MY BULLYING FEARS FOR GAY SON

Dear Coleen

My 16-year-old son has recently come out as gay. We’d had our suspicions for a while, but didn’t want to bring it up with him until he felt comfortable telling us.

We’ve told him we’ll always support him and said how great we think it is that he’s come out, but I think he’s struggling at school in terms of whether to tell people or not, and he’s worried how his classmates are going to react.

Have you any ideas on how we can support him? He’s at a big secondary school and while he has a good group of mates, I worry he’ll get picked on.

Coleen says

Good for him and good for you that he feels supported by his family. OK, there’s usually one idiot at school who just wants to pick on someone, but I think parents can misjudge situations sometimes because we think back to attitudes when we were at school. Things have changed.

When my daughter was at high school there were quite a few gay kids in her year and it was never an issue. Young people are so savvy and so cool when it comes to issues around sexuality and gender. And schools are much better at handling things, too.

It sounds like he has a good bunch of friends who’ll stand by him, so it’s an opportunity for him to own this and be himself. I get plenty of letters from much older people who are still struggling to come out and it’s had a terrible effect on their lives.

Having said all that, at 16 you still have fears of being different to your friends and being excluded because of it.

He doesn’t have to walk into school tomorrow and announce he’s gay – he shouldn’t feel under any pressure to discuss his sexuality unless he wants to. His real friends will stick by him and, if he does get any abuse for being gay, tell him he’s got to speak up about it.