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Coming Out, Coming Home: Helping Families Adjust to a Gay or Lesbian Child resources

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248  Appendix Jersey. Families were recruited via advertisements in local newspapers (n = 21) and on Craigslist (n =23), a Web site of electronic classified advertise- ments. Fifteen families were recruited from Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), which is a support group for parents of gays and lesbians. The remaining six families were recruited through high school and community service organizations that ran support and social groups for gay youth. I would give talks at PFLAG meetings and community organi- zations about coming out to parents and, at the end of each talk, I would describe the study and distribute flyers, asking the audience members to con- sider volunteering. Interested potential respondents were instructed to contact me to sched- ule an interview. Parents were asked to check with their children to be sure they were willing to be interviewed. If young gay men or women contacted me asking to participate, they were instructed to have their parent call or e-mail me to arrange an interview. This was to ensure that parents were indeed willing to participate. The interviews were done in person and by telephone from the fall of2003 until the spring of2005. The Youth Thirty-five of the youth were female and thirty were male. Forty-one of the youth were white, seventeen were black or biracial, six were Latino, and one was Japanese American, with parents born in Japan. Their ages ranged from fourteen through twenty-five, but only four were under eighteen. Their mean age was twenty-one. The time they were out to their parents ranged from6 months to9 years with a mean of3.8 years;61.5 percent of the youth described experiencing mental health symptoms of anxiety or depression before coming out. The Parents Fifty-nine mothers and seventeen fathers participated in the study. Fifty-four parents were white, sixteen were black, five were Latino, and one mother was Japanese. The parents’ ages ranged from thirty-four to sixty-nine, with a mean age of fifty-one;53 percent reported symptoms of anxiety and or depres- sion after discovering that their son or daughter was gay or lesbian and44 08_lasala14382_app.indd 248 3/10/10 1:12:10 PM

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