Face Homosexuality With Facts, Not Fear : Prejudice: Mother wishes she would have showed understanding about her son’s sexuality 25 years ago.

If homosexuality had been understood, rather than feared, 25 years ago, our son, Jeff, would not have felt compelled to lock himself in a dark closet for secrecy. At 18, he confided in no one, ran from school to job to anonymity and, finally, to our home in the wee hours of the morning.

If homosexuality had been acknowledged as reality, rather than ignored as taboo, perhaps our son would not have been on a collision course on the freeways and in our living room. He had numerous accidents and we had even more arguments.

If homosexuals had been regarded as ordinary members of the community, rather than persecuted as misfits, perhaps our daughter, Judi, would not have become hysterical when she learned of her brother’s gayness. To this day, she weeps in fear for him.

If homosexuality did not raise threatening questions to men and women of ignorance, I would not have nightmares about gay bashing and hassling, about skinheads and rednecks.

When I was a child, homosexuality was not included in polite conversation, and thus, could not be understood. When Judi and Jeff were children, it was included in conversation long enough to be ridiculed and rejected.

When we confronted our son’s gayness more than 21 years ago, the rejection and the ridicule, the fears and the hysteria converged. “Of course we love you, son, but we hate what you are doing with your life!”

What a preposterous conflict, spoken in heat and darkness, love and terror. My husband and I, possessors of half a dozen university degrees between us, knew nothing about homosexuality, except its myths, and were snug and smug in our ignorance. We responded to our son’s cry for help from the depths of that mythology. We sent him to a therapist expecting that--abracadabra--he would be changed into a conforming heterosexual. He was not; it does not happen.

It is said that you never get to know anyone until you live with that person. I can honestly say you don’t know (spell that “understand”) homosexuality until you live with it. Those who wish to misunderstand me can protest that I am advocating a homosexual liaison to achieve understanding. Wrong! We must allow the word, the idea, the concept and the people into our minds and our hearts: live with them, study them, worry with them, absorb them.

The first fact we will learn is that no one chooses to live a homosexual lifestyle. Who would choose rejection over acceptance, a slap over a hug? We are not talking experimentation here, we are discussing lifestyle.

Studies have not discovered a single, clearly defined cause of sexual orientation: biology or chemistry; heredity or environment; a combination of all four, perhaps; but choice is not a scientific option. One may choose to be celibate or sexually active, but the attraction that one person has for another does not have an objectively definable origin.

When our grown son reminisced: “I knew I was different as a kid but I did not know why . . . I preferred to be like all the others, but I didn’t know how,” choice never entered the discussion. Handsome, friendly and attractive, Jeff had girlfriends, slept with some, hated it all, but continued to try to conform until he matured into an understanding of himself.

We can help our gay children out of the closet into society’s mainstream, to participate as equals in school and at work. We can encourage them to make career and social choices without the coloration of rejection and ostracism.

But we cannot do it alone. They must know that the world of their peers is supportive and not hostile; that their teachers’ patience will not run out when she/he suspects a nonconformer; that their clergymen and women will be kind, sensitive and unpunishing; that there will be no graffiti and no unsavory jokes from friends, family and strangers.

Where do we begin to make first-class citizens of our gay children?

When the San Diego city school teachers, nurses and counselors recently met to learn how to help students with their curiosity and fears concerning homosexuality, Virginia Uribe, a prominent counselor to homosexual students, explained, “We are trying to demystify the whole subject of homosexuality.”

That is precisely where to begin.

For the parents who fear that education will promote homosexuality or encourage--even seduce--their children into the gay lifestyle, the facts will dissuade them, if they listen. Supporting children in their efforts to confront their own realities does not lead to AIDS. A truly enlightened system that will help children understand homosexuality will also help them understand how to avoid AIDS and will guarantee their being far more knowledgeable than their parents and, inevitably, more healthy.

Long ago, Sigmund Freud wrote to a troubled mother, “Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it a variation of the sexual function. . . .” In 1973, the American Psychiatric Assn. caught up with Freud and took homosexuality off the “illness” list.

It is time now for the rest of us to catch up. We can destroy the distortions of mythology with a massive attack of facts.