Therapist advises man on whether to tell parents about childhood gay bullying

A gay man in his 50s who endured severe bullying in school wrote a tell-all letter to his school’s director after a recent reunion and found the director’s gracious response healing. He has shared the letter with a supportive brother but is unsure whether to show it to his parents, who are in their 70s and say they “didn’t know” he was suffering, Lori Gottlieb writes in the Ask the Therapist column (Jan.

29, 2026). The reader says his family accepted him after he came out in his 20s, yet his parents openly acknowledged he was “different” from toddlerhood and often criticized his “un-boyish” behavior. He recalls older kids using a gay slur as early as age 7 and his mother’s shocked reaction when he asked what the slur meant.

He is tempted to have a “warts and all” conversation to understand their perspective. Gottlieb advises first sitting with three questions: What am I hoping for? What happens if I don’t get it? And who is this conversation for — the younger version of me or the adult version? She notes the director’s reply felt healing because he saw and honored the writer’s pain, while the parents were present during the childhood and are therefore the source of a different, more fraught need for acknowledgment.

Gottlieb suggests that the parents’ earlier claims of ignorance may have been a form of protective denial, driven by fear — fear of what it meant if their child was gay and fear about how others might treat the family.

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