Age doesn't always do much to quell the nerves of coming out, and when parents reveal themselves to their children, they are often fraught with all the fears of a trembling adolescent: of losing love, of being forsaken, of being deemed a disappointment.
For those men, many of who became parents during marriages or long-term relationships with women, the process is just as difficult. But every day, disclosures move in the other direction: dads will have to tell their children that their father is gay. Tales about coming out often focus on the experience of a child telling his or her parent. So when his 11-year old middle son burst into tears and shrieked those three words, the reaction pierced his dad's already-anxious heart. But when California dad Steve sat his three sons on the living room couch, the news he had to share was of much greater consequence. Usually they're in response to a playground tease, the common kind of slander - four eyes! metal mouth! - that kids get over fast. You'll often hear those three words come from the mouth of a child.
