‘Modern Love Podcast’: Does My Grandma Need to Know I’m Gay?

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From “The New York Times,” I’m Anna Martin. This is Modern Love. Today on the show author and advice columnist, John Paul Brammer. John Paul has built his career answering people’s burning questions about love and relationships in his column Hola Papi.

Hola, Papi, I suck at first dates. Hola, Papi, is my crush just leading me on? Hola, Papi, is it a bad idea to live with my ex? Hola, Papi, I came out. No one cares.

The column runs in New York Magazine, but it didn’t start there. It began on a blog started by Grindr.

Grindr is an app that is known for young gay professionals seeking love. And I’m putting that nicely. [LAUGHS]

Is that their official tagline?

Not at all.

Young gay professionals.

That’s what I tell people — that’s what I tell straight people when I’m back in Oklahoma.

To decode what John Paul’s saying, Grindr is a hookup app mostly used by gay men. And to him, that felt like the perfect place to source a ton of problems.

I’m using the inexhaustible well of gay drama here. So I was like, oh my God, I’ll never run out of stuff to write about.

What kind of questions did you get?

There were ones that were as simple as, like, I moved to a big city and I still can’t find friends or a boyfriend and I’m lonely. But then there were ones that were really quite dire, like oh, I’m into my coworker and he’s giving me some signs that he might be into me as well, but we’re in a country where homosexuality is illegal and I don’t know what to do. And I’m sitting there, like, I’m sitting there in a coffee shop in Chelsea like, I don’t know how to answer this.

Wow. I mean, so how would you respond?

I don’t want to try to pass myself off as a therapist or an expert, but I kind of drew on my own background of, OK, well, who are the people who gave me advice when I was first coming into the gay community? I’d just come out. I was getting the lay of the land. Who were my mentors? And it was really informal in Oklahoma. They were just guys at the gay bars that I met and there were old queens there who would kind of take me under their wing and be like, here’s how we do things. Here’s the kind of guys to look out for. And I thought, OK, I can do that. I can be an informal mentor figure that you meet at a bar.

OK, so John Paul, before we get into the essay you chose to read today, I wanted to ask you about a question you got recently that’s very timely, because it’s Mother’s Day this week. It was from someone who called herself Helicopter Mom. And she writes that her son is 29, he has his first real boyfriend, and she feels super protective of him. So the question she asks you is, what is the best way I can support my son while he’s navigating his first relationship?

Yeah. It just sounded like she was really afraid of the human condition, which is that in the human condition, we’re vulnerable creatures. We’re going to get hurt in life. And I think that when we love someone, especially a child, I have to imagine, and you take a look at the world that they’re stepping into and you just wish that you could shield them from things and you wish that you could protect them from harm.

But making peace with that is sort of a — it can be really difficult to do. But I think trying to make the case to this mom that we learn to live by living, and it’s through disappointment and hardship that we open ourselves up to wisdom and change and growth.

Do you remember a specific moment where your own mom or grandma was overpowered by their protective impulse for you, kind of like Helicopter Mom in this letter?

Oh gosh, yeah. And it’s not super characteristic of my mom. But I grew up in rural Oklahoma, very rural area. And I went to college like an hour and a half away. And so I was able to visit all the time. And so I finally got a writing job after I graduated that was going to take me to DC. And I was going to move pretty far away. I mean, that’s a big leap from rural Oklahoma.

And I think that it made my mom kind of nervous, because both she and my dad accompanied me to my first trip to DC. And I was going to meet my roommates, but my mom just had to go with me, like absolutely. It was like, no, I want to make sure that you’re going to be in a place that’s safe and I want to see these people for myself. And something about having five roommates around my age in this new big city really spooked her, I think. And so I did bring my mom, and believe it or not, they did not ask me to live with them.

That is so sweet of your mom to support you, even if she’s nervous about your decision to move. And John Paul, you’re actually kind of helping me out, because that story reminds me of the Modern Love essay you chose to read today.

Absolutely.

It’s by Kevin Hershey. But in his case, Kevin is watching his grandmother make a big decision that he has to accept. And like your mom, Kevin’s way of supporting his grandmother through her decision is by being there for her along the way. The essay’s called, “Young, Gay, and Single Among The Nuns and Widows.”

And before we hear the essay, do you think you could come up with an Hola Papi pen name for Kevin? Kind of like Helicopter Mom. I know I’m putting you on the spot. I know you can do it. I can also brainstorm with you.

OK, yeah, so my mind immediately needs to play with the nun aspect of the whole thing. So —

What about Getting Nun, but it’s N-U-N, like not having sex, but then —

Oh, that’s a really, really good one. I’m jealous that that one didn’t come to my brain. Yes, I mean, it has to be Getting Nun.

