Julissa Collato promised her mom that she would tell her when she started dating. Little did Collato, then 14, know that her first date would be with a girl.

Collato and her mother were really close. They told each other everything. When she turned 16 and started dating a girl, she knew she had to tell her mom.

‘I thought I could tell my mom anything,’ said Collato, a sophomore communications and rhetorical studies and Spanish major. ‘So two days after I started dating my first girlfriend, I sat my mom down, and I started crying.

‘She was looking at me like something wasn’t right and I said, ‘Mom, I’m a lesbian. I don’t like guys, I never have.”

It was OK, Collato’s mother said at the time, she would always love her.

But two weeks later, after Collato continued talking about her girlfriend, her mother stopped talking to her.

Ten other students joined Collato in sharing their coming-out stories Monday night in the Nifkin Lounge in Marshall Hall at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. The event was one of several hosted by Syracuse University’s LGBT Resource Center for Coming Out Month, held each October.

After the students shared their stories, they walked to the Quad and drew chalks messages supporting LGBT rights on the sidewalks.

In the Nifkin Lounge, the stories the students recounted were emotional – many touched on how the event affected their families.

Chris Wakefield, a senior sociology major, worked hard to keep his sexuality from his parents for a long time, he told the group in the Nifkin Lounge.

‘Originally when I began to struggle with who I was, I went to my school counselor,’ he said. ‘After my second session with the counselor I started to feel better. I was scared but feeling better.’

A few days later, Wakefield was called out of class and into the school psychologist’s office. The counselor he’d spoken to was there, and Wakefield learned the school had called his parents and told them to come in.

When he got there, they were sitting in the advisory office waiting for him to tell his parents that he was gay.

‘I told the counselor and the psychologist that there was no way they could get me to talk about this. They told me if I didn’t tell my parents they would do it for me, which they did,’ he said.

‘I cried, they cried, we all cried, a lot.’

Wakefield stormed out of the office and doesn’t remember what happened after that. All he knew was that at the time he told his parents not to tell anyone else because he wasn’t ready for anyone to know. A few days later, Wakefield woke up to his mother throwing his stuff down the stairs, telling him that he couldn’t live there anymore.

‘My parents were divorced and luckily my father, who I barely knew at the time, took me in,’ he said. ‘He felt responsible for me despite my mother’s instability.’

Now, after years of being openly gay, Wakefield’s mother is dealing with her homophobia issues and is starting to support Wakefield and other members of the LGBT community.

Greg Sides, a senior advertising and women and gender studies major, read an article recently that talked about three types of strategies parents use when they first find out if their child is gay.

‘The strategy my parents used was: deny, deny, deny, and scare your child into not being gay,’ he said.

Sides arrived at Syracuse from a rural area, came out to his parents unintentionally after he and his sister had got into a fight. During that fight, Sides told his parents that his sister was a slut. And to get back at him, she told his parents that he was gay.

‘It was like farting in class awkward,’ he said. ‘My dad said that when I was 18, I was out of the house.’

Sides was only in eighth grade at the time.

‘That night my parents shut their bedroom door, which they almost never did and I heard my mom say, ‘I just don’t know what we’re going to do.’ They were treating the situation like I had cancer or something.’

Three days after the fight, Sides’ family stopped talking about his sexuality. They didn’t bring it up again until he came home for winter break after his first semester at SU.

‘My dad had never cared about anything, but when he found out I had a gay roommate, he demanded that he would call housing the next morning and have me move out.’

Sides has yet to speak to his father since that day.

‘My father is not going to come to graduation, but I still think he loves me,’ he said.

rltoback@syr.edu

Published on October 12, 2009 at 12:00 pm