“I have been perfectly happy the way I am,” wrote renowned gay author Christopher Isherwood. “If my mother was responsible for it, I am grateful.”

“My mother,” countered Gore Vidal , “was a traumatic experience.”

Love them or hate them, mothers are often the only major woman in a gay man’s life — the one female relationship that has any depth to it.

Though Freudians in the past indited mothers as the “cause” of male homosexuality, the modern data suggests sexual preference is a biological orientation. The role mothers play seems mainly biochemical:

According to a landmark study of mothers with adult gay children, conducted in 1988 at Minot State University, pregnant women who suffer great stress during their second trimester are more likely to deliver gay sons.

While this study suggests that gay men are the result of something gone wrong, its basic finding, that homosexuality is grounded in a chemical state, has been supported by subsequent studies — though the emphasis now is on genetics rather than chemistry. Mother Nature, it seems, not mother nurture, casts the deciding vote.

This is a far cry from the once unquestioned tenet that too much mother love (or too little) was the key to homosexuality. The theory, with its implicit assumption that homosexuality was a sick mental “condition” rather than a naturally occurring human state, purposely misread biased samples: the findings were based on gay men in therapy.

I’m alluding here to the discredited study by Irving Bieber, an advocate of “reparative therapy,” which held sway in the 1960’s (and is still — another nail in its coffin — a staple of the ex-gay ministries movement). Bieber based his conclusions on a statistically meaningless sample of no more than 106 men — of which 27% were schizophrenic, 29% were psychoneurotic, and 42% had character disorders sufficient to require professional help.

Today one’s mother, as a determinant of homosexuality, has been cast on the same rubbish heap of supposed causes as demonic possession and English boys schools.

And yet …

Though our mothers certainly didn’t “make” us gay (no one is more powerful than Nature itself), we — many of us — are very much our mother’s sons … perhaps a shade more that our straight brothers.

Join us now as we examine this unique and tricky relationship. Here then is Nightcharm’s Cavalcade of Extra-Colorful Moms. Can you spot yours?

 

Right about the time your voice changed, your mother went into her second girlhood.

Whenever you brought a high school pal over for dinner, Mom was all cleavage and pretty legs as she sashayed about the barbecue pit. Then, to your utter shame, she took “you two big, handsome guys” around the shoulders and reminisced about her sweater days as a buxom, much-dated cheerleader.

Your ears burned pink with each too-candid detail, sly wink and throaty Kathleen Turner laugh. Funny, she never acted this way around your father. Then she seemed rather cool, even a bit prudish. If Dad had so much as smacked her on the can, she’d have whirled around and snapped, “Not with a growing boy in the house!”

However, when the house held just you and her — or worse, the two of you and one of your buddies — she was all double entendres, and any wild thing might pop out of her mouth, from the superiority of convertibles for moonlight petting to whether “you two guys” were still virgins.

Your friends thought she was warm, earthy and “a real trip.” But you found her behavior a bit fake, as if it were only around adolescents that she felt safe enough to act (overact) sexy. Still, not exactly lost on you was the huge — and sometimes amazingly outlined — rise she got out of the big buck jocks you brought home.

Today, years later, you are a credit to your Mom. In fact, you could make an Olympic team, if free-style cruising were ever recognized as a sport. Then gay America would watch breathlessly as you stepped onto the mat, lowered your jaw, and with a look of terrible concentration, took the gold in Staring Without Blinking, Eyeballing Your Opponent Into the Wall, and Making Small Talk Fraught with Pornographic Suggestion.

When you were a tot, she dressed you in blue blazers with monogrammed gold crests. Up and down the boulevard you were paraded, the perfect accessory for Mother’s swanky ensemble.

From tothood on, your most intense chats with Mother took place before her vanity dresser as she dabbed shadow onto her lids and talked to you through the mirror, in triplicate. You were scarcely four when she began coming to you with her many dilemmas about hair color and which of two dresses she should buy (of course, she always bought both).

