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Mom
At a family reunion, Aunt Mary Beth was pointed out to 21-year-old Carolyn Dempsey. You see Mary Beth over there? You don't want to be like her. An old maid. She's all alone. You don't want to be like that. She has nobody.
"I got the message loud and clear that as a female, I needed a man," she says. In college in the seventies she found one. Despite sexual feelings towards women, feelings that dated from the third grade, she married her sociology professor.
"Do I believe that I loved [my husband], and that I loved the men that I was with prior to him? Yes. Do I believe that I would have been happier had I followed my heart and [loved women]? Yes. Had I realized earlier that I am gay, I would have been much happier. I always kind of knew," she says, "but I am of an age where there were no gay role models."
In 1984 her son Eric was born.
When Eric was in elementary school, Carolyn's husband accepted a job in another state, returning home to Vermont every third weekend. At that stage of their marriage, "I needed that distance from him," she says. "He was very controlling and at that point in my life I was very comfortable with that."
A theatre major, Carolyn didn't do plays during her marriage because her husband "didn't want me to do [that] because [it] took too much time from him and the family."
Distance from her husband brought a chance for her to explore her identity more freely. She became active in women's groups. She joined a local Unitarian church. She started seeing a psychotherapist. She met a woman named Kelly and began a romantic and sexual relationship with her. "I fell in love. I think that happens to a lot of us. And then I knew."
She did not tell her son. Not in so many words.
"I never sat him down and said, "Eric, I'm a lesbian,'" she says. The family attended Pride parades and supported the gay community at local events. "I always knew people in the parades," says her son Eric. "I thought we were there to support friends."
Carolyn says that "Eric and my girlfriend in Vermont were very close. Kelly loved him, and he loved Kelly. But he thought we were really good friends."
Eric says he didn't really think much about his mother's sexual orientation, but didn't know if she was straight or gay. Carolyn had assumed he had known since fourth or fifth grade, around the time she began the relationship with Kelly. But when questioned, Eric says that he didn't learn for sure that his mom was gay until a Gay Bingo fundraising event two years ago, when Eric was a teenager. Eric was there with his mom, his girlfriend, and a family friend. The emcee asked everyone in the room to stand up, and then asked all the non-homosexual people to sit down. Eric and his girlfriend sat down. Carolyn remained standing.
Carolyn believes she had good reason for keeping the truth from Eric. "I was still married. I felt like I had to maintain a certain status quo until I was strong enough to get out."
During divorce proceedings, she was afraid that her then-husband would "pull out the lesbian card, and that kept me quiet. I saw what he did to his first wife to get custody."
"I still feel in many ways I have a dual life, and many of Eric's teachers might not have known," she says. But she feels she "never really did anything different as a parent." She does, however, believe that her homosexuality has powerfully affected her son.
"Eric was exposed to so many kinds of people, and labels were never placed on these people. Or on me. Eric's view of the world is so much broader and so much more accepting. Eric has opened the world for his friends in many ways. As a fifth grader, he would say to his friends, "My mom's friends are lesbians,' and then he would talk about it. He would make it OK. He doesn't go into situations looking for differences. He goes into situations saying, "Oh, wow, look at this new experience!'
"When Eric was in second grade," she continues, "there was a girl in his class who had Down Syndrome. She had difficulty communicating. Eric became her champion, her translator. He took the time to listen to her when the other kids were just too busy or too put off. Eric has always had a sensitivity that I haven't seen in a lot of other kids."
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