OP, I feel your pain. I came out as gay to everyone but my family when I was about 21. Like you, I was kind of a "girly boy," and my mother was aware of it and sent mixed messages--on the one hand, it also, in my case, meant that I was a good student and obedient (the opposite of my brother, who had to go to summer school to graduate from high school and who had a statutory rape conviction on his record )by the time he was 20). On the one hand, I was praised for things that I think were tied to my being non-boyish (as stereotyped at the time, the mid-60s), but my mother (more than my dad) were also worried that I wasn't boyish enough. I gave up on trying to have an honest relationship with her, though it also meant that I kept hidden the pain I experienced when my ex-lover died (of a heart attack) and my best friend from high school onwards, whom she liked because he actually was nice to her (though, when we were in college and she was in her cups, she said she hoped he wouldn't "contaminate" me) died not simply of cancer (as I told her), but of AIDS. Part of what made it difficult was that my father died, unexpectedly, when I was 25, and she was a very sad widow--I think, had my dad lived, I might have felt more able to come out, since I think he would have helped her work through her feelings (and my brother was nine years older than I, in trouble from middle school on, and the counselor they saw, in typical fashion of the time, blamed her for bad parenting). I decided that it would be more work for me to be out (since, once I was 25, I lived far away and came home for visits, though often for several weeks in the summer, as I am teacher) to her than to just keep up the "blank" of my romantic life. She's been dead now for over twenty years; I was with her when she died in the hospital, having been in a non-responsive state for nine days. I told her I was happy and that I had just met someone who made me happy and I used the pronoun "he" (the deathbed coward, I know). She opened an eye and looked puzzled--I suspect it was not a conscious response, but the autonomic system (as was the case with Terri Schiavo). I wonder if, had I come out earlier, we could have had a warmer relationship, once she got over the difficult feelings she would experience. I think, like your mom, she must have played a game of see-saw--my sister, to whom I was always out, said mom often said she just wished I would find a nice woman to settle down with. But her favorite cousin was a very 1950s gay man, complete with marveled hair, a "roommate" named Emory (!), and a standard champagne brown poodle named Coco (and they all lived with Ken's mother, my great-aunt Mable), and mom, after her second scotch, would inevitably flirt with our waiter at a restaurant, who was also inevitably flaming. "I bet I know what your major is," she would slur, "I bet you're a theatre major." "Why, what makes you say that," the waiter would respond, and I'd roll my eyes at him. And she was a generous tipper.
