I have wished my daughter wasn’t gay, for several reasons, some of them selfish, totally. I wanted the “normal,” future, she meets a guy, they marry, have kids and make me a grandma and her really happy.

That’s not exactly what is going to happen, only she has promised me I will have grandchildren: I really, really, really want grandchildren and if my daughter’s partner is as good of a person as my daughter is, then all will be well and those will be some lucky kids.

But one of the biggest reasons I wish my daughter wasn’t gay is the most recent example, of that poor young man who jumped from the George Washington Bridge after his roommate and his roommate’s female friend, posted on the Internet a video of him having sex with another man.

First just let me say how grateful I am that my daughter is not like that roommate or his friend. I would be far more distressed if I had a daughter who thought it was cool to humiliate, degrade, torture and bully another human being; one who had done nothing to them at all, nothing to merit their dislike or their attitude that he was less than a human being, just for being different from her.

Thank God my daughter is not like those kids. I’d far rather have a gay daughter who is compassionate, kind, sincere, considerate, loving and sensitive than a hater like those two. Now that would break my heart. It would be similar to how some of those mothers’ whose children kill people, sell drugs, rob people, burglarize businesses and homes, must feel.

I know my daughter, she’s pretty strong and she’s older so she’s not as likely to fall prey to what this young man did. She’s already come out to the people who matter most to her, so it’s not like she’s prey to being “outted” before she’s ready.

But this type of hate crime can do so much damage to young people. Tyler Clementi is an extreme example: he killed himself. But I wonder if more damage is actually done to those who do not kill themselves. I know Tyler’s family would disagree with me and I understand. But whom I’m thinking of are those young people who carry that pain, rejection and hurt around with them. How does that affect them and their ability to grow into healthy, adjusted adults? It’s hard enough being gay, even in this day and age without someone sowing the seeds of self-hate into gay young people. What will become of them in their struggle to find their place in this world, something we all go through, only as the straight ones – kind of like white people in the day – have a leg up with their sometimes subconscious belief that they are okay, superior even to those who are not like them. Whites who got the jobs over blacks because their dads were frat brothers or just because the manager doesn’t like black people. Never was that stuff said aloud but it is how people lie to themselves to avoid confronting the truth of it.

There is so much going on the world, starving children, war, poverty and here in America, the worst recession since the Great Depression. We have people out of work losing their homes and their health because of lack a job with health care. People are losing their way of life; they are losing their belief in their right to live because they do not have a job, which for most is what identified them as who they were.

And in the midst of all this, we are fixated on who is sleeping with whom, in the privacy of their own bedrooms? Maybe that’s why people are obsessed with that stuff, to keep them from thinking about their own problems.

But come on, isn’t that what America is about? Isn’t that what people (gay people, too) died for? So that Americans can live their lives the way they think they should live it, and their privacy to do so remain sacrosanct?
I shake my head and shed a tear.