My son was 23 when he called me with a shocking confession - three years later, he was dead
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At 4am one morning in 2013, Lanette Sweeney received a phone call from her 23 year-old son Kyle that would mark the beginning of what she called 'the worst tragedy of my life'.
The 'high achiever' left her blindsided with a confession she never expected of the son who recently 'followed' a girl he loved to New York: '"Mom, I think I'm gay,"' he told her.
'As a queer person, I thought I had pretty good gaydar,' she said. 'I’d never had the slightest inkling Kyle might be gay.'
Heartbreakingly, Kyle, from Western Massachusetts, went on to admit that he had been so afraid of revealing his sexuality that he'd turned to dangerous methods of escaping his anxious thoughts.
He was in the grip of an addiction to crack cocaine, he told his mother.
'He confessed he’d become so uncontrollably addicted he’d spent all his student loan money on the drug and was holed up alone in his apartment, high out of his mind after trading away his PlayStation to get more,' Ms Sweeney wrote for the Huffingtonpost.
'He was calling because he was afraid he was about to start trading away his roommates’ electronics too.
'I suspected he'd only told me about his attraction to men because that felt easier than announcing his addiction to crack.'
Mrs Sweeney immediately set about finding a rehab facility for her son, and booked him 'thinking all of our problems would now be solved'.
In fact, it would tragically play a part in his death.
It was via conversations with fellow rehab residents that Kyle became interested in heroin, a powerful and highly addictive opiate drug, which he 'knew immediately' he wanted to try.
A year-later, with the help of a friend he met at rehab, he did.
Mrs Sweeney said the remainder of her son's short life was spent in and out of rehab before he died of an overdose of heroin combined with another drug, meth.
He was just 26.
Mrs Sweeney described her son as gifted poet who loved writing sonnets and was an expert Scrabble player.
She said Kyle's secrecy about his sexuality had initially puzzled her because she herself was married to a woman, and her daughter had also openly come out as queer, something Kyle had 'embraced'.
'Our family is about as accepting as a family can be, which made it all the more shocking when Kyle came out to me,' she said.
However, she added that — during that 4am phone call — Kyle said he remembered his mother once saying she 'didn't believe' men could be bisexual.
She continued: 'Which was why he'd never discussed his sexuality with me. He feared I'd insist he was gay, which he didn't really think he was.'
Mrs Sweeney said her 'unknowing rejection' of her son's sexual identity was 'a mistake I have the rest of my life to regret'.
However, she added she's not alone.
Research suggests a disbelief about the validity of bisexuality is present among both straight and gay people.
This bias is believed to play a role in why only about one in 10 bisexual men are open about their sexuality with their nearest and dearest, Mrs Sweeney said.
Mrs Sweeney added that data suggests bisexual youth are more likely to be bullied and to take illegal drugs, and bisexual adults are more likely to suffer a substance-abuse disorder and have depression than others.
Recent data from the British Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggests bisexual people are three times more likely to suffer self-harm than their heterosexual peers.
Mrs Sweeney said she now wishes the family had addressed Kyle's difficulties regarding his sexuality with as much importance as they did his drug addiction.
'Kyle needed mental health support for the shame society made him feel about being bisexual as much as he did for his addiction,' she said.
'But we only focused on what seemed like the more life-threatening problem, his substance-use disorder.'
'Further, many therapies in rehab are done in groups, and Kyle never felt comfortable discussing his sexuality in those hyper-masculine, gender-segregated rooms.'
'We tried to get Kyle to talk further about this, but he resisted, insisting he was "mostly straight."
'I wish I could have gotten him to talk to a therapist about his sexuality, and the potentially traumatising encounters he had with grown men when he was a kid, but I don’t think he ever did. '
Mrs Sweeney said the more she has learned about the challenges bisexual men face, the more she considers it a factor in his early death.
'My son may have been taught by our culture to feel ashamed of who he was, but in sharing his story, I am saying I will not be ashamed of this part of him anymore.'
'I can never undo the damage I did by telling him I didn’t believe bisexual men existed.
'But I hope other parents reading this will think twice about the messages even supposedly accepting families might be sending their children.
'I wish I could go back and tell my son instead that he could live a happy, healthy life as a bisexual man.'
Mrs Sweeney published a book called 'What I Should Have Said: A Poetry Memoir about Losing a Child to Addiction' featuring some of Kyle's poems.
The latest data from the ONS shows 1.5 per cent of British men identify as bisexual.
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