In 1977 a law was passed in Florida which banned discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodation based on sexuality. This law was an important step towards respecting gay and lesbian civil rights. However, immediately after it was passed, Anita Bryant, a former beauty queen and a born-again Christian, started a group called Save Our Children to overturn the law. This group based their campaign on the slogan, “Homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit.” They claimed that the bill would allow gay teachers into schools creating dangerous role models for kids. The Save Our Children campaign stirred up so much fear that six months later they were able to repeal the gay-rights ordinance by a vote of more than two-to-one. This led to a wave of repeals and gay rights defeats in other states.
The blatant fear mongering and cruelty of the Save Our Children campaign incensed me. I wanted to do something to show the false logic of their campaign. It occurred to me that if people were afraid of the effect of having a gay role model influencing a child as a teacher, then there couldn’t be a more important gay role model than having a gay parent. So, in 1979 I decided to show realistic and positive gay role models by finding families raising children in openly gay homes and asking them to tell their story.
In the late 1970s there weren’t a lot of families raising children in openly gay homes. There was so much hostility, as well as legal issues to consider, that very few families were brave enough to take the risk of openly raising their kids as gay parents. But I managed to find some, and A Secret I Can’t Tell follows five families raising children in homes where one or both parents were not hiding their homosexuality. This book was first published in 1983, but the publisher went bankrupt six months later and the book was barely distributed. I am republishing the book now in 2022, with an update from many of the children, because these heartfelt stories give insight into the intense pressures and prejudice that gay and lesbian families were subjected to at that time.
Perhaps people assume that because I wrote this book I must be gay or the child of a gay parent. That’s not the case. I grew up in a reform Jewish family in a very diverse neighborhood in Cincinnati, Ohio. I find prejudice and injustice deeply disturbing, whether that has to do with race, religion, sexuality, or any other unreasonable bias. And this country has a long tradition, still going on today, of vilifying those people who don’t fit the norm. The culture wars have shifted somewhat, but it seems that it is still easy to generate fear and hate using the touchstones of race, religion or sexuality.
A lot has been written recently about White privilege. That’s the idea that White people have no concept of the difficulties that Black people have to deal with, because they are afforded such a different, much more privileged experience throughout their life. But there is also something that I would call heterosexual privilege. In 1979 I went into this project with good intentions, however I had not experienced anything like what gays and lesbians dealt with every day. I knew that there was tremendous prejudice towards gays and lesbians in the U.S.; that was the reason I decided to write this book. But I couldn’t fully understand the impact of this prejudice because I didn’t grow up experiencing the constant insults and ridicule, or threats and potential violence, that nearly every gay, lesbian, and transgender person from that era experienced. So, of course, I could not fully understand how this relentless prejudice would affect someone as they were growing up gay or with gay parents.
I think it was somewhat naïve of me to think that I could go inside these families and show the effect of a parent as a gay role model on their kids, as if you could isolate that one issue in these families. There was so much going on in each of these five families as these gay parents courageously took the risk to be one of the first families raising their kids without hiding the fact that they were gay. As I interviewed each family it became clear that there were many issues affecting the kids, some of which were connected to having a gay parent and others not at all.
To find the families I advertised in gay periodicals and was able to locate and interview 23 families across the U.S. and Canada. From that group of 23, I chose five families that I lived with for a week at a time and interviewed, several times over the next few years. This book is written from the tape recordings that I made with these families. Once I turned on the tape recorder I would ask a question to start the conversation, and then I would try to fade into the background and let the person or the family take the conversation in whatever direction they wanted. My goal was to have the kids and the parents talk about whatever they felt was important. So, I would interject as little as possible, while at the same time trying to help each person find what it was that they really wanted to express.
These families were living in Milwaukee, Toronto, Rapid City, SD, and Seattle. All of these five families had started out as a heterosexual family where the gay parent had tried to tell themselves that they were straight, or had tried to fit in as heterosexual, before admitting to their spouse and kids that they were gay. And at that point, the family either separated or divorced with the gay parent retaining custody or co-custody.
All of these families had gone through a separation, and several had experienced a divorce. In many of these families the kids also had a stepparent to deal with. In most of the families the parent or parents had been living as heterosexual until recently. And when those parents finally admitted to themselves and the family that they were gay, suddenly the kids had to adjust to this new image of their parent. And that was a big adjustment for the kids to suddenly wrap their mind around. Also, when some of the parents finally came out as gay, they went through something like a second adolescence. They had denied their sexuality for their whole lives, and now they were anxious to act on the sexuality that was repressed for so long. And their desire to find a new partner often took time and attention away from the family.
My goal in writing this book was to show that gay and lesbian parents are most often loving and supportive parents and good role models, and in that regard are no different than straight parents. Indeed, the gay parents in this book are loving parents and good role models. However, as I interviewed the parents and the kids, I let them talk about everything that was going on in their lives. It quickly became apparent that there were a lot of pressures on these families and that the family life could at times be difficult and confusing. Which of course is not unique to gay families, but nonetheless the situations they described were not always easy for the kids to navigate.
