How One Mom Changed Other Parents’ Minds About Their Children’s Sexuality
For nearly 40 years, Paulette Goodman has been helping people accept their LGBTQ children.
Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series about the gay-rights movement and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising.
In the 1980s, when residents of the Washington, D.C., area called a hotline set up for parents of lesbian and gay people, it was often Paulette Goodman’s home phone that rang. “I heard such awful stories,” she told me, mentioning one gay man who called after being released from the hospital—he’d tried to kill himself. At the time, the response that many parents had to learning that their child was gay was, in Goodman’s words, “Throw them out.”
Many parents called in because they
