Dealing With Homophobic Family

Dealing with homophobic people in general is difficult, but when those people are your family it hurts. Unfortunately, in most cases, you will not be able to change the views of your homophobic family members regarding your sexuality, especially if their homophobia stems from their religion.

The best you can do is to temporarily distance yourself from said homophobic family members for two reasons:

1.) You need to get away from the toxicity and stress that your family members cause you due to your sexuality, and

2.) You need to take a step back and educate yourself on why your family members are the way they are so that you can fully understand their perspectives. It could be that it isn’t necessarily you they dislike, it’s the homosexual stereotypes and stigma. For most people, homophobia stems from a lack of factual knowledge about homosexuality.

Once you’ve distanced yourself from your homophobic family members and taken a step back to understand their perspectives, then you can take the next steps in calmly confronting them on their behavior and educating them. Most conservative or religious people will not willingly seek out or accept factual information regarding sexuality, so please be sure to be mindful of this when confronting your family members on their homophobic behavior if they are conservative or religious. Understand that the homophobia will not go away in a day, a week, or in some cases, ever. Remember, the most you can do is to distance yourself, take a step back and understand their perspective, confront them and then educate them. After that, the rest is up to them.

In life family is all that we have, so while it may be okay to temporarily distance yourself from your family in pursuit of ridding your life of homophobia, remember to not distance yourself from your family forever. Sometimes it takes distancing yourself from people for them to appreciate you and for them to realize that they are missing out on having you in their lives for such a trivial and ignorant reason; a reason that neither you nor they can change.