Coming Out

When Sandy Slater came out, her conservative mother shunned her. As time has passed, however, the two have reconnected despite very different beliefs. 

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Michael Lee: [00:00:00] When We Disagree is a show about arguments, how we have them, why we have them, and their impact on our relationships and ourselves. Have you ever been in a disagreement about a disagreement? It's so confusing. Let's say that you and a friend just saw a new, buzz worthy film and go grab a drink when the movie's over.

You liked the movie, but your friend didn't. To you, the argument you then had about the movie seemed a little more than just a good natured, friendly back and forth about acting and plots and soundtracks. The disagreement felt weirdly heated. And you felt the distance between you and your friend when you said goodbye that night, when the two of you talked again, you told your friend, you were sorry about the fight you had about the movie.

And your friend said, What fight? I didn't think we were in a fight. Did you think we were in a fight? And then you have a choice to dig in and fight about whether or not you thought you were in a fight or pretend like nothing happened and move on. Did you just invent a fight in your [00:01:00] head? I'm Michael Lee.

Professor of Communication and Director of the Civility Initiative at the College of Charleston. Our guest on When We Disagree is Sandy Slater, Associate Professor of History at the College of Charleston, who is originally from Eastern Kentucky. Sandy, tell us an argument story. 

Sandy Slater: Thank you, Mike, for having me today.

Um, mine is not more Of an argument so much as a fundamental disagreement about identity. Um, I was raised in a very conservative Appalachian household in eastern Kentucky, right wing as they come, um, evangelical, politically conservative and very traditional in terms of family values and expectations and the disagreement I would say.

As I clearly remember, is a phone call. I had confided into my sister, you know, quite privately expecting this to remain confidential, that I was queer. And, um, she had a disagreement with me, and she got really vengeful, I [00:02:00] suppose, and maybe had a bad attitude that day, who knows. But she told my parents, and I was in graduate school, I was on campus at the University of Kentucky, and I got a call from my mother.

And she said, very directly, Are you gay? And I had a moment of, I had to either claim myself or continue to hide as I had done since I'd, I'd known that I was, I was, um, queer since I was five in kindergarten, right? But I, you know, I was very quiet about it for a moment and I had a choice. So I said, yes, I am.

And I waited. And her response was, Okay, you know you're going to hell, and we can no longer have anything to do with you and this family. And she hung up. And the world fell apart around me. I had a very close family growing up, and this kind of 30 second phone call changed my whole [00:03:00] life. It changed the whole trajectory of my, uh, gosh, my career even, because, you know, I do queer studies now.

And part of that of course is rooted in trying to find my own identity in graduate school. But I didn't know what to do. I was 24. So I went to class and I kept going with my day and I waited and she never called back. And one day turned into two, turned into a week, turned into weeks, turned into months.

And in this period, I'd actually, um, I'd started seeing a woman, and it was very chaotic for me. It was my first queer relationship, and I was going through all kinds of turmoil around it. You know, having been raised so conservatively. Um, but I had been this raging liberal since I was young, and kind of the black sheep of the family already in terms of politics.

But, um, yeah. I was scared. You know, I was alone. I felt very alone in the world, [00:04:00] but after a few months, my mom called and we talked for a little while and it ended essentially the same way and we tried over a period of maybe 10 to 12 years to find our way back to one another. And in this period, I married the then girlfriend and it was an incredibly unhappy relationship and very abusive in lots of different ways.

But having been kind of thrust out of my family, I felt alone and that was the person I clung to, right? It was a clearly a very unhealthy coping mechanism. I had not been to therapy yet. I recognize it for what it actually is now. Fine. Um, but, You know, there were various attempts made over that 10 to 12 years to, um, redeem me back into the family, to try to find some peace.

Occasionally, my, my wife would come home with me and then it would always kind of spiral into these, these things. Um, but [00:05:00] in 2015, I had to have a massive spinal operation. And my marriage was falling apart but I was so determined to, you know, be committed to protecting that because it was defiance at this point.

Um, but my wife wouldn't take care of me when I was sick and I couldn't walk and it was tragic and all these sad things but my mother came down to South Carolina to take care of me and she stayed with me in my home and my wife was there of course but she stayed with me for six weeks. And never left my side, and even though, you know, we had not really, we'd had trouble for many years.

Um, we knew that we loved one another very much. So, in rebuilding that relationship with my mother over the course of that surgery, and, you know, finding some footing of my own, I eventually left that marriage that next year. It was fantastic, [00:06:00] fully liberated, living my best life, all the good things, right?

