This article was originally published in Le Point on 07.12.2025
For many young people, there’s nothing more dreadful or terrifying than having to “come out” as gay to one’s parents. Even in the most loving of households—ones that aren’t particularly judgmental or moralistic—striking up the nerve to disclose one’s sexual attraction to members of the same sex can be daunting. It’s been over thirty years since I had that excruciating moment with my own sweet but rather traditional mom. At first, she thought I was joking. Jesse the prankster. No, it can’t be. You’re kidding, right? What was with those “girlfriends” in high school then? Then, later that night, showing how such exotic horrors all danced together in her suburban head, she had a nightmare of me dressed in drag. Soon enough, smiles returned, and the shock passed. But sadly so did she, and she never got to meet my partner of the past twenty years. Neither of us, incidentally, has ever worn a dress.
I was one of the lucky ones. The nature and intensity of parental responses to their children’s coming out vary widely (my dad merely shrugged his shoulders and asked where I wanted to go for lunch). But it’s not uncommon for the news to be met with grief, shock, and even rage, with heartbreaking stories of parents abusing or kicking their gay kids out of the home a dime a dozen. Some desperate, usually churchly parents even try to “cure” their kids with sexual conversion therapy, which has proven to be about as effective as turning water into wine.
Why do so many parents care so much about their children’s sexual orientation... and why are young people so reticent about disclosing this core part of themselves even to loving parents?
It’s easy to chalk things up to, say, religion, politics, gender norms, education (or lack thereof), or—as my mom certainly expressed to me all those years ago—just simply worry and concern about their children having to deal with, let’s face it, a bigoted society. These things all play a role. But underlying everything, reasons Danielle DelPriore, a research psychologist from Pennsylvania State University, is also the parents’ potent and largely unconscious concerns about their own selfish genetic interests. This more distal psychological factor strikes at the heart of the evolutionary dilemma of coming out. The central logic is as follows: given the reduced reproductive prospects of those attracted to the same sex, having a gay child threatens to seriously diminish one’s own “inclusive fitness” (shared genetic material across biological kin, including successive generations).
Learning that one’s offspring is homosexual implies real genetic costs for a parent who has already “invested” heavily in that particular child, especially considering that the average age of coming out is 18 to 20. If they’ve been operating with the unspoken, ancient, implicit understanding that such efforts will eventually pay off in the form of cooing, perambulatory gene repositories known as grandchildren, it is as though the parent has just been soberly informed that their life savings have been sitting in a shell account all this time. Yes, gay people can reproduce biologically, and many do, either the old-fashioned way or through modern technology. We’ll get to that in a moment. But having little to no motivation to mate with the opposite sex—instead diverting our efforts to fruitless pairings—means that we’re not even playing the same adaptationist game as those who do have such desires.
Now, I’m well aware that the foregoing sounds rather cold and transactional, and that this sort of Darwinizing of the nuanced intricacies of private family dynamics can be a little off-putting. But as a gene-centric view of human emotions and behavior, it also leads to a number of testable hypotheses concerning parents’ reactions to their children coming out. Here are a few from DelPriore and her colleague Olivia Ronan’s study “Parental Negativity Toward Offspring’s Minority Sexual Orientation Disclosures: An Inclusive Fitness Perspective,” published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships a few years ago.
· Mothers should react more negatively than fathers. That may sound counterintuitive, given gender stereotypes. But consider that moms “invest” disproportionately more than dads—nine months of pregnancy, followed by an extended period of breastfeeding, then usually the primary caretaker well into the child’s teens. On top of that, human females only have so many opportunities themselves to reproduce before becoming infertile in early middle age (whereas men can theoretically sire an infinite number of offspring, for decades beyond). So for mothers, the reproductive decisions of their children are basically theirs as well, as it’s the last indirect route to their own genetic perpetuity. “Information that this potential pathway might be foreclosed is something women are unlikely to accept neutrally given the steep reproductive costs,” write the authors.
· Parents should react more negatively when children come out as homosexual than bisexual. The latter may have other erotic interests, but they’re still, in principle, in the traditional mating game. Thus, parents will likely perceive bisexual offspring to be “less costly” to their inclusive fitness interests than a child who informs them that they are attracted exclusively to members of the same sex.
· Parents with fewer children should react more negatively to their kid coming out than those with more children. And the response should be most negative of all for “only children.” This is because they’ve put the bulk of their genetic stock into a single replicator, whereas larger families have a much more diverse investment portfolio. If one kid is gay, well, they’ve still got plenty of skin in the game. Perhaps this softened the blow in my situation, for instance, given that I had two straight older siblings (fast-forward to now, four grown nieces and nephews).
