JANE HILL
PHOTO JEFF OVERS/BBC
I recently met a young gay man who’d come out to his parents only two weeks earlier. It hadn’t gone well. His mother and father were horrified – telling him it was “a phase” was the kindest of their responses – and his only sibling tried to be supportive, but felt stuck in the middle, trying to bridge the chasm between parents and brother. This man was intelligent, articulate, and had a good job; he was still in his 20s, lived in a big city and had plenty of friends – on the face of it, life was very promising indeed. But he was struggling; dealing with anxiety, guilt, all those self-defeating feelings that so many of us experienced when we told our family.