To her questions, you could only chirp back the beauty lore she herself taught you. This prompted her to praise your “terrific taste,” for you were a wonderful new sort of mirror, reflecting her own opinions back to her. She seemed unable to make any fashion decisions now without your final word, and by age seven you were offering opinions left and right, asked for or not.

Today, you pontificate with frightening ease. Chats with Mother still turn on the crucial question of what shoes to wear, but now and then you attempt to change the subject.

Mother, however, finds subjects that do not center on her to be tiresome and weirdly abstract. The last time you made the mistake of introducing an adult topic (actually, you wanted to talk about yourself), she grew steadily absorbed in a jar of lip gloss.

All at once she glanced up into the mirrors and fixed you with tormented eyes. “Darling,” she cut in, “do these two reds work together?”

Your mother, you will admit, is a vain and beautiful woman — but then you’re not exactly mirror-shy yourself. You have been trained from birth to be her personal fashion consultant, and now it is she who parades up and down the boulevard on your arm — each of you the other’s favorite bauble.

This prim lady dabs an imaginary crumb from her mouth after each bite, speaks in subdued tones about music (and, of course, God), and just may have had you through some sort of virgin birth.

The spotless gloves she wears to church are never quite taken off. They stay buttoned on in spirit form, keeping her at one remove from any reality grimier than the one she reads about in her inspirational books by Dr. Schuller.

For you mother, it is always Sunday morning at the Crystal Cathedral. She tried to instill these values in you. How she beamed when you decided to study for the ministry (”The Lord’s gift to a mother,” she said). But then, oh, the reproachful looks when you became an English teacher instead.

That you are still unmarried at 37 draws no questions from her. As long as your personal life is never mentioned, polite coexistence can go on.

And you do more than coexist.

You visit her every Sunday after church. Entering your mother’s house is like stepping into a picture in a lady’s magazine. Everything is perfect, airless, antiseptic. A vase of fresh mums stands on the TV set, under two symmetric frames. One is a photo portrait of you, and the other is of your mother — both rendered in flat, painted-on tones, featuring the two of you with banged hair that resembles hardened plaster. Like her — and you are very like her — you chose to pose for the photo with your glasses on.

Mother brought you up to do everything as she did, the right way — that is, to do everything for appearance’s sake. And it is for appearances now that you bring female dates to faculty parties and feign fiancées who never quite materialize.

Close friends worry about your actual private life. You seem to fancy none of the soft-spoken gentlemen they press on you. It seems you can only have sex in the gutter, with the lowest possible trash.

Trash, after all, is meant to be discarded, while a serious lover — how would you ever explain him to Mother!

Your mother can never simply come into a room; she makes an entrance worthy of Cleopatra taking Rome.

Scenes have been witnessed in her kitchen that only a shameless run for the Oscar would explain.

She is a master of the piercing stare, the spine-tingling rejoinder, the silvery laugh, the catch in the voice, and, oh yes, the brave eyes shimmering with tears that go unshed — a repertory of fire-and-water effects that turn the most ordinary conversation into something out of Eugene O’Neil.

The cameras are always running when Mother’s around, and you, like everyone else in the world, are one of her many supporting players — she brooks no costars.

In the role of The Son, you are cast always as comic relief or as a doted-upon prop in a scene meant to show her in the warmest light.

Really, your mother is an entire Joan Crawford movie, one made during Joan’s Queen-Bee-in-turmoil period.

One day you decide to tell her your secret. After all, you too are a budding tragedian, with a red-velvet curtain of your own to ring up. But just as you begin your confession, you are bumped off to the sidelines, and Mother takes the spotlight to give her greatest performance: the dying swan, wounded by a heartless son turned gay.

Silly extra, you made the mistake of bringing her only your soul on a platter. Now you see, as she ends her poem to pained love, that what you should have brought was a dozen red roses to fling at her feet.

