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Coming out, part one
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In Rob Daroff’s case, it proved to be an ultimately healing family affair
By Fern Levy
Special to the CJN
“When their children come out of the closet, parents go into the closet.” That’s how Beachwood resident Jane Daroff describes the most common way families deal with finding out that their child is gay or lesbian. While the child has been “rehearsing” for a long time about when and how to tell his parents, she says, the parents are usually totally unprepared to either hear the news or deal with it.
When Jane’s son Rob came out to her 30 years ago at age 14, she and her husband “felt like we were out on a limb because we didn’t know anybody with any gay connection.” The family was living in Miami, Fla., at the time when Rob told his mom he knew he was different from the other kids because he liked boys.
When Jane told her husband Dr. Robert Daroff, now professor and chair emeritus of the department of neurology of Case Western Reserve University/University Hospitals, he immediately called a colleague in Philadelphia whose specialty was adolescent psychiatry. The colleague referred them to a psychiatrist in Miami, who promised that he would help Rob become the healthiest, happiest person he could possibly be.
“Someone was looking out for us,” admits Jane gratefully. The doctor, she explained, provided supportive therapy for her son instead of aversive therapy, like shock treatment that was often employed then to attempt to “convert” the homosexual to heterosexuality.
Rob remembers how the psychiatrist “just tried to help me be myself and love myself without ever doing anything to further the feelings of distress and self-loathing that I had them.”
Today, Dr. Rob Daroff, 44, is a staff psychiatrist at the San Francisco VA Hospital and a clinical professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of California-San Francisco.
The unhappy years
His memory of coming out to his mother is a little different from hers. He remembers walking with her for at least an hour before he was able to speak the words he had been rehearsing in his mind for some time. He also remembers his many tears interrupting the words that he feared “would bring shame not only to me but to my family as well.
“I felt isolated and in a lot of turmoil, afraid that I would have to spend my life pretending to be something that I didn’t think I could ever be,” Rob recalls. At the time, no support resources were available specifically for young gay people. Rob remembers calling the Miami Gay Hotline out of desperation – only to be hung up on when he mentioned his age.
“They thought it was a crank call because it wasn’t yet understood that many gays and lesbians know their sexual orientation as teenagers, if not before,” he says. He also remembers thinking about suicide at the time, but “some part of my soul felt my mother, in particular, and eventually, my whole family, would be my allies.”
“Rob was unhappy,” remembers his father. “He really didn’t want to be gay at that time, so he kept going out on dates with young women in order to fit in.” After graduation, Rob attended Kenyon College for two years, where he was on the football team and active in his fraternity. At Kenyon, Rob finally began to slowly come out, but a small college in a small town like Gambier, Ohio, was not the ideal place for a gay college student in the 1980s.
“I guess I came out with a bang after I transferred to CWRU,” Rob admits. He was the first president of the Lesbian-Gay Student Union, chairperson of the Minority Affairs Interest Group, and co-coordinator of CWRU’s first Lesbian-Gay Conference. He also found other gays to work with in order to establish the support organizations they all needed.
An anthropology professor involved him in the founding of the Gay People’s Chronicle, a publication that still exists. A staff person in the accounting department helped him organize the Lesbian-Gay Conference. It was attended mostly by staff and faculty, with very few students. “I was threatened several times and was sometimes scared,” he admits.
Robert Daroff was always pragmatic about his middle son’s sexual orientation. “I was concerned that it would limit his options, especially because, at that time, and even now, some people think that being gay is sinful and bad.” He advised Rob to get into medical school before coming out. “But now I realize that his adamant attitude about being out as an undergraduate and on his application to medical school, on which he mentioned being president of the Lesbian-Gay Student Union, was absolutely correct.”
As a medical student at CWRU, Rob continued his activism. Together with around a dozen gays and lesbians in his class, he started a chapter of LGBTIM (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender in Medicine).
“Because no faculty members were willing to be out at that time, the gay students had to take the lead in starting what we called ‘Gay Day,’” explains Rob. seminars were presented to sensitize medical students to the specific medical and psychological needs of gay and lesbian patients.”