Um, but I was able to let her see that in my defiance, it wasn't a great marriage. And that's not to say, you know, that being queer is some great catastrophe. It was just that I couldn't share that with her to have any support. But she saw it when she came to take care of me in an open up conversation. Of our relationship, of the health of my marriage, of what I was going through, and all these other things, and we started to rebuild.

My mom's now my best friend in the world. Um, over the, the next, gosh, the next decade, we talked a lot. We talked about hard things. We talked about spirituality, of faith, politics. Um, I taught her about who I was. I learned about who she was, about her generational trauma. We had incredibly open conversations that were rooted in love and [00:07:00] respect.

And she still tells me I'm going to hell, right? That's her perspective, and I find it fine. It's hers, and it doesn't affect who I am. Um, she knows all of my beliefs, I know all of hers. And we have these, these kind of, um, this kindness now between us. That, even though our world views are so very different.

Um, that we've been able to build and maybe grow up together. My mom was, you know, 21 when she had, when she had us. So she was a baby too and, um, didn't have access to the same educational resources or mental health resources that I did. And as I was going through therapy and learning, I was talking to her about it and we found this commonality of healing together.

Um, there's a tremendous amount of pain. In that [00:08:00] relationship hers because of I suppose disappointments in expectations of what she wanted for her child you know she saw us as an extension of her success and was terribly embarrassed about what the neighborhood and the church would think about her queer daughter.

Um, and there's hurt too that she still hopes that it's a phase. Um, that when I say I'm queer now, I mean I've always been queer so I, I, I date men and women and sexually fluid and so whenever I'm dating men she'll be like, see I knew you weren't gay. And I'm like, wow, keep dreaming mother, keep dreaming, okay?

Um, but so we can joke about things now and it, it doesn't escalate. In the way that it used to, um, and we've talked a lot about it and one of the most powerful things is that I have a younger relative who came out and my mother said to me, she said, um, I will always love and support him because I don't want to make the same mistakes with him that I made with [00:09:00] you.

And that's, that's the goal. Right? Is learning and healing and becoming better people for it. So, it's not one disagreement. It's a lifetime of disagreement that we've been able to move past. I find a lot of comfort and companionship in my mother now. 

Michael Lee: I'll be honest with you, this is an A spellbinding, powerful, affecting story.

Oh, thank you. And I am at a bit of a loss as to which of the thousand questions I have in my head to ask first. I know, 

Sandy Slater: I should have brought in something a little bit more, uh, you know. No, no, no, no, 

Michael Lee: this is perfect. Workable for 15 minutes, 

Sandy Slater: I'm sorry. I brought in a whole lifetime of queer trauma. You have nothing, 

Michael Lee: nothing to apologize for.

And this is amazing. I'll start, maybe we start at the beginning. So, did you know On that, in that phone call, that 30 second phone call on the campus at the University of Kentucky, that when she said, are you gay? And [00:10:00] you answered, yes, I am. Did you know what the potential consequence 

Sandy Slater: was? Oh, I knew. We were raised in an evangelical Baptist household and, you know, there are a lot of rainbow flags in my family tree, but those relatives were treated with, um, with shame and whispers and condemnation and criticisms and just, just hellfire and brimstone.

Exactly what you would expect. And we heard, I mean, I was a child of the 80s. We grew up in HIV AIDS culture where there was so much homophobia built into society, um, that we heard vitriol against queer people. And that's why I'd stayed so quiet about it. I got the message very early on in life. that and I knew very early on that I was queer, but I just kept it to myself because the consequences would have been so destructive to my heart.

Um, so I had to choose for a very long time how to navigate that [00:11:00] world. And I did so at the cost of my own, um, identity. And, and, and freedom there, but I knew and, um, perhaps in hindsight, I should not have trusted my sister with this information, but it was, it was like, you know, an attempt to, to, to be seen, um, authentically.

Michael Lee: Your truth. 

Sandy Slater: Yeah. And I was struggling with it so much at the time and I desperately needed the support of my family. And I just, I was hoping, I don't know, you, you know, you just kind of, in those moments you zone out and you. Listen to what your gut tells you to do, and you go with it, and you know life will

Michael Lee: When, and stretching it a little chronologically here, So, several months go by after the 32nd phone call in which your mom told you you were going to hell, And day after day after day goes by, Did at some point during that period of time, [00:12:00] You start to give up hope that she would not call back and that was actually the end of your relationship or maybe the last time you would ever speak.

