Jonathan Allen, a graphic arts student at Columbia College, came out when he was 14. He was a freshman at Oak Park and River Forest High School.
“When I figured it out, it didn’t make any sense to stay in the closet,” Allen, now 19, says. “I knew my friends would be OK with it. … Coming out to my parents and my older brother was a bit intimidating.”
Over the course of four months, the Oak Park native did tell his family that he’s gay: first, his brother; then, his mother; finally, his father. His claim at first was questioned, he says, because of his age. But, according to Allen, it was acknowledged and accepted, and soon it as though nothing had changed.
Allen credits the political and social ascendancy of the gay community for creating a climate in which he got, at school, only some strange looks and just a few nasty remarks.
Growing up in what he calls the liberal community of Oak Park helped him, Allen says, be honest at such an early age.
Twenty-five years earlier, in the farm town of Richmond, Mich., Ray Johnson was just about as young when he came out to two of his best friends. At 15, Oak Park’s first openly gay village trustee shared what he says he knew since fifth grade.
“My awakening to my sexual orientation just felt natural to me,” says Johnson, 46, who nonetheless waited ’til what he calls “later in life” to tell his family. They’ve come to be accepting and proud of him, though, he says, they didn’t initially “act as though he’d won the lottery.”
Through his wave of coming out stories, Johnson learned to be selective in whom he told. “The parents of one of my very best friends politely told me I shouldn’t be hanging around their son anymore, or coming over,” Johnson recalls. “I became more cautious.”
During his college years, Johnson says he was demoted after a homophobic boss discovered he was gay. “Facing discrimination and that feeling of having to work in fear actually set me free,” he says. “From that point forward, I never wanted to live in a manner other than one which was true to me.”
He encourages parents to be more open when talking to their kids about dating, and that whatever relationship their son or daughter is in, being true to themselves and others is one of the most important aspects in life.
“I don’t care if you are gay, straight, bi, transgender or asexual, we can each be active in creating a better world to be passed on to the next generation,” Johnson says.
Oak Park gay rights activist Alan Amato, the fire behind passage of the village’s domestic registry ordinance, was 20 when he came out in 1972: to friends, first; cousins, second; finally to his parents, whose reaction he particularly feared.
His strategy: “You start developing a circle of gay friends who really become your family … you turn to them instead of your blood relatives. It’s an unfortunate byproduct of the history of homophobia,” says Amato, now 57.
“On the whole it was received very well. No overtly negative reaction, considering how long ago that was.”
It was more than two decades later in time, and more than a dozen years later in a person’s life, that Brad Bartels came out. He was 33 and living in Pittsburgh. He told a group of gay friends there, but was apprehensive about telling family in his native Iowa City.
Bartels, 48, an Oak Parker in the insurance industry, says he sought counsel from a minister who told him it was unlikely that his parents would be able to handle the gamut of emotions in 15 minutes. He opted to tell them just before Christmas in 1994, after he and his partner, Joe Langley, had been living together for a year.
“I said to myself I was going to rectify this … if we are going to live together as a couple,” Bartels recalls.
Although he wasn’t shunned, and he boasts of having a good relationship with his parents, Bartels says it took them about a year, in particular his mother, to digest the news and for things to get back to normal. Since then, they’ve grown to get along well with Langley, whom Bartels has been with for almost 16 years.
Bartels and Langley became registered domestic partners in Oak Park in 2004. They’ve lived in the village on two different occasions since 2000.
“In the ’50s and ’60s, with the exception of those that lived in gay ghettos, you didn’t know people who were gays and lesbians,” Bartels says. Once the gay community decided to come out of hiding and face discrimination and ignorance, progress was made and continues, he says.
Only after the gay community had a face, did they achieve a voice, Bartels says.
“It’s very encouraging … it just did not exist when I was a younger person,” Amato says.
Ray Johnson credits such national support networks as PFLAG (Parents Families & Friends of Lesbians and Gays), a national nonprofit organization advocating acceptance and equal rights for members of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) with being one of the most inspiring agencies around.
“To have your parents be willing to march in the street during the parade and say, ‘Hey, I’m proud of you …’ They get a standing ovation every time,” Johnson says.
Allen, the recent OPRF alum, notes:
“We’re no longer a subculture … we’re mainstream.”
Or, as Bartels says, in reference to the TV sitcom Will & Grace, in which Will is a barely effeminate gay man and his friend Jack is entirely effeminate, “We’re not all Jack.”
The NIMBY guard
Susan Abbott is the youth program director at the Oak Park Area Lesbian and Gay Association.
She helps to promote and spread awareness among teens by conducting student forums and HIV testing at high schools that have a Gay Straight Alliance – a national organization that supports the formation of networks of students within schools to promote education, to fight discrimination and to create an overall safe environment for all students.
“My peer advisers talk about HIV awareness and any type of issue within the gay community,” Abbott says.
Oak Park and River Forest High School houses a Gay Straight Alliance called A Place for People Like Us.
Abbott believes that people are more comfortable in their skin these days and are content to come out at a younger age due, in large part, to groups like OPALGA and the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, a Chicago-based nonprofit.
“By going to the schools and saying, ‘Hey, do you have gay kids?’…We are chipping away at the ‘not in our back yard’ mentality,'”
she adds.
