Family Outing: What Happened When I Found Out My Mother Was Gay introduces the reader to Troy Johnson, a straight man, who learned at the age of 10 that his mother was a lesbian.  In 1983, this was not cool.  Ronald Reagan was President, AIDS was running rampant, and the Moral Majority was coming into power.

Johnson learned his mother was a lesbian from her jilted lover. This moment of spite led to family counseling with his divorced parents and his sister.  But Johnson played it off as being cool while at the same time, he didn’t want anyone else to know and he set limits on his mom’s life so he wouldn’t have to see her lifestyle.

Johnson’s book is primarily about his ongoing struggle against his mother’s sexuality, asserting his own sexuality, growing up, establishing his own identity, and trying to understand it all.  When we spoke, he told me that when his mom came out (or was outed), the first thing he did was look for books about the subject.

“When I found out my mother was gay, I was a reader so I turned to books to understand, but what I found was psychobabble, or…story books about rainbows & puppies or that gays should not be raising kids.  What I didn’t find was anything I could relate to, I didn’t find anything real. I didn’t find anyone that was my own personal Holden Caulfield*. Nobody was copping to what I was feeling.”

Part of what he was feeling was the sudden realization that his mom’s whole identity had shifted to that of a sexual one and one that wasn’t considered normal by most folks.  Johnson loved his mom and knew she was a good and loving person but the overwhelming message he was getting from the rest of world was that being gay was sick, evil, perverted, and sinful.  That is a difficult mixed-message for an adult to handle, and Johnson was only 10.

Throughout his adolescence, Johnson was in and out of trouble.  He was even institutionalized for a period while he was in high school.  And he engaged in what he dubbed in Family Outing as ‘coital overcompensation’ in an effort to prove to himself and everyone else that he was straight, not gay like his mom.

“It wasn’t my mom being gay that was the problem it was the perceptions of gays around me,” said Johnson.  “And I was a cantankerous twerp.” He added.

I asked Johnson if he thought he would’ve been a problem kid if his mom had been straight.  He told me, “I think that I would have but not as much. My mom’s sexuality was definitely an issue for me. There still would have been a few broken windows and run-ins with Johnny Law.”

One reason Johnson’s escapades got out of hand was that he was often left at home alone.  Johnson explained, “My mom was divorced…she was gone a lot because she wanted to be with her girlfriend but I banned my mom’s lifestyle in her own house. So, there were times when I was alone but she was not an absentee mom.”

And some of those same perceptions about gays and lesbians that affected Johnson’s attitude toward his mom also affected her and her behavior as a parent.  All those negative images eroded her self-confidence as an individual, making her more inclined to be malleable to various social and political pressures.

“If my mom had had the confidence in herself and who she was at the time and laid it out,  ‘this is who I am and you’re going to deal with it,’ things might have been different.  But I manipulated her into letting me dictate her life because she was afraid she would lose her last child since she had already lost my sister to the straight part of the family.”

Perhaps if Johnson’s mom had greater ties to the lesbian community or at least a sense that there was a lesbian community, she would have had the courage to stand up to her son.  But even so, not as many lesbians were raising children at that time, not like now. If there had been more of a community like that around young Johnson, he may have found the Holden Caulfield he was looking for.

Unlike Holden Caulfield, Johnson is a changed person by the end of his memoir. Johnson’s attitude about his mom changed when he was in college.  He always loved his mom, but seems to have harbored some resentment towards her for many years.  His epiphany came when he was kicked out of college for calling the head of his dorm a faggot.

He says he suddenly, “felt how ugly that was.  Once I did that, it was one of those moments of enlightenment…I realized I was complete pond scum on pond scum.  I pictured my mom’s face and couldn’t believe I’d done that.  College was absolutely essential to taking the asshole out of me.  I apologized to my mother and accepted her for who she was. It was no longer acceptable to myself that I was a bigot.”

Johnson’s book about his experience is, in his terms, “the perspective of a Holden Caulfield raised by David Sedaris.”

I think anyone who was once a rebellious child will enjoy it. Johnson hopes that children of gay and lesbian parents will find a lot of resonance in it.  He also hopes that it will fill the gap in literature that he found when he was searching for answers and understanding when he was 10.

“I think it’s okay to have feelings of resentment and to have thoughts like ‘Is this okay?’ ‘Is it perverse?’  Then realize that it’s not a problem.  Parents will benefit from it. I wasn’t afraid to say any of the dark weird creepy thoughts I had about how my mom’s sexuality would affect me.  Straights will get a kick out of …readers will enjoy the humor and the emotional rawness of it.”

Family Outing: What Happened When I Found Out My Mother Was Gay is a fun read. The humor is real and natural because it comes from the awkwardness we all went through as we grew from children into adults.  Johnson wanted the book to be humorous.

“People lack a sense of humor when it comes to sexuality and now that I have a good relationship with my mom I wanted to laugh about what I went through, I do anyway, I wanted to make this humorous… I think humor is the way in.”

He also hopes that, “Straights will learn that their bigotry will affect not only the gay person they are snickering about but also their kids and the other people around them.”

When he has been asked if he’s afraid anti-gay groups will use Family Outing against the LGBTQ community, Johnson has responded by saying that he can’t be concerned about that because “Way too many books gloss over the challenges, the issues of sexuality…they [anti-gay organizations] will pick and choose what they can use anyway.” He’s right, that’s the way those groups operate.

In a letter to PFLAG about the book, Johnson said, “Today, I am a gay advocate. It’s been over a decade since I stopped viewing gay people like defects in the human assembly line. Family Outing, however, is not an advocacy book…it is not an anti-homosexuality book. It’s the story of how I truly felt as an impressionable teen in an age when gays were the piñatas at America’s hate party. It’s an honest, real tale of gays, bigots, politicians, sexual identity, family dynamics and angry grandmas.”

And I agree with Johnson 100 percent.

*Holden Caulfield is the narrator/protagonist of J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye.  Caulfield has become an iconic representation of teenage rebellion, angst and defiance.