Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Andy: Your background is on Broadway and also in television producing Nurse Jackie for Showtime.

Richie: Yeah.

Andy: That is awesome. So I'm super interested in what your journey was to get there, and then what propelled you to write this book?

Richie: Right. So I had produced Nurse Jackie for seven seasons on Showtime. And my career was I produce theater and film and had gone to school to be a producer, and that was where my career was. And so when Nurse Jackie ended, I had this idea to write a TV series about an older gay man and a younger gay man who are thrown together as roommates, and try to look at how different it is to be getting now versus when I was a teenager in 1983. And I thought the hilarity would ensue.

Richie: Then just as I was coming up with these character descriptions and plot outlines, my husband and I have two children and our oldest son who was 15 at the time told us he was gay. And I thought, "Oh, this is happening right at our dinner table. This is not a TV show. It's real life."

Richie: And I was thrilled. I wanted him to be gay. I had hoped he'd be gay. And then he said, "Dad being gay is not a big deal. My generation doesn't think it's a big deal." And I said, "Oh, no, being gay is a really big deal. It's the best thing about me. It's the most important thing about me."

Richie: And I didn't want him to be one of these people that diminishes it and demeans it by saying, "Well, gay doesn't define me. I just happened to be gay," because he would break his own heart and not take full advantage of the gift that it is.

Richie: So I started to think of all the things I needed to share with him, to tell him what it means to be a gay man. And then Donald Trump was elected and declared war on the gay community. And he took with him the Washington, Mike Pence, Jeff Sessions, Betsy DeVos, all who are more of an imminent threat to our son than ISIS or North Korea. And then I had to warn him what it takes to be a gay man in America. And that was the impetus for the book.

Andy: And so did you start actually as writing this just to your son, and then at some point along the way you realized you had to publish it, or someone told you you had to publish it or what?

Richie: So it started as a letter to my son. And one day my friend Arianna Huffington asked me, what was I thinking about? What was I excited about? And I said, "Well, I'm writing this book." And she said, "That's an important book. We have to get your message out." And she introduced me to her book agent who then made this all happen for me.

Andy: It's a beautiful book and it's beautifully written and it's very personal, but the messages that you talk about are universal, I think. And it's about your family, but it's also about our culture. And it's about your story, but it's also about this just reads like all conversations that parents should be having with their kids, I think regardless of your kid's sexuality, these are things that you should be talking about.

Richie: I'm happy you think. There's so much we're not taught about ourselves growing up and especially LGBTQ youth. And our parents are in the Quip on their own to help us. And so I feel like I got to write the book I so desperately needed when I was young, the book our son needs, the book so many of us are hungry for, and that our parents need and our straight friends need to read to understand us better.

Andy: Okay. So talk to me about a play that your mom took you to called Torch Song Trilogy that you mentioned in this book was kind of a pivotal experience in your life and kind of shaped your trajectory into adulthood.

Richie: Right. So when I was in high school in 1982, when there were no out movie stars, there was no representation or visibility on TV or in movies or in magazines, there were no out elected officials, nobody was talking about gay people back then, my mother came home from a day in the city, a day in New York city, we lived on long Island. And she said, "I just saw this unbelievable play with this incredible actor who was also the playwright. And on my way out, I bought tickets to take you."

Richie: I thought we don't have enough money to buy tickets at the box office, and we never bought tickets for something we've seen before. So I was like, what is the urgency? And I said, "What's it about?" She said, "Homosexuality." And my mother took me to see Harvey Firestein in Torch Song Trilogy. And I had not told her I was gay. I hadn't told anybody. The character that Harvey plays, Arnold, was the very first gay I ever came in contact with. And he wanted what I wanted. He wanted to be a father and he wanted a relationship. Those were the only two goals I've ever had in my life. So I was completely taken with this entire experience.

Richie: But at the end, the play culminates with the character, Arnold, having a fight with his mother and the mother says, "Had I known you were going to be gay, I would never have had you." And afterwards, my mother took me to dinner and said, "If you ever came home and said you were gay, I would never react like the mother in that play." She used theater as a crystal ball to show me a life that could be possible for me. And my mother had no gay friends, no gay coworkers. It was her own humanity that had her bring me to see this play and introduce me to this world that was going to be my life. And it was a real lifeline for me.

