Endless Thread - Endless Thread Presents: Pride Stories From 'Kind World'

Episode Date: June 24, 2019

In honor of Pride month, the Endless Thread team shares a pair of stories from another WBUR podcast -- Kind World. Co-hosts Yasmin Amer and Andrea Asuaje tell stories about the profound impact an act of kindness can have on us. Enjoy, and happy Pride to all!

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Team Endless Thread wanted to share a pair of stories from another WBUR podcast called Kind World. It's co-hosted by our pod homies Yasmin Ammer and Andrea Aswaha and it tells stories about the profound impact that an act of kindness can have on us.

Think of it like a weekly dose of hope. I could use some of that. Could you use some of that, Emery? No, I'm good. JK, yes, please. More hope, please. Okay, good. Well, first up, a story about changing your view, which can seem pretty impossible when we're talking about a deeply held belief. Yes, Meen has this story. Sarah Cunningham was born and raised in Oklahoma City.

She grew up in a working class family with four brothers and sisters. She was the social butterfly of the family, or as her mother liked to call her, the goose. And I think she knew that I just had this knack of sticking my nose in everyone's business. I always wanted to know if everyone was all right, where everybody was. Still, she dreamt of the day she would one day leave Oklahoma behind for someplace bigger, less landlocked and with more people, like maybe California. I remember in my teens begging my mother to not let me be buried in Oklahoma. But as I've grown older, I've grown to just really appreciate the city,

the sense of community here. That sense of community kept the now 55-year-old Sarah in Oklahoma when she married at and raised her own family. She wanted her two boys, Travis and Parker, to love the same evangelical Christian community she did. I loved church life. I loved our family being plugged in. We were there every time the church doors were open,

and the boys were happy to go. Little by little, Sarah noticed something concerning about her younger son Parker. He grew more quiet and reserved and tended to spend a lot of time alone. But there's one moment that, sticks out in Sarah's mind when she saw a completely different sight of Parker. He was five years old, and he came downstairs wearing one of her dresses and started dancing

ecstatically. We were all just kind of taken back by his energy and his excitement, and that was my first glimpse of, like, that's different. And from that moment on, I tried to control the situation by, well, for example, when we went shopping, I would try to gear, Parker towards or steer Parker towards the more masculine things. I encouraged him, well, I forced him to join Cub Scouts. I just tried to make Parker a fine, young man, very masculine.

Instead, Parker became shy and anxious. He struggled to speak openly to his mother. But at 21 years old, Parker finally told her he's gay. I just remember that I had to face the reality in that moment, in that hour that I have a gay child. And I truly believed that my son was going to hell. I really did. Sarah spiraled into a depression. And when she tried to talk to her friends at church about it, the conversations were awkward, and she felt isolated.

It was painful. We all just became alienated from the congregation. so before long we just quit going. And I've heard it said that when a child, when a gay child comes out of their closet, the parents often go into theirs, and that's true. There were days when Sarah couldn't get out of bed. On one of them, Parker came into her room to ask if she was okay.

And I said, yeah, I just need to figure this out. And he said, I understand that, but I need you to understand that I have sucked it up for 21 years being your son. I need you to suck it up now and be my mom. That moment motivated her to do some soul searching and research. She began a journey that would change her life forever. Not far from Sarah, in neighboring Arkansas, Tabitha Cash's life was also about to change forever. The love of her life, her girlfriend Marley Castillo, proposed to her on Thanksgiving of 2017.

So at first it was really, really, really exciting, and then it set in to me, about telling my mom and my family. Tabitha worried about how her family might react. They were Southern Baptists with strict views against same-sex relationships. Tabitha was close to her four siblings and spoke to her mother nearly every day. She didn't want any of that to change, but she also knew she couldn't keep her relationship with Marley a secret. So I didn't know how to marry her and be,

as happy as I was right then. Because I knew when we told my mom about the engagement, it's just heartbreaking because it turned into this awkwardness for so long after you were so close for your entire life. Still, the couple continued to plan their wedding, and Tabitha's fiancé Marley asked a close family friend to officiate it.

That friend was Sarah Cunningham from Oklahoma. By that time, Sarah, this same woman, who struggled after her own son came out, became what she calls an accidental activist. She joined a group of moms with LGBTQ kids and even became an officiant so she could preside over same-sex weddings. Tabitha remembers the first time

she met Sarah at a get-together in Arkansas. And, I mean, I just immediately, I think, we connected because I feel like I saw what I want my mom to be in her. Instead of officiating the wedding, Tabitha asked Sarah if she would be her stand-in mother. Sarah said yes. On September 1st, 2018, Sarah stuck by Tabith's side on her big day, helping her put on her white dress and making her bouquet.

