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Photo By Matt Borgerding
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PFLAG, meeting at cody's Cafe in Clifton, takes on
Issue 3 and Dr. Laura Schlesinger but mostly works
for tolernace, acceptance and support.
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The world will be a better place when PFLAG -- Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays -- ceases to exist. PFLAG's work will be done when widespread acceptance of alternative lifestyles is an unquestioned reality, not a distant goal.
Granted, acceptance of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) community has crossed barriers -- no one denies that. Nor does anyone deny that when a person "outs" himself or herself, the person also outs the family. The result can be love and support or rejection and severance.
Outing himself, says Joe O'Flynn, treasurer of the Cincinnati chapter of PFLAG, was the scariest thing he has ever done.
"The family, well, for me, was my strongest and closest relationship," he says. "I felt I was bringing a burden into their lives, something that they had to deal with that, within our society, is not looked on as favorable."
O'Flynn admitted to himself he was gay when he was 33. With a laugh, he points out Jesus was the same age when he was crucified. O'Flynn needed a safe place to get information. During a Coming Out Week one October, he went to his first PFLAG meeting.
"Before that, I had no life," he says. "It was too scary to acknowledge anything. But this was a group of people who were going to accept me for who I was and for who I couldn't accept myself to be."
Less than a year after that initial meeting and a period of group therapy, workshops and counseling, O'Flynn told his family.
Although it's been a few years, O'Flynn remains active in PFLAG as an advocate. Most members remain active for the same reason. At a PFLAG gathering, chapter president Linda Arnest quotes a friend, "There's no stronger advocate than a mad mother." Everyone laughs and agrees.
"When parents find out, they want to be loving and supportive, but they don't know how. It's a mystery," says Jim Bliss, who with his wife, Beth, is PFLAG's co-vice president and parent of a gay son. "There are all these emotions. Then it's like, 'Oh my gosh! What did I do wrong?' Then you get mad, because it's not fair that your child is being treated like this. You become an activist."
When Bliss and his wife found out about their son, he says he felt an urgent need to become informed and to get support.
"It was never a question of accepting him," Beth Bliss says. "We wanted to help him and ourselves. It brought our family closer."
Jim and Beth Bliss have been PFLAG members for five years. Now they try to help and educate other parents and those in need of support.
PFLAG has a three-fold mission -- to support, educate and advocate on behalf of the GLBT community. The only criterion for membership is the need for support or the desire to be an advocate. The organization has 80,000 members in its 445 chapters and affiliate groups across the country.
Marian Weage founded the Cincinnati chapter in 1984, 10 years after the first PFLAG chapter was founded in New York. While living in Lansing, Mich., in the late 1970s, Weage found out one of her four children was gay. The PFLAG chapter there consisted of four women, including Weage. Then, when her middle daughter was 28, she also came out to Weage.
In 1984, Weage moved back to Cincinnati. As she was watching the news one night, Channel 12 was doing a weeklong series on Cincinnati's homosexual community. Upon seeing a hotline number on the screen, Weage called and inquired about PFLAG. She remembers the voice on the other end of the phone sounding ecstatic at the prospect of starting a PFLAG chapter in Cincinnati. Along with three gay men, Weage started one.
The first Cincinnati PFLAG meeting was in August 1985. One more of Weage's children, her youngest, had yet to come out to her. But in time, she did, too. As each of Weage's children came out, the process got easier, she says, but initial feelings of guilt and surprise reared their heads.
Living in a small town, Weage went to a mental health clinic to find an ear. Her therapist told her the American Psychological Association had just taken homosexuality off its list of mental illnesses.
"I had divorced their father, so initially I thought that that was the problem," Weage says. "I told my therapist, 'Had I not taken him away from his father, he would be OK.'
"Then my therapist said, 'Did you hear what you just said?'
"Yeah," she remembers, "I said he wasn't OK. He's perfect."
Weage's biggest fear, one that most parents share, is that her children would suffer from their lifestyle.
Arnest says her brother, Paul, opted Los Angeles over Cincinnati in searching for an accepting community.
"I knew he was gay shortly after he moved to L.A.," she says. "He told me he didn't know how anyone could live openly gay in Cincinnati, because it was so conservative."
Arnest's parents, Harold and June Delph, did not find out their son was gay until he moved home in 1992. He had AIDS, which took his life four years later. Harold Delph says that, before his son came out, he did not know anything about gay issues. The Delphs are now active members of PFLAG.
"It was very scary to tell the family," Harold Delph says. "I knew it could destroy relationships, but it worked out well. I'd say we were 95 percent happy with the way it went. We've heard horror stories."
The Delphs, like other PFLAG members, have their work cut out for them. Along with Stonewall Cincinnati, PFLAG still fights to get Issue 3 repealed. In 1993, Cincinnatians approved a charter amendment excluding sexual orientation from any city ordinance forbidding discrimination.
In the past year, PFLAG rallied against WCPO (Channel 9) for airing The Dr. Laura Show. PFLAG believes Laura Schlessinger discriminates against the GLBT community by characterizing them as "biological errors," among other things.
One of the most urgent issues for PFLAG is teaching tolerance at an early age. Beth Bliss says PFLAG tries to get in any school it can, but does not have much luck. In 1998 a member of PFLAG spoke to the junior class at St. Xavier High School about tolerance -- not about homosexuality. She was not invited back, because a group of parents objected to her affiliation with the group.
"Her message was fine," says Paul Zook, director of communications and events for St. Xavier. "The problem was not what she was saying, but her association. The thing was that we could get the same message from a speaker without a negative connotation."
No matter. The parents, friends and GLBT community will keep working toward an accepting world and will always support each other. ©