Andy: I think that's such a great tool for parents though, to be able to use something that's happening in the culture or something else that you see, to kind of begin a conversation or as kind of a way in. So that's really cool that she did that, I think, and obviously had a huge impact on you. And we just talked so much about how important it is to have models. And as a teenager, you need to have models for what your life could look like. And so interesting that this was the first gay man that you have been exposed to at all. And that shows you what our media was at the time and still is largely, that there aren't models for you to look to of like, what could my life be and how could I live my life?

Richie: That's why I talk about in my book, for parents of LGBTQ kids, and really any kid who might be other, or if they need to see themselves, look to art, look to writers, to artists to theater, and you can help your child understand themselves better. And you can make them feel less alone. And art teaches you that your otherness is a gift.

Andy: You talked about this earlier, but one of the things that I had marked in this book is on page 65. You talk about this idea that people say being gay doesn't define me. Gay is just a part of me. I just happened to be gay. And you say, "These are all dismissals, rendering gay as incidental merely matter of fact." Why is this attitude damaging? And why do you hope that your son thinks differently about his identity?

Richie: That's a very good question. Thank you. Being gay is the best thing about me and everything good in my life has come from my gayness. Everything I think, feel, crave, create comes out of this deep well of my gayness. And I think if you diminish it, if you demean it, if you say, "Oh, I just happen to be gay." That means you're putting it in a tiny little corner of your life and you're not taking advantage of the freedom that being gay gives you, the blank canvas of what your life can be, the creativity, the incredible community to which you are a part of and the incredible people that you will love and that will love you.

Richie: And part of being a strong gay person is not breaking your own heart. It is very hard to be gay in America. You have to have double vision. You have to have one view. You have to have America's clear eye view of how they treat you, how they see you, how you're at battle with the government, how laws don't protect you, how you're not always safe. But in your other view, you have to see your beautiful gayness, your divinity, your vision board for the future, what's your destiny? And part of being gay is holding those two visions every day, and making sure you don't let America's view of you sip in and poison your own special view of your gayness. So if you're demeaning your gayness, if you're belittling it, you're basically doing the work of our adversaries. And I don't want my son to do that.

Andy: So if you're a parent, what can you say or what can you do, especially if you feel like your kid is kind of adopting this attitude a little bit, or you notice comments that are sort of negative, what could you say? Or what do you think you could do?

Richie: Well, I think one of the things that parents could do to help their LGBTQ youth is build up their self esteem. And you do that by teaching them LGBTQ history. And not out of some sense of responsibility, it's not like, Oh, you have to know your history. If you teach them their history, they will feel less alone. And they will see that they are part of this incredible continuum of people who have always changed our world. That will empower them. And then if you teach them, as I said before, if you expose them to art and literature, LGBTQ thinkers, writers, and artists, they will see that their otherness is a super power and they will see how to activate it. And if they activate it, then that will give them a better sense of self than if they're trying to fit into the straight world, if they're trying to soften the edges of their gayness, if they're trying to pass or get along, to go along, to get along. I think a good parents lesson would be don't scrub off your gayness, invest in it, rely on it, have faith in it. And that will build up their sense of this superpower.

Andy: I love that. We recently had Peggy Orenstein on the podcast. And she was talking about kind of like the similar concept, but for women and how our education system is so male focused and it's like for girls going through school.. She went to this one teacher's class for reporting for one of her early books school girls, where it was like this teacher in middle school forced people to at least do projects on women and stuff. And it was like this eye opening experience for the students because they were like, "Wow, there's so many women in history that we had no idea, we didn't know about." And I had the same thought reading your book is, because you talk about and hear how there's, we got the gay Rosa Parks, there's a whole history that is just not taught, that's completely glossed over, the LGBTQ history that is like-

Richie: Imagine if you are a young LGBTQ kid sitting in your elementary school, while you're being taught about Martin Luther King and the, I have a dream speech and that march on Washington. And imagine if the teacher also told those children that Bayard Rustin who organized that march was a black gay man. If that fact was mentioned to young gay people, when they were in elementary school, that would be a lifesaver for them.

Andy: Yeah. It's just erased from the history books or it's just completely disregarded.

Richie: Yeah. So that means the students are erased as they're sitting there. They're literally erased.

Andy: You just don't feel like you're represented anywhere..

Richie: Not anywhere. No