It was bittersweet. I felt for Tabitha because I know she enjoyed the day. She felt honored and celebrated, but by the same token, her mother was not there. Tabitha and her now wife, Marley, say Sarah's role as a stand-in mom was so much more than arranging the flowers and helping with the decorations. As a mother who had come to terms with her own son's sexuality, she brought a special kind of support Tabitha really needed.

Sarah always gives me hope for my own family, and the fact that she has experienced it, and she has experienced every bit of the feelings that my mom is probably going through, gives me hope because she figured out a way to make it all work. Sarah says there are so many moments she regrets not being there for her son when he really needed her. But she's here now, and she wants to help others in the gay community who are struggling with rejection from their families. She now volunteers to go to other same-sex weddings if the biological parents won't. She's there as a stand-in mom and as a symbol of how a deep, unconditional love can change everything.

Yesmeen Amher of WBUR's Kind World podcast. We'll be right back. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics. Country music. Hockey. Sex. Of bugs.

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we have one more story of pride from WBUR's Kind World podcast. Here's Andrea Aswaha telling the story to her co-host Yasmine and to all of us. So in 2002, Joe Faust was the manager of a little independent LGBTQ bookstore

in Indianapolis called Outward Bound. Great name. Oh, is that W-O-R-R-R- Yes, it's just love a play on words. So Joe was working one evening and the store's phone rings and he picks it up and on the other end is a very upset young man. He called to say that he felt like he was probably gay and that this was a difficult feeling for him and that he wasn't sure what to do about it and if it was even right and he was really agitated about it too. And there was a real sense that he, He might have been intent on hurting himself if he couldn't come to terms with this experience he was having. That seems like such a terrifying phone call to get because you're just thrust into this situation where you feel like you have to do or say the right thing immediately. Right, right. So Joe is talking to this guy and he's telling him about his life and how he came out and his life since coming out.

But he's also kind of trying to figure out what to say because he's, He's a manager at a bookstore. This is not a crisis center. He's just at work. And Joe tells me that the bookstore is pretty small. It was about the size of a, like a good size living room. And so the few customers that are there are clearly hearing what's going on. And then this happened.

This one woman, this beautiful woman came to the counter, and I thought that she was going to ask a question or need help finding something. And I tried to give her this look that said, I can't help me right now. I'm doing this other thing. And she put her hand on my shoulder and her other hand out. And she asked for the phone. And she said, let me have a turn. Oh, let me have a turn. What did she mean by that? So she actually took the phone from Joe. And she starts talking to this man about her life and her coming out story and how she has this wonderful partner and how her life has changed for the better since she came out. And then she starts handing the phone to the other customers in the store and they start telling their stories of coming out and living their lives as people who are out. And so she just sets this amazing domino effect.

Yeah, exactly. And just as there weren't like a ton of people in the store or anything, but there were like enough people there that they could give like a nice swath of the coming out experience and telling this young. man, you know, what life is like as a queer person. So Joe is watching all of this just unfold before his eyes completely unexpected. What does he think when he reflects back on that night? Well, when he says he tells the story quite often now. And when he thinks about it, he says it's kind of this moment that showed him so much about how powerful and important the LGBTQ community is.

That experience, and I think just the experience of working in that bookstore generally, really colored my perception of the gay and lesbian community, and I have taken that with me the whole rest of my life because I know that we are capable of really amazing things together. And then he mentioned this part when he thinks back on that day, on that night, that really struck me, which is that he thinks about this group and how it helped this man, but he also thinks about the kindness that was done for him

by this woman who stepped up. And he says that she really affected him for life. I think I would like to tell her that her evening of kindness became a philosophy that I carried for 20 years after. I really have to ask you, did Joe ever see any of these people ever again? So Joe says that he probably did see some of them because he was still working at this bookstore. But he didn't really keep in touch with anyone. They didn't, you know, exchange numbers or they didn't talk. about it again and he didn't speak to the man on the phone either but he hopes that

that phone call helped him through this tough moment and that he went on to have a wonderful fulfilling life. I would like to think that after that bad night that he picked himself up and that he had lots of other people to talk to and friends and family and people that supported him and that this kind night I would hope would just be lost in a sea of of other kind nights and he wouldn't even remember. Andrea Eswaha and Yasmin Ammer from WBUR's Kind World podcast. There's a lot more where that came from. So subscribe to Kind World on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.

Also, while we're playing personal recommendation algorithm, another good listen this month is an episode we made a year ago called The Rest is History. It'll hit you right in the fields. And we'll see you back here in the Endless Thread Feed with a full-on episode. This Friday.