Sandy Slater: I think I had absolutely moments of despair and fear. Um, but I also didn't want to give up hope because my family had always been. This is one of the beautiful things about rural communities and we grew up in a coal mining family and farming family and we were all so close knit and grew up one or two haulers.

the time. So the family meant something more encompassing than just one relationship. But what it didn't do, was it made me cling, perhaps in unhealthy ways to something that wasn't good for me because I didn't feel like I had something else and that's the takeaway grief that I have now is that that was the consequence but I always held out hope and as those years pass and all the conflict year after year and it sometimes was It's brutal and cruel [00:13:00] and screaming and just so much pain inflicted upon one another, or me rejection so much of what I grew up in.

That I had, I lost hope periodically, but I would always come back to love and healing and that there was, there's always hope as long as everybody's alive. Um, there's this thing in my family, it's terrible that many people have died not speaking to one another. And to me that's, I mean I grew up in Hatfield McCoy country, we, we live and die by our feuds.

To me was just the worst case scenarios that there would be nothing good come out of it in the end. But I've learned. That as hard as it was for me, that phone call was worse for her. And I'll tell you why I'd had 24 years to [00:14:00] prepare for that phone call. I knew who I was and I knew what was happening with me.

She was taken by surprise. I think, although later on, we've had conversations where she was a little suspicious. I mean, I was rocking a pretty awesome ball cap and flannel in college, but, um, So I, you know, I think she just didn't want to believe it, but for her. All of her dreams, everything she knew about me was gone in an instant and I think it was more catastrophic for her.

I think it, the rejection was intense for me, but the collapse of who she thought she knew, um, was maybe, you know, equally bad. Terrible in, in some ways. I mean, um, but what I, I've always tell my students, and I, I teach Queer America all the time, is they, you know, a lot of queer students will come out to me for the first time.

And that's a beautiful blessing and a, a privileged place to be and to hear their stories and to be a safe space for them to reach out because I didn't really [00:15:00] have one. But I always tell them, When they ask me, how do I tell my family? What do I do? I always say be patient because you've been dealing with this and struggling and wrestling and suffering and you know all the things that come with that your whole life.

And you're maybe a little bit more prepared. Give your parents, your loved ones, your community, your A little bit of space to come to terms with it to get caught up with where you're at mentally with that identity and you know ideally everybody would love everybody else and celebrate one another and we wouldn't have all of this prejudice and hostility and homophobia and all of the things, um, but the reality is a lot of people are not going to have that initial welcoming response and that can either devastate you or it can make you stronger.

But it does teach you the lesson of patience and waiting and communication. [00:16:00] 

Michael Lee: Can I ask you a follow up about the patience piece? Sure. And then I want to talk about the movement of your mom, you and your mom's relationship. But the patience piece, did it ever exhaust with you and your mom? I mean, in other words, how many times can you hear you're going to hell?

Oh, 

Sandy Slater: Mike, I hear it every week and I'm still fine, right? I mean, I mean, but honestly, I mean, it's, it's how much you, you internalize what they're saying is truth. Um, if you hear somebody say something that you absolutely don't believe, you just, you, you brush it off and you go on with your day. But if there's a part of you that believes it, that's where the pain comes from.

Um, I, you know, I've, I've come to terms with this identity and um, and found a lot of happiness and peace in it. And so, my mom will say it to me. But, that's her truth, not mine. And her opinion is not my business. If it affects me, yes. Like if there's some genuine harm being done to me. But at this point, [00:17:00] it's, I think this is generational, too.

I think the older you get, you just let your parents say things sometimes, and you just smile and nod because the world changes. And they're not a part of that change sometimes. 

Michael Lee: You just see it as this anachronism. 

Sandy Slater: I just see it as just like a wacky commentary by mom and then I'll say, Oh, what's for dinner?

And then it just keep moving because I've made, I've made my piece with it and I know who I am. I love myself. I don't believe those things, but it's also not my place to. You know, hurt her because she's never going to change. I'm never going to change. So you make peace with it. You can't go into the world.

I mean, she's changed a tremendous amount in terms of her world view. Absolutely. Um, and I always tell her, I'm like, Mom, you're a, you're a secret feminist and you just don't tell people. I always just think, oh my gosh, she's terrified the church will find out. But, um, you know, it's, it's what you believe to be true.[00:18:00] 

Michael Lee: Yeah, 

Sandy Slater: and I don't believe that to be true. I don't believe, you know, so I don't, I'm not flustered by it anymore. It used to cause me tremendous heartache because I was so steeped in that literal hell ideology. Um, but now that I'm older, I always think that seems like where all the fun people are going. I mean.