Getting Nun. The Hola Papi pen name for Kevin Hershey is Getting Nun. That’s again N-U-N. It’ll make sense once we hear John Paul read the essay. How about you take it away?

“Young, Gay, and Single Among the Nuns and Widows” by Kevin Hershey.

When I graduated from college in Portland, Oregon, eight years ago, I dreamed of taking my Spanish major and spirit of adventure and moving abroad, where I would quickly acquire a gay lover who would introduce me to new languages, foods, and sex. Instead, I moved back home to Saint Paul, Minnesota, and into my Irish grandmother’s Catholic senior living apartment, where she and I barely spoke and where she, at least, didn’t eat. At 90, having lived a long and healthy life, she had decided to die by starvation, and I had decided, at my mother’s request, to be there for her.

My grandmother had moved to the United States from Ireland 65 years earlier. While she spoke with a thick brogue and still chose tea over coffee, she did not glory in tales of the beautiful country she had left behind. Sean and Jimmy hated Ireland, she would often say about my brother and cousin, who had studied there in the early 2000s. It rained the whole time and their feet were never dry.

Of course, all I heard is how much they love their semesters in Ireland. They never complained about having wet feet. But my grandmother had left that dank, gray island, brutalized by British imperialism, and never looked back.

She landed in New York City, the bright and bustling opposite of her slow, sea washed homeland. She wore pink linen pantsuits and turquoise floral tops, never beige Irish wools or long, plaid skirts. She preferred pasta with red sauce to potatoes and brown bread. And then having reached 90, she had decided to die with seemingly as much confidence and determination as when she left her home country. Having been healthy her entire life and still blessed with the full ability to walk, talk, and cook, my grandmother stopped eating.

There was no discussion in the family as to whether we would force feed her or somehow coerce her into living more years that her body could have managed. She simply remained in her chair, draped in rosaries, waiting for what she believed to be her next step, heaven.

My grandmother’s matter of fact death announcement came a month after my college graduation. As the jobless and largely aimless person I was back then, except for the aim to experience new languages, foods, and sex, I became the most obvious candidate to be there for my grandmother during her final weeks.

And so for the next six weeks, I spent my days shouting over the TV — she was no longer using her hearing aids — as she peacefully lay in bed and starved herself to death. In the morning, we would listen to public radio. Or I would. She probably couldn’t hear. And I would make eggs and toast and put them on a plate for her, knowing that she would wordlessly refuse to eat. Within an hour, I would be eating them myself.

I would follow a recipe for Irish soda bread I found on yellowing newspaper in her drawer, only to eat half of it myself and pass the rest out to the neighbors, mostly nuns who were thrilled to get bread from a real Irish kitchen.

In the evening, an old Italian priest would knock on the door and deliver the blessed wafer, which my grandmother took solemnly on her tongue. I took it too, not because I believe it to be the flesh of Christ, but because I knew it was the only way to share a meal with my grandmother.

Needless to say, my living situation was not at all conducive to gay sex or most other sins, so I had none to confess before swallowing the wafer. I quickly learned how the human body can function with little food. For several days, we would walk together down the hall to daily Catholic mass. While the other mass attendants wore threadbare slippers and even bathrobes, my grandmother even in the face of death wore suits splashed with tropical patterns and a glistening gold watch at her wrist.

Far from my gay South American fantasy, I found myself single and surrounded by the pasty white faces of nuns and widows. No men were in my daily life other than the bloody, crucified, well-muscled, and oddly sexy Christ hanging above the altar.

Despite how close we were, especially as I saw her through to her end, my grandmother didn’t know I was gay, and I didn’t tell her.

Within weeks, she could no longer get dressed up or walk down the hall to mass or leave treats for the neighbors. Her pearly white skin turned dishwater gray. Her piercing green eyes became as cloudy as the sea she had once crossed.

Perhaps out of religious fervor or simply a need to cover up the smell of decay, the priest lit a tall, red candle depicting Jesus with his crowned heart of flame popping out of his chest. Like lace curtains barely concealing Irish poverty, the rose scented candle did little to hide the aroma of death that permeated the room.

One day as my grandmother lay in bed, the funeral of Margaret Thatcher flashed across the screen. Having not spoken in days, my grandmother nodded at Thatcher’s face on the screen and said, “I won’t be seeing her in heaven.”

Like many Irish people, my grandmother had never forgiven Margaret Thatcher for her hard line stance on keeping the North of Ireland in the United Kingdom, particularly her infamous indifference toward Bobby Sands, who died on hunger strike while interned by Thatcher’s government. I don’t know if my grandmother saw the parallel that, like the Freedom Fighter Sands, she too was on a hunger strike, against aging in her case.

