‘Mom, guess what?’

The closest I’ve come to coming out is telling my oldest sister (a Mormon, and for much of my life a surrogate mother to me) that, yes, my good friend Jen was more than a good friend. Her response was understated: “I had a feeling.”

I had it easy. As a young woman who has explored the, uh, ambidextrous sexual lifestyle, my fears of social and familial rejection ended up being far harsher than reality. What I found was that once my own issues of guilt and confusion were resolved, people like my sister were not only willing to accept me, but also relieved to finally have out in the open what they suspected all along.

Some people, however, aren’t so lucky. Whether their families employ the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, or flat-out disown them, many homosexuals’ coming-out party feels more like a kiss-off. We asked Dennis Rhodes, minister at Christ Temple Apostolic Church, Darshan Singh Mundy of the Sikh Temple of Sacramento, and Michael Moran of Spiritual Life Center, how to go about breaking the news that few parents are prepared to hear.

I’m gay, but I’m frightened to tell my parents. They come from a very conservative background, so I’m afraid they won’t understand or accept me. I’ve waited until now, when I’m in college and no longer living under their roof, to start living openly as a gay male. How do I break it to them?

“In our community, homosexuality has been going on for ages, but we don’t deal with it or talk about it,” said Rhodes, decrying what he calls the “conspiracy of silence.”

Rhodes is not your typical traditionalist. A former “corner boy” from east Palo Alto, he worked with Sacramento Area Congregations Together before starting his own nonprofit, I Trust Him Ministries, a faith-based entity focused on at-risk youth.

“I talk about these young people who are at the corner of peril and promise, because I’m directly one of those kids,” he said. “And I went way up Peril Street.”

Rhodes was a spiritually sensitive youth raised amid suffering. By 13, he was dealing drugs, but the encouragement of a high-school counselor led him to college. He came to the ministry after becoming a single father of two sons, and now serves as “a father to a lot of kids.”

From his experience working with HIV in his community, Rhodes has heard countless renditions of the Sodom and Gomorrah story from people who see the disease as God’s blight upon homosexuals. In his eyes, however, “Everybody needs to be loved. You need to go where you’re going to be loved and feel comfortable and safe. … So this young man needs to find the best way to be transparent and communicate [his integrity]. How, I don’t know. But I know that in my community, I have my own cross to bear, since I started dealing with HIV, because it brought up so many issues about homosexuality that we don’t deal with.”

Mundy, public-relations director with the Sikh Temple, presented a more conservative viewpoint.

“First, have a look at why he wants to be gay. I will try my best to bring him back, through counseling and other things. If the person doesn’t change … I will let him go.”

Mundy came to the United States from India 30 years ago and spent years working farm labor before landing a job at IBM. No stranger to racial discrimination, he uses his role as board member of the Interfaith Service Bureau to promote the embracing of all faiths and cultures.

Yet despite his message of unity, Mundy claimed to have no experience with openly gay people in his community. If the issue arose, he said he would “advise him it’s not good in society. Even though gays are open in America, there are still lots of faiths and cultures against them.” He referenced the Fourth of July tragedy at Natoma Lake, where Satender Singh was fatally beaten at the alleged hands of two anti-gay Slavic Christians, as an example of what can befall someone even mistaken as a homosexual.

“They were dancing because they were enjoying themselves,” Mundy explained, “and the other group thought they were gay because they didn’t have any female with them. … But they were not gay.”

Mundy would not go so far as to break ties with someone because of their sexual orientation, however.

“We don’t stop them or say there’s no room for you. … We’ll try to fix the problem, but we will not ignore him completely, because he’s also a human being.”

Unperturbed by controversy, Moran, founder and minister of the Spiritual Life Center and a return guest to our roundtable, was sitting pretty with this question.

“I’m one who believes that homosexuality is not a choice,” he said. “I don’t remember the day that I chose heterosexuality. If it’s a choice, that would have been a big day in my life, and I think I would have remembered it! But it just was something that I always knew, and most of the people I know who are gay, they didn’t have a name for it, but they always knew. And they didn’t live in a society where it was safe to talk about it.

“So what I would counsel and advise this young man is this is the time, you’re an adult, and it’s time to be true to yourself. It’s time for you to define who you are, and not accept the definition your parents, your society, your culture, or your religion gave you.”

Having grown up Irish Catholic in the segregated South, Moran saw firsthand how religion can divide people. Finding his own faith meant believing in “a loving, inclusive God who doesn’t send people to heaven or hell based on their religion, race, nationality, culture or sexual orientation.”

Following this line of thinking, Moran threw down some Shakespeare—“To thine own self be true”—before pointing out that the young man in question is “probably not going to tell [his parents] anything they don’t know.”

He emphasized not drawing it out, but being as “upfront as possible about your fears … and willing to stand in your truth now, regardless of the consequences.”

And while sometimes parents do pull back for a while, Moran has found in the majority of cases that “there is a reconciliation, because that love between parent and child is so strong that once somebody acknowledges the truth of who you are, that opens up the opportunity for healing. Until that happens, there’s always this wound that nobody’s talking about, and it can’t heal until you shine the light of truth on it.”

“That’s the whole thing about that silence,” agreed Rhodes. “You’re all part of the conspiracy.” In his experience in the African-American community, there are men leading double lives, where “Monday night football with the fellas” is cover for a homosexual relationship.

“We need to sit down with homosexuals themselves and begin this discussion,” Rhodes insisted, stressing the importance of transparency in any kind of relationship.

Despite the potential difficulty of such honesty with one’s parents, according to Moran, “If you’re ever going to live an authentic life, this is the only way it’s going to happen.”

Besides, as I discovered with my sister, “There’s no such thing as a secret.”

“Everybody knows, but they don’t want to acknowledge it,” Moran noted. “So they sweep it under the rug. And some things are just too big to sweep under the rug.”