“You’re just like your father!”

That was a poison curse when it hurtled from your mother’s lips. Your father (a.k.a. “that bastard”) had run off when you were a kid, and your mother used you afterward like a voodoo doll to jab out her hate against men (a.k.a. “those selfish pigs”).

Her sharpest weapon was her tongue. If you got an A on a test, she was appalled by your sloppy penmanship. If you bought her a gift she had admired, it was really the one in green she had wanted. When you laughed on the phone with your friends, you were “giggling like a girl.” But when you ripped a tendon during football practice and were laid up in your room for a week, then you were a “typical man,” who expected to be waited on hand and foot.

There was no pleasing your mother.

Eventually you stopped trying. This was your rebel phase. You got a startling haircut only another teenage boy could love, dealt serious drugs from your bedroom, and roared down mountain roads at neck-breaking speeds.

One day during a yelling match, you shook you mother by the shoulders and blurted that you hated her so much, you had turned gay.

You knew hate had nothing to do with it, but the remark hit her over the head like a mallet. For the first time you saw the Nightmare on Elm Street shrink down to the size of a small, wordless old woman.

Soon after, you left her house forever. You never visit now, or even call. Oddly, though, you tend to look for your mother in the men you meet, preferring those who are masters of verbal abuse and dungeon torture. Then you ditch them.

Just like your father.

You were already 10 and she still brushed your hair, tied your shoes, and bundled you up like an Eskimo. She crammed your lunch box with multiple-choice sandwiches, a festival of cupcakes, and an extra thermos of hot cocoa to drink on the bus. (Your lifelong battle with weight dates from these days.)

She forbade you to play rough, and if you so much as scraped your knee (because you were skipping rope in secret with some screamy girls down the street), your mother would band-aid and iodine and Mercurochrome the cut as if she were going out of her mind.

Trouble, though, rocked your teen years. She never liked any of the chatty girls you scared up for school dances, and for weeks she moped about the house, wondering aloud if they were really interested in you or in your shiny new car.

Jealousy now made her snoop about your room, reading harmless letters you had left out. Then one never-to-be-forgotten day, she tripped over a certain shoebox at the bottom of your closet and out spilled a slew of magazines, jampacked with beefy boys in a variety of unhygienic positions.

There was much wailing and breast-beating that day. She said she felt shocked, stunned, betrayed. You pointed out it was your privacy, actually, that have been violated (she seemed not to hear this).

The carrying on lasted a month. You tried to calm her by dating some girls, but this had just the opposite effect.

“You were such a beautiful baby,” she bawled. “What happened to that … little boy?” It was as if someone has swiped her favorite toy.

Today, you live not far from her. And Mom thinks nothing of turning her very own key in the lock without calling first — though, more than once she made you drain a ghastly white as you ran to slam the bedroom door. She has endured all you lovers with a bright, pasted-on smile, but in private tells you exactly what’s wrong with them.

Even now, though you are a grown man, she takes over your kitchen once a week with a flotilla of her own pots and cooks up a devilishly complicated meal, looking wistfully into the sauce as she stirs.

“This,” she says with a long, ragged sigh, “was always your favorite dish … at home.”

One day when you were in kindergarten, your mother made a surprise visit. She appeared at the edge of the playground wearing a new suit, with a suitcase in her hand. You ran to her call and she caught you up in such a fierce hug, enveloping you in perfume and scented makeup, that to this day you can pick that fragrance out in a crowd and, for a moment, have your mother back again.

Over a banana split at a lunch counter, she explained she was leaving your father — and you as well. She began to cry, which made you cry. Then she smoothed back your hair and kept saying she loved you, that you were such a smart little boy and so sensitive, the only one who understood her.

And so you were raised by your father. Though you saw your mother now and then in summer and sometimes on your birthday, when she would pull into town laden with spectacular gifts, the strongest image you have of her — an imaged burned into your mind like a brand — is the way she looked that day she left, in her shapely blue suit, dabbing her eyes with a Kleenex that had a lipstick smear on it.

