My Family Story

Walt Vanderbush

At Indy Gay Pride

My wife and I are the parents of five children. Our third child and oldest daughter is a lesbian who has been in a committed relationship for nineteen years. I am a retired high school principal who grew up when there were very few out gays or lesbians. Neither my wife nor I knew any.

My father, a former teacher/coach and a YMCA executive, taught me that African-Americans had been abused and were being discriminated against, that Jewish people were the objects of hate and discrimination, and that many other ethnic groups and religions were mistreated in our society. However, he never mentioned gays and lesbians, or homosexuals as we called them at that time. The first time I knew such a person existed was when, as a teenager, my father told me that he had fired a "Y" staff member for soliciting young boys. He then explained to me that there were people who were attracted to members of the same sex.

My daughter (right) and her partner

As a teenager I occasionally heard jokes about "homos" and I never commented or thought much about them. I remember that as a college student I was guilty of laughing about a masculine girl at our college and making fun in private of her and her probable sexual orientation. I assumed at that time that there were very few homosexuals.

Our daughter was a very high achiever, both academically and athletically, throughout high school and college. She had a full four year scholarship to an outstanding university, was graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and was a first team Academic All American Division One basketball player during her senior year. She dated young men and married a fellow student during her senior year. By that time we were much more aware of the fact that there were many gays and lesbians in our society, but we never suspected that our daughter was one of them.

She and her husband had a son a couple of years after their marriage. We noticed that she and a former college teammate seemed to have an unusually close relationship, and we began wondering if it were more than a friendship; but this was really just a passing thought.

Before her son was a year old, she and her husband separated and filed for divorce. There had been no hint of any kind of problems before this occurred. I wrote my daughter and told her that I was disappointed that she gave up her marriage so easily, and I asked if there might be a special reason and listed her possible lesbianism as one of those reasons that might be insurmountable. She wrote back that she was a lesbian and that was the reason. She indicated that she had been afraid to tell us and had told only her oldest brother. We were disappointed that she hadn't felt comfortable enough to tell us right away, and we were worried about the abuse that she and her son would take because of the attitudes in society; but we never felt anything but love and the desire to help her.

I began to read as many books as possible about gays and lesbians and have accumulated quite a library. I studied the biblical passages that were commonly used to stigmatize gays, and I read with great interest the articles and books that countered the arguments of those who cited the Bible. We joined PFLAG to share our experiences and to continue learning.

After a couple of years we realized that it is important for the parents of gays and lesbians to be out as much as it is important for gays and lesbians themselves, so that people realize how many of us there are and so that others will have the courage to join us in fighting for equal rights for our children. We included the same kind of information about our daughter and her partner in our Christmas letter that we did about our other children, talked about our daughter and her partner with people we met whenever we could do so gracefully, and took part in public events that we felt were helpful to gay rights.

Our daughter has master's degrees in journalism and public health and conducts a very successful medical writing business from her home. She also coaches a high school girls basketball team. Her partner, who has a doctorate in biostatistics, is an administrator for an organization which works with third world countries to develop contraceptive methods that will be effective for them.

Our mission now is to do everything we can to advance the cause of gay rights so that our daughter and her partner and others like her have the same rights, privileges and opportunities enjoyed by heterosexual members of our society. Our daughter had crushes on girls and young women as a teenager, but she suppressed any thought that she might be a lesbian. She married a man because she didn't want to believe that she was a lesbian. I have learned that this denial is the "normal" reaction of most gays and lesbians because they have been raised in a society that has made gay jokes a regular part of life, has made it very difficult for gays to exist and has made the very word "gay" a synonym for "bad." We want to do everything we can to change that.

Walt Vanderbush

Franklin