At the end of Gay Day, after the training was over, Jane invited everyone over to the Daroffs’ Shaker Heights home for dinner.
While Rob was taking the lead in collaborating with other gays to create programs and groups to serve the needs of the gay community, Jane, a social worker, was not far behind him. In 1985, after going with Rob to PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) meetings in Akron a few times, Jane started the Cleveland chapter of PFLAG.
“Even though I have been facilitating these monthly meetings for 23 years,” she says, “it still feels like a miracle to me that when families share their experiences with each other, they leave the meetings feeling so different from when they came in.”
Many PFLAG attendees, who have not been fully accepted by their families, have considered Jane a surrogate mother. A social worker at the CWRU Counseling Department for 16 years, Jane was recently appointed to the board of (HRC), the Human Rights Campaign, which is the largest LGBT advocacy organization in the country.
The family’s response
The Daroffs decided not to tell their other two sons about Rob’s sexual orientation until Rob was in college. (Rob would have preferred telling them right away.) William was only 9 when Rob came out to their parents, and he remembers being around 13 when they told him Rob was gay. “I remember being nonchalant about it, thinking that it was cool, and that was the end of the discussion.”
When William was in high school, his mother and Rob appeared on “The Morning Exchange” with Fred Griffith, and there were articles in local newspapers. “Teachers and parents of friends were always telling me how courageous they thought they were.”
Married with two young daughters, William is currently vice president for public policy and director of the Washington, D.C., office of the UJC (United Jewish Communities). He is also vice president of Beth Shalom Congregation, a Modern Orthodox synagogue in suburban Maryland.
William remembers the year he introduced Rob to everyone, including the rabbi, after Rosh Hashanah services. He made it clear that his brother was a Jewishly and politically active gay man. Everyone reacted very positively, he reports.
Charles, Rob’s older brother, is a real estate attorney who lives with his wife and four children in Pepper Pike. He remembers his father breaking the news to him just before Rob was due home on break from Kenyon.
“It was a relief for everyone to finally have the secret out, because Rob didn’t want to be in the closet,” says Charles. “I watched him grow up and know how tough it must have been for him all those years.” He does not hesitate to mention that one of his brothers is gay. “I couldn’t maintain a relationship with someone who has a problem with it.”
A board member of B’nai Jeshurun, Charles, like his brother William, believes that the Jewish community as a whole is very accepting and even loving toward its LGBT members. Charles and his 7-year-old son recently spent a weekend with Rob in San Francisco, as have all three of his older children when each of them turned 7.
Love and marriage
Rob and his fiancé Dr. Brian Nagai, a radiologist, had planned to be married in May 2009. But they were worried that California’s Proposition 8, defining marriage as solely between a man and a woman, would pass. (It did.) So six days before the Nov. 4 election, notes Rob, his rabbi conducted a civil ceremony for the couple with just four close friends. “We’re legal. At least for now,” he exalts.
“Never in my wildest dreams as a young boy did I ever imagine that, as a gay man, I could marry the person I love,” he marvels. “That it has become a reality gets me choked up just thinking about it.”
In May their actual wedding will take place at Sha’ar Zahav, a diverse congregation that is around 60% LGBT with a large number of straight families and a very active religious school serving many children of lesbians and gays. Rob finds it to be “a phenomenal community and a wonderful home for me.”
The entire Daroff family plans to attend the wedding. Robert Daroff thinks his son has found someone who is “perfect for him” and “they will have a great life together.” Jane is “thrilled” and adores Rob’s partner; she thinks it’s about time that Rob gets married. Charles and William think it’s beautiful that Rob can celebrate “a very loving relationship” with a wedding just as each of them did when they married their wives.
While the last 30 years have been challenging for Rob and his family, they have managed, as have other Jewish families with lesbian and gay members, to create a stronger and more loving family as a result. “The love of my mother and father has been an incredible source of support and inspiration for me,” Rob says. He also thinks about the positive changes that have occurred both in the Jewish and general community since the time, as a boy of 14, he told his mother he was gay.