My grandmother stayed alive for six weeks without food, almost as long as the 66 days Sands lived on hunger strike at age 27. Her death left me again jobless and without purpose, single, living with my parents, and full of that driftless feeling that you’re afraid will never pass when you’re in your early 20s.

I tried my best via Grindr to make it seem like I hadn’t just spent the past several months in a Catholic senior living community going to daily mass while seeing my grandmother to her death.

I never told most of the men I met about that, neither then nor in the years that followed.

On my first date with Matin, though, I immediately opened up in a way I never had before. Something in his warm, brown eyes said that I didn’t have to lie. As we walked through Central Park, he told me lovingly about his Muslim Iranian parents and the various foods, prohibitions, and celebrations that seemed to govern their lives. I knew that me, he was no stranger to prayers and incense, candles, prayer beads, and rituals for rituals sake.

We shared a kiss in the park, and I invited him for a drink. He said he would love to but that he had promised to bring his grandmother Iranian food in the hospital. “There’s no way she’s eating the American hospital food,” he said with a laugh. “If I don’t go, she’ll starve.” As I watched him walk away to fulfill his family duty, I was filled with a calm curiosity that I had never felt after a first kiss.

Years later, Matin and I have taught each other our grandmother’s cooking. He has filled our kitchen with scents of saffron and sumac, and he has learned to love Irish soda bread with Kerrygold butter. Despite his halal diet, we don’t let a Saint Patrick’s Day pass without blood puddings, bangers, and Guinness.

My grandmother died not knowing I was gay. It’s not that I thought she would object. It just didn’t come up, and I didn’t raise it. Matin’s grandmother, still living, doesn’t know he’s gay either. She comes from a country where homosexuality can be a death penalty crime. Mine left a land where Catholicism once ruled that then became the first nation to legalize same sex marriage through popular vote.

Many straight people can’t imagine hiding a core part of their identity from their loved ones, and some gay people would surely consider Matin and me to be cowards for not being honest with our grandmothers, for not trusting them with the knowledge of our true selves and say it isn’t real love if you’re keeping such a major part of yourself hidden.

My only response is that love is complicated and diverse. In many immigrant families, it’s intertwined with duty and care. For Matin, love is in the passed down Persian rugs, the five daily prayers, and the perfectly browned rice at the bottom of the pot. For me, it was being there to comfort my dying Irish grandmother as she chose to leave in the manner she wanted, cursing Margaret Thatcher’s name to the end.

John Paul, you read that so beautifully.

I mean, it’s almost bizarre how much I recognize in my own life here.

After the break, John Paul on the things he never told his grandmother and why she still knew him better than anyone else. Stay with us.

OK, so John Paul, you just read the essay “Young, Gay, and Single Among the Nuns and Widows” by Kevin Hershey. And you said that there were some striking similarities between Kevin’s story and your own. Tell me more about that.

So I come from a Mexican American background and a very Catholic background as well. And I never came out to either my abuela or my abuelo before they died. I tried to come out a couple times to my abuela, but she kind of had selective dementia where she would just kind of forget certain things. So one time I kind of ventured and said, I think I’m gay. And she turned to me and she was like, you know, mijo, Rachel Maddow is a handsome woman and then just moved on and kind of forgot again.

What a response.

Yeah, an all timer, for sure. And then also strangely, my abuela, also a very strong willed woman, she chose to die in kind of the same manner that Kevin’s grandmother chose to die. She just was — she was very stubborn and she was like, nope, I’m done, and she stopped eating. And we kind of believed her, because when she says that she feels a certain way or that she’s going to do something, it is impossible to change her mind. And so we knew that that’s how she was going to go. And obviously, there’s just a lot here that I was like, wow, that’s from my life.

I want to go back to this moment where you said you kind of tried to come out to your abuela. Did you say several times? So that time that you mentioned was not the only time?

Like once or twice, but it was always a probing question. Similarly to Kevin, I kind of thought this isn’t something that I really need them to know. We were so set in what our daily lives look like and the way that we knew each other and the kind of love that we shared. And I understand what he’s saying when he said that some would say that that’s cowardly or that she never knew the true me. But I just don’t see it that way, because I think that with my family and with my grandparents, I almost inhabited a truer me than I do here in New York, where I’m kind of out and about.

Tell me more about what you mean by that.

The moment when you really come out to a beloved family member, that’s a big moment, right? It’s a moment where you’re like, yes, we have entered a new phase of our relationship. But I guess what I’m talking about is more subtle and kind of just more ingrained into the everyday nature of things.

And so there are facets of me back when I lived at home and with my grandparents that I haven’t communicated to anyone else on Earth. And I think it’s just as sacred, it’s just as important, and it’s just as central to who I am than any other part of it. And so I shared something very special with my grandparents that I just never felt the need to bring this other part into it, I guess.

