If you were to ask me what is important in a person, it would be compassion.  By committing oneself to compassion, the pathway to becoming a better person is made more clear.  This has been the ultimate idea that has allowed me to survive the ordeal of coming out to my parents.  During my senior year of high school, my family’s ideal life was turned upside down. Why? My parent’s oldest son turned out to be gay! That would be me of course.  My mom took it the hardest, having the constraining traditions and values almost every Taiwanese mom has.  To make a long story short, I was angry with their reaction and life became terrible, certainly not worth living, or so I thought at the time.  Now, four years later, I’ve realized that by having the compassion to see into my mother’s pain, to fully understand why she adamantly demanded for me to “become” straight helped all of us cope with my being gay.  An important factor in coming out to one’s parents is working with them, don’t drop the news and hope that they’ll understand without your guidance.  Even today, I am still struggling to help them accept my sexuality, it’s a lifelong process for some.  But in the end, it’s worth it, my relationship strengthened more so than it could have ever become without their knowledge of my being gay.  It was important for me to understand that my parent’s perception of who I was died with the disclosure of my sexuality.  Imagine the pain if your child died and everyone refused to help you cope with that grief.  In addition, imagine that the last words between you and your hypothetical child were ones of anger and misunderstanding.  How could I be angry with this knowledge?
    Recently, while watching television, I saw a commercial about an Asian mother and father promoting HIV-testing, having lost both of their sons to this virus.  It brought tears to my eyes, to see the pain that they suffered in seeing their children die before them.  My mother has put all of her dreams and aspirations into my life, hoping that I may enjoy a life that she was not able to claim when young.  Her greatest fear is that she will lose me to AIDS, as so many gay men have in the past two decades.  While she understands that AIDS is not a gay disease, her fears are genuine.  And through this I realize that I have a responsibility not just to myself, but to those who love me as well.  Succumbing to one night of lust is certainly not worth the pain that could arise from such an incident.  While I feel sadness for the two brothers in the commercial, I feel a much more intense sadness for their parents, who were left behind to pick up the broken pieces.
    If you have any comments or suggestions, please write me at tommio@uclink4.berkeley.edu.