In the 1960s and 1970s the level of hostility coming from our homophobic society, as well as from their own families and communities, certainly had an impact on whether or not someone who was gay or lesbian chose to come out and reveal their sexuality. In addition, in the ’60s and ’70s there were laws making it illegal for a man or a woman to be dressed in clothes not belonging to his or her sex. States also wielded their liquor laws to arrest gay patrons and shutter gay bars, which were the only place where gay people could be themselves. In 1979, when I began writing this book, there were sodomy laws against “perverted sexual practice” in almost every state. In fact, these laws are still on the books in sixteen states. And it wasn’t until 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association issued a resolution stating that homosexuality was not a mental illness.
I came to this project expecting to write a story with a clear and straight forward conclusion. However, the stories that I was being told by these five families were full of complicated emotions. Both the parents and the children were giving me honest and heartfelt accounts of their experiences. Life is messy at times and there are difficulties in the most loving and well-meaning families, regardless of the sexuality of the parents. As I was writing the book, I didn’t want to whitewash these families’ stories. But at the same time, I worried that someone looking for a reason to be negative about gay parents raising children could point to one of the issues in the book, issues that can also be found in heterosexual households, and say this is not optimal.
This book, A Secret I Can’t Tell, was originally titled Whose Child Cries, after a Scottish proverb that goes, “He cares not whose child cries, so his laughs.” It was published in 1983 and then I was sent on a publicity tour. I did a lot of interviews with the press, and the book seemed to be selling well. And then six months later my publisher suddenly went bankrupt and the book was no longer being distributed. It took about five years before I was able to regain the rights to my book. By then I was focusing on my career as a documentary filmmaker. (I produced Taxicab Confessions and other TV series, as well as the documentary films American Winter, Ending Disease, and The Race to Save the World.)
When I finally got back the rights to my book, I decided not to republish it. I had this nagging feeling that with all the anger and hostility directed towards gay families in those early days of the gay rights movement, that some readers might not be able to see past the difficulties in these families to notice the love. Forty years ago, there was an avalanche of prejudice directed towards gay and lesbian parents, and I worried that the message of this book might be too nuanced for those hostile times. So, I kept the copies of the book that had been returned to me in my garage, and I didn’t republish it.
In the 40 years since this book was first published there has been an incredible amount of change in the way the public sees and treats gay people. These days, gay couples raising children hardly raise an eyebrow. And marriage equality is the law of the land. I feel that now the time is right to put this book out again. A Secret I Can’t Tell is a time capsule which can give insight into the intense stress and uncommon bravery that gay and lesbian couples and their children had to go through as pioneers in this movement. The stories told by these kids and their parents can help us appreciate the many challenges that gay families had to deal with as the first wave of families living in openly gay homes.
—Joe Gantz
(This is an excerpt from the introduction of A Secret I Can’t Tell.)
The blatant fear mongering and cruelty of the Save Our Children campaign incensed me. I wanted to do something to show the false logic of their campaign. It occurred to me that if people were afraid of the effect of having a gay role model influencing a child as a teacher, then there couldn’t be a more important gay role model than having a gay parent. So, in 1979 I decided to show realistic and positive gay role models by finding families raising children in openly gay homes and asking them to tell their story.
In the late 1970s there weren’t a lot of families raising children in openly gay homes. There was so much hostility, as well as legal issues to consider, that very few families were brave enough to take the risk of openly raising their kids as gay parents. But I managed to find some, and A Secret I Can’t Tell follows five families raising children in homes where one or both parents were not hiding their homosexuality. This book was first published in 1983, but the publisher went bankrupt six months later and the book was barely distributed. I am republishing the book now in 2022, with an update from many of the children, because these heartfelt stories give insight into the intense pressures and prejudice that gay and lesbian families were subjected to at that time.
Perhaps people assume that because I wrote this book I must be gay or the child of a gay parent. That’s not the case. I grew up in a reform Jewish family in a very diverse neighborhood in Cincinnati, Ohio. I find prejudice and injustice deeply disturbing, whether that has to do with race, religion, sexuality, or any other unreasonable bias. And this country has a long tradition, still going on today, of vilifying those people who don’t fit the norm. The culture wars have shifted somewhat, but it seems that it is still easy to generate fear and hate using the touchstones of race, religion or sexuality.
A lot has been written recently about White privilege. That’s the idea that White people have no concept of the difficulties that Black people have to deal with, because they are afforded such a different, much more privileged experience throughout their life. But there is also something that I would call heterosexual privilege. In 1979 I went into this project with good intentions, however I had not experienced anything like what gays and lesbians dealt with every day. I knew that there was tremendous prejudice towards gays and lesbians in the U.S.; that was the reason I decided to write this book. But I couldn’t fully understand the impact of this prejudice because I didn’t grow up experiencing the constant insults and ridicule, or threats and potential violence, that nearly every gay, lesbian, and transgender person from that era experienced. So, of course, I could not fully understand how this relentless prejudice would affect someone as they were growing up gay or with gay parents.
