I had what I consider a textbook, best-case-scenario coming out experience with my mother. In 2004, I had fallen in love with a woman for the first time, and as sometimes happens, fell so deeply and quickly in love that I didn’t realize we weren’t on the same page until she broke my heart over dinner one summer night. I cried on the bus home and when I arrived, I collected myself enough to tell my mother the thing that silently occupied conversations about the Indigo Girls or the gay marriage debate: I was bisexual. I had a girlfriend. She broke up with me. I’d be crying and upset, and I didn’t want my mother to wonder why.

My white American middle-class mother, who’d gone to gay bars in Toyko in the ’70s and took me to see Rent when I was 12, held