Hatred saddens mom of gay son

The conversation started pleasantly enough. First, everybody around the luncheon table talked about the weather, then there were the usual questions about children and grandchildren.

But then the subject somehow switched to gay rights and voices started rising in disgust and anger.

"I'll tell you what," one immaculately dressed woman said. "All of the gays ought to be strung up, sent out to the middle of the ocean and drowned."

Christine felt a rage rise inside her. Several relatives and casual acquaintances were sitting at the table, but she could no longer be silent.

"That's a horrendous thing to say — how can you speak so hatefully?" she said. "The truth is, you're judging people who have a lifestyle they didn't choose. (I believe) that it chose them."

Nobody at the table knew it, but her son was one of the people the ridiculous woman in the elegant attire wanted "eliminated." He'd recently come to Christine in confidence to tell her that he was gay.

"I sobbed for weeks when he told me — not because he was gay but because of the pain he'd endured all these years, repressing who he is," she says of her 34-year-old son. "My heart ached for him."

Christine says this over a Free Lunch of fruit salad and muffins at the Little America coffee shop. The 60-year-old mother of four wanted to meet because she is saddened by the hatred directed by some people toward Salt Lake City's gay community, especially since the movie "Brokeback Mountain" came out.

"I'm tired of listening to people downgrade things they know nothing about," says Christine, who did not want to reveal her last name because her son hasn't yet made other family members aware of his sexual orientation. "Somehow, we need to facilitate some understanding."

Imagine, she says, if somebody were to criticize you because you are tall or because you have brown eyes — things that you can do nothing about.

"My son has suffered at the hands of misinformed people who have labeled him as sinful, weak and less than his 'straight' male counterparts," she says. "I know this is controversial — that there are many in our community who believe a gay person can change. But my son didn't ask for this identity. Why would someone choose to hurt so profoundly?"

When her son looks back now, she says, he realizes that he was "different" from other boys early on, when he developed a crush on a male teacher. He dated several girls in high school but always felt repulsed when they tried to kiss him.