This resource offers words of encouragement and hope to guide those wanting to come out to their parents.

Excerpt:

Parents entertain all sorts of dreams for their children, but they don’t usually imagine their children coming out as lesbian or gay.

Watching their children grow up, mothers and grandmothers dream about bridal gowns and college degrees for their girls. Fathers envision sons growing up to be engineers or football players. Having a homosexual daughter or son is not usually part of those dreams. But the fact remains that many Latino/a families do have gay and lesbian children.

During their childhood, boys and girls share in their families’ dreams and some of them will come true: both girls and boys can graduate from college, both can play football, and all of them at some point will experience sexual attraction. For roughly ten percent of them, that attraction will be toward members of their own gender. That kind of attraction, desire, and romance may also cause fear, confusion, and guilt.

Many people grow up hearing false and misleading information about homosexuality. Gay men are often treated with disdain and mockery while hardly anyone talks about lesbians at all. Too often both are condemned by churches and the wider society.

Given that message of condemnation, too many homosexual persons think of themselves as deviant or immoral. They may have heard of well-known singers who are gay or of famous actresses rumored to be lesbians. Sadly, few people have ever told them that they themselves are beloved and accepted by God just as they are. And hardly anyone has told them that their own families can love them and accept them as gay and lesbian people