It should go without saying, but these are probabilistic outcomes that would apply only to all-else-being-equal scenarios. And of course, all else is never equal. Nonetheless, DelPriore and Ronan found marginal support for all three hypotheses. Hundreds of LGB adults completed online surveys. In addition to some theoretically key information (How old were you when you came out to your parents? How many siblings do you have? Are you gay or bi? etc.), respondents were asked to rate how their coming out as a sexual minority was received by each parent on various negativity measures (e.g., “...yelled and/or screamed”; “...didn’t believe me”; “...pretended that I wasn’t”; “...wanted me to not be”; “...was angry at me,” etc.). It’s revealing in itself that there are no comparable measures of positive responses—just try to imagine a scenario where a parent erupts with unbridled joy or gives a spontaneous fist pump. The predicted patterns were most apparent for lesbians coming out to their mothers.
An obvious limitation of this correlational study—and one that DelPriore and Ronan themselves point out—is that it relied on participants’ retrospective perceptions of their parents’ responses. Whether their parents actually felt or behaved the way they remembered them doing upon hearing the big queer news isn’t entirely clear. Perhaps lesbians are just more—or less—accurate in gauging emotional cues than are gay males. Or maybe, if the gender-nonconforming tells of being a “prehomosexual” are more apparent in boys than they are in girls, parents are less shocked on being told that their sons are gay than that their daughters are lesbian. This would be the sort of tell-me-something-I-don’t-know situation in which, really, the person needn’t even bother coming out, because they were never really in.
To help tease such factors apart, and to test the causal hypothesis that reproductive concerns drive negative parental responses to learning that their child is not heterosexual, DelPriore and her team conducted an experiment meant to pinpoint that specific gene-centric anxiety.
In this series of studies, published last year in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, the researchers recruited “heterosexual, cisgender” parents of at least one young child (under age 6). Participants were told only that the study was about reading comprehension, memory, and perception. Half of the participants were randomly assigned to the experimental condition, in which they read a brief article titled “Medical Advances Allow Thousands to Welcome New Additions to Their Families.” It described new reproductive-assistance technologies (e.g., in vitro fertilization, artificial insemination) that have made it easier and more affordable than ever for people who want to conceive genetic children, including same-sex couples. By contrast, the other half of participants were randomly assigned to read an essay on genetically modified tomatoes: “How New ‘Super’ Tomatoes Can Help in the Fight Against Cancer.” It was comparable in length and complexity to the other article, but a spiel on the surprising health benefits of GMO tomatoes—and nothing at all on baby-making.
If you’re thinking like an experimental psychologist, you’ll see where this is heading. “We predicted that mothers and fathers presented with the reproductive versus control [tomato] information would report more favorable attitudes and expected reactions to their children’s hypothetical LGB orientation disclosure,” explain the authors. Parents were told to think of their youngest child and to give only the child’s first initial. The researchers explained: Imagine that, in the future, little “S” comes to you one day and reveals that she’s attracted to women (or “B” says he’s into other men, you get the idea). Now, hold that thought...
Parents then completed a series of Likert-scale measures (e.g., on a scale of 1 to 7, how much do you agree with this statement) about their feelings and expected reactions toward their hypothetical gay or bi child (“My child being gay, lesbian, or bisexual would destroy our relationship,” etc.; “I would pretend that my child isn’t gay/lesbian/bisexual”, etc.) and also toward the LGB community in general (“People who are gay, lesbian, or bisexual deserve any hatred they receive,”; “It is best to avoid people who are gay, lesbian, or bisexual,” etc.).
As predicted, parents who’d first read the article about reproductive-assistance technologies expressed more favorable attitudes toward both their own imaginary, future non-heterosexual child, and toward the LGB community in general. Presumably, merely being reminded that it’s not necessarily the end of the line for their own genes if little Henri happens to grow up to love Paul, or little Mary decides to settle down with Claire, helps to mitigate any evolutionary crisis response. And that, reason DelPriore and her coauthors, is the whole point of doing this type of research. Don’t forget, they remind us, that parental rejection in this context is linked to everything from depression, anxiety, and suicidality to substance abuse, sexual risk-taking, and internalized stigma, all making for a very vulnerable group of young people. “By generating and testing an evolutionary psychological perspective regarding these experiences, we aim to elucidate the role of fitness-relevant concerns in shaping parents’ negative reactions to youth orientation disclosures so that we can attenuate them, not accept them as inevitable or desirable,” write the authors. After all, wanting to become grandparents is baked so deeply into parental psychology that it’s going to be much easier to work with this adaptive drive than against it. It’s a matter of hacking the system, but for benevolent ends. It’s also a lot easier to convince parents that same-sex couples have viable reproductive options than it is to change, say, their political or religious views. Good luck with that.
The researchers stress, though, that their data shouldn’t be used to pressure LGB youth into conforming to any reproductive expectations, especially if it’s to placate their own parents by keeping that grandchild pipe dream alive. Although a substantial percentage do say that they want kids some day (52% of gay men, 61% of lesbians), many don’t. And—sorry Dad—others are just happy having biologically unrelated family members with 100% canine DNA.
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