Kristy Trautmann The evening my mother heard what she didn’t want to hear

In the fall of 1988, I sat in the passenger seat of my mother’s car and told her that I was a lesbian. I was eighteen: heart pounding, voice unsteady but determined to speak my truth. Since then, I’ve thought of that moment only from my perspective.

But as I celebrate my own daughter’s eighteenth birthday, I’ve come to see it through my mother’s eyes. And what I recognize now is fear.

To her, I was impossibly young to make such a declaration. She saw my inexperience more clearly than my courage. She feared I was stepping into a life marked by stigma, discrimination, and hardship; and she had good reason to be afraid.

What my mother heard

At that time there were no affirming portrayals of LGBTQ+ people on TV. It was the height of the AIDS epidemic. People were fired from their jobs. Fam