I think it was somewhat naïve of me to think that I could go inside these families and show the effect of a parent as a gay role model on their kids, as if you could isolate that one issue in these families. There was so much going on in each of these five families as these gay parents courageously took the risk to be one of the first families raising their kids without hiding the fact that they were gay. As I interviewed each family it became clear that there were many issues affecting the kids, some of which were connected to having a gay parent and others not at all.
To find the families I advertised in gay periodicals and was able to locate and interview 23 families across the U.S. and Canada. From that group of 23, I chose five families that I lived with for a week at a time and interviewed, several times over the next few years. This book is written from the tape recordings that I made with these families. Once I turned on the tape recorder I would ask a question to start the conversation, and then I would try to fade into the background and let the person or the family take the conversation in whatever direction they wanted. My goal was to have the kids and the parents talk about whatever they felt was important. So, I would interject as little as possible, while at the same time trying to help each person find what it was that they really wanted to express.
These families were living in Milwaukee, Toronto, Rapid City, SD, and Seattle. All of these five families had started out as a heterosexual family where the gay parent had tried to tell themselves that they were straight, or had tried to fit in as heterosexual, before admitting to their spouse and kids that they were gay. And at that point, the family either separated or divorced with the gay parent retaining custody or co-custody.
All of these families had gone through a separation, and several had experienced a divorce. In many of these families the kids also had a stepparent to deal with. In most of the families the parent or parents had been living as heterosexual until recently. And when those parents finally admitted to themselves and the family that they were gay, suddenly the kids had to adjust to this new image of their parent. And that was a big adjustment for the kids to suddenly wrap their mind around. Also, when some of the parents finally came out as gay, they went through something like a second adolescence. They had denied their sexuality for their whole lives, and now they were anxious to act on the sexuality that was repressed for so long. And their desire to find a new partner often took time and attention away from the family.
My goal in writing this book was to show that gay and lesbian parents are most often loving and supportive parents and good role models, and in that regard are no different than straight parents. Indeed, the gay parents in this book are loving parents and good role models. However, as I interviewed the parents and the kids, I let them talk about everything that was going on in their lives. It quickly became apparent that there were a lot of pressures on these families and that the family life could at times be difficult and confusing. Which of course is not unique to gay families, but nonetheless the situations they described were not always easy for the kids to navigate.
In the 1960s and 1970s the level of hostility coming from our homophobic society, as well as from their own families and communities, certainly had an impact on whether or not someone who was gay or lesbian chose to come out and reveal their sexuality. In addition, in the ’60s and ’70s there were laws making it illegal for a man or a woman to be dressed in clothes not belonging to his or her sex. States also wielded their liquor laws to arrest gay patrons and shutter gay bars, which were the only place where gay people could be themselves. In 1979, when I began writing this book, there were sodomy laws against “perverted sexual practice” in almost every state. In fact, these laws are still on the books in sixteen states. And it wasn’t until 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association issued a resolution stating that homosexuality was not a mental illness.
I came to this project expecting to write a story with a clear and straight forward conclusion. However, the stories that I was being told by these five families were full of complicated emotions. Both the parents and the children were giving me honest and heartfelt accounts of their experiences. Life is messy at times and there are difficulties in the most loving and well-meaning families, regardless of the sexuality of the parents. As I was writing the book, I didn’t want to whitewash these families’ stories. But at the same time, I worried that someone looking for a reason to be negative about gay parents raising children could point to one of the issues in the book, issues that can also be found in heterosexual households, and say this is not optimal.
This book, A Secret I Can’t Tell, was originally titled Whose Child Cries, after a Scottish proverb that goes, “He cares not whose child cries, so his laughs.” It was published in 1983 and then I was sent on a publicity tour. I did a lot of interviews with the press, and the book seemed to be selling well. And then six months later my publisher suddenly went bankrupt and the book was no longer being distributed. It took about five years before I was able to regain the rights to my book. By then I was focusing on my career as a documentary filmmaker. (I produced Taxicab Confessions and other TV series, as well as the documentary films American Winter, Ending Disease, and The Race to Save the World.)
When I finally got back the rights to my book, I decided not to republish it. I had this nagging feeling that with all the anger and hostility directed towards gay families in those early days of the gay rights movement, that some readers might not be able to see past the difficulties in these families to notice the love. Forty years ago, there was an avalanche of prejudice directed towards gay and lesbian parents, and I worried that the message of this book might be too nuanced for those hostile times. So, I kept the copies of the book that had been returned to me in my garage, and I didn’t republish it.
In the 40 years since this book was first published there has been an incredible amount of change in the way the public sees and treats gay people. These days, gay couples raising children hardly raise an eyebrow. And marriage equality is the law of the land. I feel that now the time is right to put this book out again. A Secret I Can’t Tell is a time capsule which can give insight into the intense stress and uncommon bravery that gay and lesbian couples and their children had to go through as pioneers in this movement. The stories told by these kids and their parents can help us appreciate the many challenges that gay families had to deal with as the first wave of families living in openly gay homes.
—Joe Gantz
(This is an excerpt from the introduction of A Secret I Can’t Tell.)
