Dear Carolyn

Note from Jdaddy: I'm not familiar with Carolyn Hax --- I stopped reading advice columnists back when Ann Landers died and Dear Abby's column was taken over by her daughter, Jeanne, so I guess my ignorance is a generational thing.

But I stumbled across this excerpt from one of her recent columns and liked the way she handled the situation, which has to do with a father wondering about the proper response to his 13-year-old son's announcement that he is gay.

Parenting is an ongoing challenge for men and women regardless of their sexual orientations. It doesn't ever get easy, as far as I'm concerned, and no matter how much you think you want or don't want children, no one is prepared for it. Some people do develop some skills at it, but if they're like me, they're always amazed when they get something right.

I'm a gay dad with six adult children --- three of whom are partnered or married --- who still wander in and out my life. Their sexual orientations are as varied as the colors of the rainbow --- straight, bisexual, gay, and with many variations in between. Most of my kids are smarter and more sensible than me, but we all pretend that the opposite is true, probably operating on the theory that if we wish hard enough for something to be so, it will become reality.

We have a policy in our family of open discussion --- within certain limitations of privacy --- of sexuality. The only rules are:

(1) No sexual orientation is better than another.

(2) When a family member commits to a partner, the rest of the family does everything they can to be supportive of both partners.

(3) The only "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy we have deals with what goes on behind closed doors. Dad doesn't need to know what the adult kids are doing and the kids are quite adamant about not wanting to know what Dad may be doing with those handcuffs and other items in his toy chest.

(4) When Dad is right about something, we celebrate. When Dad is wrong, he tries to admit it and the kids forgive him or attribute it to him probably becoming old and senile.

But I digress: I did a Wikipedia search for Carolyn Hax and found the following information:

Carolyn Hax (born December 5, 1966 in Bridgeport, Connecticut) is a writer and columnist for the Washington Post and the author of the advice column Carolyn Hax (formerly titled Tell Me About It).

The column is geared toward people under the age of 30, but its readers are not limited to specific age group. Since its founding in 1997, the column has gained a large audience. New columns are published on Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday and are carried in more than 100 newspapers. A weekly Friday web chat on the paper's website with Hax is also one of the paper's most popular features, and selections from the transcripts of these chats are published as columns on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.

Carolyn Hax grew up in Trumbull, Connecticut as the youngest of four daughters of a corporate planner and a secretary. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard University in 1988.

Previously, Hax worked as associate editor and news editor at the Army Times and as a copy editor and news editor at the Washington Post. In 2001, Hax published her first book, Tell Me About It: Lying, Sulking and Getting Fat and 56 Other Things Not to Do While Looking for Love. Her essay "Peace and Carrots," which describes how she is too busy to care about the so-called "Mommy Wars", was included in the 2006 anthology Mommy Wars by her Washington Post colleague Leslie Morgan Steiner.

Hax's second husband, Kenny Ackerman, is a New Haven, Connecticut, educator whom she has known since childhood. They are the parents of three boys: twins Jonas and Percy, and a younger boy, Gus. The Hax-Ackerman family recently moved to the Washington, D.C. area.

The cartoons that accompany Hax's columns are drawn by her ex-husband, Nick Galifianakis

I was interested in Hax's answer to Here is Carolyn Hax's answer to a gay father whose 13-year-old son came out to him:

Son comes out as gay at 13

By CAROLYN HAX

Dear Carolyn:

My 13-year-old son just informed me that he is gay. I want to be supportive, but I have a hard time believing a 13-year-old knows ANYthing definitive about his sexuality yet. I had decided to just say, "OK," and carry on as if nothing had happened, but a friend of mine says it would be incredibly demeaning not to treat my son's outcoming(?) as sincere. What do you think?

-- Maryland

I agree with your friend. A 13-year-old knows a lot about his sexuality. Think back to when you were 13. Maybe your tastes have changed since then, but you were still you, no? And knew it when you had a crush?

I imagine your son would like to hear -- even now, belatedly -- that you're proud of him for telling you this, since that can't have been easy (there's no way it was easy); and that you love him, always have. Your love presumably has never been contingent on who he loves, so why start now?

Also assure him that he can come to you, since the road from 13 to independence is hard for everyone.

Parents and kids are both in the business of finding a comfortable and stable emotional place in the world, and anytime they can be each other's allies in that quest, both are that much better for it. This has nothing to do with anyone's sexual orientation.