Can we get a group on for this? I don't know. 

Michael Lee: Is that still a thing? Um, one of the things that's really striking about your story is Your mom's ability to expose herself and spend time with you and that the twin narrative of the The fall and rise again of your relationship with your mom Juxtapose against the rise and fall of your marriage And so as I'm hearing it and correct me if I'm wrong in the details Your mom can't even stand to be around you on the phone after you've come out for more than 30 seconds but [00:19:00] then when you have Spinal surgery your then wife who doesn't want or can't take care of you is then replaced in a caregiving role By your mother who can now spend time spend serious time quality time caring for you and helping you back to health 

Sandy Slater: I know it sounds very dramatic.

I should write a book about it. 

Michael Lee: I would I would think about it well, and the 

Sandy Slater: marriage was quite scandalous, so I think it would be a bit of a bestseller, but Well, I mean so over the years we had made attempts to reconcile Never for any, it only lasted maybe a few weeks, a few months at a time. I would go visit home, sometimes I would bring my wife and that would always, you know, there were, there were periods where we tried, but inevitably it fell apart.

And, but you know, you asked me earlier about my patience too, and the fact that we always kept trying, um, even after, Some really awful blow ups around these things and, and storming off and occasionally, you know, my mom would try to visit me and this [00:20:00] back and forth, but we tried, but we never found any longevity of communication.

It was always disrupted by this kind of chaotic underpinning of deep philosophical disbelief. But also, I mean, if my mother genuinely believes these things, so for her, she's experiencing a tremendous amount of grief and sorrow because in her heart, she still believes my eternity is going to be this. And so I have an enormous amount of compassion for her now that she's struggling with that.

Because as a parent, that's heartbreaking. But yeah, I mean, so. I kind of lost my family for a while and part of that was due to the fact that my wife was a little unpleasant and made things a lot worse and kind of exacerbated the divide in lots of ways. But yeah, I look back on it in the same way is that the marriage kind of stood in as a temporary placeholder for this larger structure that I had.

[00:21:00] Um, but now there's, there's still this idea. I'm not allowed to bring home another woman. Right. Well, I mean, it's fine. Um, so there's still a bit of separation between my life and their life. And we've made peace with that too. Like, I don't need to tell them everything that's going on in my life or who I'm seeing and all of this.

They don't ask the question so much. Um, Mom gets super excited when I'm dating a man. Cause, you know, conversion to heterosexuality as if that were a thing. But yeah, so now I've found kind of a middle ground in between where I learned, I learned privacy for one, but also not every relationship can handle the absolute truth and that's okay too.

Michael Lee: It's my last question. What do you, what in your mom's attitude or beliefs or behaviors has changed? Because as I sit here listening to you, [00:22:00] the you're going to hell comment doesn't sound like it's gone away, but she'll spend time with you now. She loves you. You love her. And y'all are best friends and mother and daughter.

Oh 

Sandy Slater: my gosh, I go home as much as I possibly can two to three times a year. We talk on the phone every single morning. Um, and I'll tell you what's changed. I think our rigidity changed. I, we were locked into these aggressive standpoints of defending not just ourselves, but our entire faith and belief system.

And it was so clash oriented for so long that it stood in the way of genuine communication. And what happened after I was more honest about My marriage and about being queer and what that had meant that it wasn't all perfect and happy and all of these different things and that she could talk about some of her more liberal ideas about things and it just stopped us from being so, [00:23:00] just, I don't know how you would even say that, just so defensive and antagonistic with one another.

But I think as I learned more I would kind of sneak in parts of conversation of here's what I'm teaching in class. Here's what I learned in therapy. How did this affect you? And then I would ask her questions about me and her childhood and her beliefs and ideologies respectfully. So that I could learn why she felt this way about so many things in life.

Not just about queer, but everything under the sun. We talk about everything. And we created, um, A safe space of love. And when you have a safe space where you know that there's unconditional love, you can talk about everything because you know that you're not going to let go of each other ever again. And we've had consistent communication and love and support since 2015.

[00:24:00] And I can't express how grateful I am for that. It's not a perfect relationship, but I wouldn't trade my mother for anybody else's in the world. 

Michael Lee: Sandy Slater. Thank you so much for being on When We Disagree. 

Sandy Slater: Thank you very much for having me. 

Michael Lee: When We Disagree is recorded at the College of Charleston with creator and host Michael Lee.

Recording and sound engineering by Jesse Kunz and Lance Laidlaw. Reach out to us at whenwedisagree at gmail. com.