One of my favorite bloggers outside of the Lesbian Family blogosphere is Isabel, of Hola, Isabel. By simple description, we might be utterly different — she’s a churchgoing west-coaster whose husband is building their second house from scratch! I only recently became a regular churchgoer, live in the south, and between Jill and me, we can pretty much build Ikea furniture. I started reading Isabel’s blog when we were both pregnant, and stayed for the good storytelling. Plus we just like each other, you know?

This week, Isabel wrote a series of posts on her experience and feelings about having a gay brother who (finally) came out to his family in his late 20s.

These posts were so interesting to me, because they tell the story of an emotionally difficult and draining coming out, from the perspective of a family that had long known that the brother in question was gay, and who weren’t particularly uncomfortable with the idea. Yet the gay son is still alienated from his family of origin. And they are alienated from him.

What I walk away from Isabel’s story with is how much homophobia hurts families.

It doesn’t just hurt the gay members of those families, and it doesn’t just hurt if the straight family members are homophobic. Fear of homophobia, expectation of homophobia, perception of homophobia even when there might be another explanation — all of those things are part of the air we breathe when we are living our lives, especially when we try to live them as out GLBT people.

What I imagine, reading between the lines of Isabel’s story, is a brother who spent a long time afraid of being rejected by his family. I imagine that he heard the relative non-reaction of his family as something like silent judgment, and I imagine that he pulled away from his family defensively, because that was the reaction he was listening for. I don’t KNOW any of that — her brother might just be a straight-up jerk, who happens to also be gay, and he might have skipped out on family weddings even if he were a zero on the Kinsey scale.

And of course, he might be a gay jerk who WAS interpreting his family’s “reaction” (or lack of same) in the most negative and homophobic possible light, regardless of their intent.

Our straight friends and families don’t magically know how to reassure us that their feelings towards us haven’t changed. They probably have no idea that we’d like that reassurance.

They also want to know that the core of who we are hasn’t changed — we’re still the human being we always were. How to share both the changes in our lives and the consistency is hard.

A lot of us go through a sort of second adolescence shortly after coming out, and much like actual teenagers, we may think that we’re Finally Being Who We Really Are, that may not be entirely true. That’s something else I imagine from Isabel’s story.

Fortunately, most of us calm down again after the novelty of feeling free to tell the truth about our romantic & sexual lives settles into the normalcy of dating and living life.

The question is, how do we keep the lines of communication open with our families during all that tumult? And how do we give them the benefit of the doubt and keep them “in the loop” without oversharing. Or how do we rebuild those relationships after our irrational exuberance calms down? How do we share our lives in all their complexity with our families, in spite of our fears?

I don’t think there’s “an answer” to that, but I think communication, in spite of fear and resistance, is at the core of whatever the answers are. At least if we want to continue those relationships.