Fern Levy is a resident of Cleveland.
Part 2 next week.
When Jane’s son Rob came out to her 30 years ago at age 14, she and her husband “felt like we were out on a limb because we didn’t know anybody with any gay connection.” The family was living in Miami, Fla., at the time when Rob told his mom he knew he was different from the other kids because he liked boys.
When Jane told her husband Dr. Robert Daroff, now professor and chair emeritus of the department of neurology of Case Western Reserve University/University Hospitals, he immediately called a colleague in Philadelphia whose specialty was adolescent psychiatry. The colleague referred them to a psychiatrist in Miami, who promised that he would help Rob become the healthiest, happiest person he could possibly be.
“Someone was looking out for us,” admits Jane gratefully. The doctor, she explained, provided supportive therapy for her son instead of aversive therapy, like shock treatment that was often employed then to attempt to “convert” the homosexual to heterosexuality.
Rob remembers how the psychiatrist “just tried to help me be myself and love myself without ever doing anything to further the feelings of distress and self-loathing that I had them.”
Today, Dr. Rob Daroff, 44, is a staff psychiatrist at the San Francisco VA Hospital and a clinical professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of California-San Francisco.
The unhappy years
His memory of coming out to his mother is a little different from hers. He remembers walking with her for at least an hour before he was able to speak the words he had been rehearsing in his mind for some time. He also remembers his many tears interrupting the words that he feared “would bring shame not only to me but to my family as well.
“I felt isolated and in a lot of turmoil, afraid that I would have to spend my life pretending to be something that I didn’t think I could ever be,” Rob recalls. At the time, no support resources were available specifically for young gay people. Rob remembers calling the Miami Gay Hotline out of desperation – only to be hung up on when he mentioned his age.
“They thought it was a crank call because it wasn’t yet understood that many gays and lesbians know their sexual orientation as teenagers, if not before,” he says. He also remembers thinking about suicide at the time, but “some part of my soul felt my mother, in particular, and eventually, my whole family, would be my allies.”
“It was a relief for everyone to finally have the secret out.”
Rob Daroff
The family moved to Cleveland from Miami in 1981, and Rob entered Hawken High School as a junior.Rob Daroff
“Rob was unhappy,” remembers his father. “He really didn’t want to be gay at that time, so he kept going out on dates with young women in order to fit in.” After graduation, Rob attended Kenyon College for two years, where he was on the football team and active in his fraternity. At Kenyon, Rob finally began to slowly come out, but a small college in a small town like Gambier, Ohio, was not the ideal place for a gay college student in the 1980s.
“I guess I came out with a bang after I transferred to CWRU,” Rob admits. He was the first president of the Lesbian-Gay Student Union, chairperson of the Minority Affairs Interest Group, and co-coordinator of CWRU’s first Lesbian-Gay Conference. He also found other gays to work with in order to establish the support organizations they all needed.
An anthropology professor involved him in the founding of the Gay People’s Chronicle, a publication that still exists. A staff person in the accounting department helped him organize the Lesbian-Gay Conference. It was attended mostly by staff and faculty, with very few students. “I was threatened several times and was sometimes scared,” he admits.
Robert Daroff was always pragmatic about his middle son’s sexual orientation. “I was concerned that it would limit his options, especially because, at that time, and even now, some people think that being gay is sinful and bad.” He advised Rob to get into medical school before coming out. “But now I realize that his adamant attitude about being out as an undergraduate and on his application to medical school, on which he mentioned being president of the Lesbian-Gay Student Union, was absolutely correct.”
As a medical student at CWRU, Rob continued his activism. Together with around a dozen gays and lesbians in his class, he started a chapter of LGBTIM (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender in Medicine).
“Because no faculty members were willing to be out at that time, the gay students had to take the lead in starting what we called ‘Gay Day,’” explains Rob. seminars were presented to sensitize medical students to the specific medical and psychological needs of gay and lesbian patients.”
At the end of Gay Day, after the training was over, Jane invited everyone over to the Daroffs’ Shaker Heights home for dinner.