Is there a moment you can remember where you felt like you were being your true self with your grandparents, like a self that people in your community in New York don’t see as much?

So when I was a kid, my grandparents, my abuelos, they were poor their whole lives, but the way they lived their life looked very different than the way that I live mine. And so seeing what they did to cope and seeing the little life hacks that they would implement in their house that was sort of falling apart and the way they would steal food from buffets, which it sounds like you wouldn’t be able to steal food from buffets, but they found a way.

No, I mean, I know exactly what you’re saying. Bringing Tupperware to the Golden Corral. I understand that. Yeah, totally.

Exactly. So little things like that. And that’s a huge part of my identity. That’s what my childhood looked like. And when I meet people here in New York — and just the other day, I was at this nice literary party thing and having a really good time. There is this aspect of where I come from and my past, the things I’ve seen and the things I know and the things I understand that another person here just wouldn’t be able to wrap their brains around.

And it’s something that I don’t really communicate to just everyone. And so that was a version of me that my grandparents fostered and that they knew really well and that they said hello to every morning. And it’s intimate. It really is. And it’s important.

Yeah. I mean, I love what you’re saying. Your sexuality is just one piece of who you are and your grandparents knew all these other parts of you so deeply and so well. I think that’s really beautifully put. So I guess I wonder, do you think we have a duty to show our true selves to the people we love?

Yeah. So I would actually say that it kind of goes both ways. So when we come from immigrant backgrounds or we come from, in my case, my abuelos, they spoke Spanish. They knew a lot about Mexico. That’s where their families were from. There was a lot I didn’t know about them. So it wasn’t just like, oh, I’m gay and I’m keeping the secret from them. There was just so much about the intricacies of their inner lives that were not made privy to me.

And there is a narrative in place where it’s just like, oh, the immigrant grandparents suffered so that their grandchildren could have a nice, comfortable life. And in that narrative, their lives get kind of papered over and they get utilized as a way to be like, oh, well it was all leading up so that I could live the life I have. And so I’m not saying that it’s narcissistic or self-absorbed or anything.

But I am saying that your grandparents probably also have things about themselves that you haven’t seen and that you don’t know. And so it’s not like you’re the only one holding a secret or whatever. We all have things that go uncommunicated even with people that we love. And so I would say no, I don’t think that that makes you cowardly. I think that that makes you just a complicated human being like everyone is.

Is there something that you learned about your own abuela maybe later on in life that surprised you, that kind of jolted you out of that narrative?

Oh gosh. Well, it’s difficult, because — and I won’t speak for every Mexican family, but at least in my case, my grandparents were fabulists. So every time I talked to them about their origin stories or where they come from, it just changed every single time. I’m pretty sure one time my abuelo just completely ripped off the plot of “Coco” to talk about who my great grandfather.

It’s a great movie, yeah. It’s a great movie.

Yeah he was just like, oh, and mijo, your great grandfather, he was an amazing musician and he fought in the revolution and he played for the new president. But no, it was so hard to get the truth out of them. But it’s funny. We do have running jokes about abuelito, yeah, he was probably gay. I remember he passed not too long ago, like a few months ago.

And my mom sent this picture to us all of my abuelito in the military. And he is sitting on a bed with another man and he looks happier than we have ever seen him in our lives. And we’re all just like, man, that’s why he loved the military, huh? He was just like — all to say there are things that we just don’t know about our grandparents. He was so into fashion. One thing that we quote all the time is that one time my sister wore this striped shirt or something and my abuelito was just like, stripes? Really?

No. Grandparents can be so savage. They can really be — they can just cut you to your core. But it’s interesting what you’re saying. Those moments where our grandparents give us a glimpse into who they are as people. Those comments or those quips or those stories or whatever, they make us realize there’s so much we don’t know about them even if we’re super close with them. In the author Kevin Hershey’s case, even if we live with them, even if we care for them. There’s still so much we have to discover about the people we’re closest to. I think that’s a really important thing, a really beautiful thing to remember.

Absolutely.

John Paul, thank you so much for this conversation. What a treat.

Thank you for having me. It was a blast.

Modern Love is produced by Julio Botero, Christina Djossa, Reva Goldberg, Davis Land, and Emily Lang. It’s edited by our executive producer, Jen Poyant, Reva Goldberg, and Davis Land. The Modern Love theme music is by Dan Powell. Original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Rowan Niemisto, Carole Sabouraud, and Pat McCusker.

This episode was mixed by Daniel Ramirez. Our show was recorded by Maddy Masiello and Nick Pitman. Digital production by Mahima Chablani and Nell Gallogly. The Modern Love column is edited by Daniel Jones. Miya Lee is the editor of Modern Love projects. I’m Anna Martin. Thanks for listening.

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