!’ Then the next day it’s ’Yep, they’re going, too – wait, what? Mom?”

This is a story of personal growth and redemption, a tale of coming-of-age as well as coming out as a member of an LGBT family. Johnson’s message is stronger because he never makes the process seem easy.

Lighthearted fiction, documentary, or biting confessional memoir. Those looking for stories of teens in LGBT families are likely to find something to appeal to them in this varied trio of works.