While Rob was taking the lead in collaborating with other gays to create programs and groups to serve the needs of the gay community, Jane, a social worker, was not far behind him. In 1985, after going with Rob to PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) meetings in Akron a few times, Jane started the Cleveland chapter of PFLAG.
“Even though I have been facilitating these monthly meetings for 23 years,” she says, “it still feels like a miracle to me that when families share their experiences with each other, they leave the meetings feeling so different from when they came in.”
Many PFLAG attendees, who have not been fully accepted by their families, have considered Jane a surrogate mother. A social worker at the CWRU Counseling Department for 16 years, Jane was recently appointed to the board of (HRC), the Human Rights Campaign, which is the largest LGBT advocacy organization in the country.
The family’s response
The Daroffs decided not to tell their other two sons about Rob’s sexual orientation until Rob was in college. (Rob would have preferred telling them right away.) William was only 9 when Rob came out to their parents, and he remembers being around 13 when they told him Rob was gay. “I remember being nonchalant about it, thinking that it was cool, and that was the end of the discussion.”
When William was in high school, his mother and Rob appeared on “The Morning Exchange” with Fred Griffith, and there were articles in local newspapers. “Teachers and parents of friends were always telling me how courageous they thought they were.”
Married with two young daughters, William is currently vice president for public policy and director of the Washington, D.C., office of the UJC (United Jewish Communities). He is also vice president of Beth Shalom Congregation, a Modern Orthodox synagogue in suburban Maryland.
William remembers the year he introduced Rob to everyone, including the rabbi, after Rosh Hashanah services. He made it clear that his brother was a Jewishly and politically active gay man. Everyone reacted very positively, he reports.
Charles, Rob’s older brother, is a real estate attorney who lives with his wife and four children in Pepper Pike. He remembers his father breaking the news to him just before Rob was due home on break from Kenyon.
“It was a relief for everyone to finally have the secret out, because Rob didn’t want to be in the closet,” says Charles. “I watched him grow up and know how tough it must have been for him all those years.” He does not hesitate to mention that one of his brothers is gay. “I couldn’t maintain a relationship with someone who has a problem with it.”
A board member of B’nai Jeshurun, Charles, like his brother William, believes that the Jewish community as a whole is very accepting and even loving toward its LGBT members. Charles and his 7-year-old son recently spent a weekend with Rob in San Francisco, as have all three of his older children when each of them turned 7.
Love and marriage
Rob and his fiancé Dr. Brian Nagai, a radiologist, had planned to be married in May 2009. But they were worried that California’s Proposition 8, defining marriage as solely between a man and a woman, would pass. (It did.) So six days before the Nov. 4 election, notes Rob, his rabbi conducted a civil ceremony for the couple with just four close friends. “We’re legal. At least for now,” he exalts.
“Never in my wildest dreams as a young boy did I ever imagine that, as a gay man, I could marry the person I love,” he marvels. “That it has become a reality gets me choked up just thinking about it.”
In May their actual wedding will take place at Sha’ar Zahav, a diverse congregation that is around 60% LGBT with a large number of straight families and a very active religious school serving many children of lesbians and gays. Rob finds it to be “a phenomenal community and a wonderful home for me.”
The entire Daroff family plans to attend the wedding. Robert Daroff thinks his son has found someone who is “perfect for him” and “they will have a great life together.” Jane is “thrilled” and adores Rob’s partner; she thinks it’s about time that Rob gets married. Charles and William think it’s beautiful that Rob can celebrate “a very loving relationship” with a wedding just as each of them did when they married their wives.
While the last 30 years have been challenging for Rob and his family, they have managed, as have other Jewish families with lesbian and gay members, to create a stronger and more loving family as a result. “The love of my mother and father has been an incredible source of support and inspiration for me,” Rob says. He also thinks about the positive changes that have occurred both in the Jewish and general community since the time, as a boy of 14, he told his mother he was gay.
Fern Levy is a resident of Cleveland.
Part 2 next week.
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Bryan wrote on Nov 19, 2008 12:27 PM: