A few weeks ago my 13 year old son approached me and told me he had a serious conversation he wanted to have with me and his mom. So we went up with him to his room and he closed the door. My wife and I sat down on his bed and he took the chair at his desk. It took a few minutes of mumbling and stammering and trying to work up the courage. My wife and I sat patiently there having a pretty good idea what he was going to say. Finally he just says it.

Mom, Dad, I'm gay.

Yep that's what we both thought he was going to say. We'd known he was gay since he was about 4 years old. I mean how many 4 year old boys put that much time and effort into making their bedrooms neat as a pin. Neither one of us ever had to tell him to clean up his room. In fact he goes around cleaning the whole house arranging everything just so. He insisted on a sewing machine for his tenth birthday and goes shopping with my wife to pick out clothes for her to wear. Yep we've known he was gay forever.

So we just sat there stone faced waiting for him to finish. He was staring at us for a moment and then

"You're awfully quiet. Are you mad? pissed off? disappointed?"

It was at that moment my wife and I both at the exact same time burst out laughing. We didn't mean to. We weren't laughing at him or his being gay. We were laughing because he actually thought it was a big secret. I don't think anyone who has ever met our son thought he was straight. He's about the most flamboyant 13 year old boy you'd ever meet.

So we both apologized for laughing and hugged our little gay son and told him we loved him and then burst his bubble by telling him we'd known since he was 4.

He had a speech prepared and memorized but couldn't quite deliver it. He was already to defend his orientation with a list of successful famous gay people. We didn't need convincing. We hadn't told him we were both bi and had more than one sexual encounter with the same gender ourselves and we shouldn't have needed to remind him that he has a gay uncle whose wedding to another man we all attended five years ago or that his cousin is a lesbian and just enlisted in the Navy along with her wife.

I know there are horror stories out there of gay kids coming out to their parents. But his mother and I just found it amusing that he had to work himself up to tell us something that he should have known we would have accepted effortlessly and how could he not know that everyone already knew.

Of course like the good parents we are we keep pestering him about when he's going to bring home a nice boy to meet his parents.