Help Me Understand My Child's Identity

A fictional story which is designed to help parents and teens work through the difficult topics of identity and sexuality. Sixteen-year-old Daniel Hale is having trouble with coming out to his parents.

He has only told one person that he is gay, his high school and youth group friend Jacob Loomis, Daniel has understood since he was a pre-teen that he was different, and he was certainly more attracted to guys that girls. He grew up on a farm in rural Ohio with his parents and his older brother, Ben, who is away at college. They were, as a family, very involved in their church.

Daniel finally gains enough courage to tell his mother. She does not take the news well. He asks her not to tell his father just yet, because he is really scared of what might happen once he finids out. He was not sure if he would be kicked out of the house or what else could happen.

She finally told Benjamin, Daniel's father. In the middle of the night three days after Daniel had told her, Miriam, Daniel's mother, could not sleep, and she was up pacing the floor in their bedroom. This woke Benjamin. They had a heated discussion about the situation. Unbeknown to them, Daniel could hear a lot of what they were saying through the heating vent in his upstairs bedroom.

Benjamin was worried about how Daniel would be treated at school, and how they as a family would be treated at church and around town. They kept it quiet for a while, then Miriam went to talk to the pastor about it one day after church service. Pastor Neal was very concerned, and was only worried about trying to fix Daniel.

Miriam was upset by this because she did not see her son as broken and in need of fixing. Things ended up going very badly after that. One day during a potluck at the church, the Hale family ended up getting into an unpleasant discussion with several of the other parishioners. They ended up leaving in the middle of the dinner. Pastor Neal kept trying to contact then, but they refused to answer their phone.

Finally, they decided that their son was more important than the hypocritical ways of the church, so they decided to not go back to that church. By t he end of the story things are going relatively well over all for the family, and Daniel is trying to decide where he will go to college.

This is a story about the contrasts between faith and the love of family, and the church and its staunch restrictions against homosexuals.