Your father told people your mother was dead: Being left with a son was an embarrassment to him. Still, no matter how often he cursed her, you put her on a pedestal. She seemed, in memory, prettier, smarter, kinder than even the model mothers on TV.

In your young mind, it was up to you to win back this impossible beauty. So it was for her that you excelled in art class, spending much of your boyhood drawing picture after picture until you got the lines perfect. Then you’d send the pretty thing to her.

“What a talented artist your are!” — how you treasured those words at the bottom of her Christmas cards … at least, at first.

In your mid-teens, a gloominess came over you that only sex with strangers could dispel. By then, everyone was making allowances for you and what they called your “artistic temperament.”

Now, decades later, some observers think your absent mother took no part in shaping the man you have become. You know otherwise.

More than your talent, it is your finely honed technique that has bought you money and some fame. The price of this perfectionism is that while you have brief, strictly sexual affairs, you shun men who stir you too deeply. Love is not a word you trust — and anyway, love gets sticky with emotions.

Life is easier when the object of your desire stands elevated at a cool distance and you observe in silence — both of you classic in your way, frozen in place, supplicant and god — two statues unflawed by time or experience.

Your father drove Mom into your arms when you were a teenager. She said she wanted nothing more to do with the brute, yet she bickered with him constantly. Dad was the black beast of both your nightmares, and you two were united against him.

“He’s so stupid and low-class and …” On and on, your mother would complain when you began taking her out to museums on Saturday afternoons.

“This marriage was a mistake, a total …,” she whispered throughout the piano recital you wanted her to hear.

“That man ruins every single Sunday with his …,” she huffed while some French-language actress coughed sorrowfully on screen, and moviegoers turned around with shrill, overeducated “Shhh’s.”

You were escorting her into a world you had just discovered, an alternative universe of culture, fashion, and snobbish disdain — a world opposite the beer-and-NASCAR realm that your father existed in. Here your mother was to leave behind her Wal-mart shopping cart and join you in what you imagined, somehow, was her true calling: as a brittle socialite, your perfect partner.

You urged her to divorce the old man, to flee with you to some bohemian walk-up far away. Your mother played with this idea for a while, but only as a new way to talk about your father.

Too late you learned that while you wanted an intellectual soul mate, she only wanted a girlfriend.

Tiring of your role as Ethel Mertz — and the tacit implication of “us girls against the universe” — you saw you had not delivered your mother into a new world; she has just reinterpreted her “sensitive” son into a role she understood.

Today, Mom and Dad bicker on in happy wedlock. So do you and your lover. Your friends keep laying bets on when you two will break up, but that isn’t really in the cards. The give-and take, the jabbing and sparring, are survival arts you leaned at your mother’s knee.

Your mother sat by your bed when you had the mumps, came to the school play when you had only one line as a talking carrot, and argued with a lot of policemen when you led an anti-nuke march. Even when you took an apartment on your own, Mom stood solidly behind you.

But your Pillar of Strength crumbled the day you came out to her.

It was a phase, she insisted after she caught her breath. A pose. Another of your rebel stances. You were not to mention it again, certainly not to your father. Then she bolted from her chair and dusted the furniture in a sort of daze.

You said you just wanted her to know who you really were, that you trusted and loved her that much. Those words made her cry. You hugged her until she stopped. She whispered it must be her fault.

It wasn’t anybody’s fault, you tried. It was just life. Being gay was a built-in condition, like eye color.

A few days later, you introduced her to your lover. She continued to call him your “roommate.”

During the next months, she snapped at every little thing, but it was really over one thing, the only thing. And it crackled about your exchanges like a thundercloud.

One day she was Windexing a framed photo of you as a Cub Scout, and she slammed the portrait down. How could you make her suffer this way, she demanded, after the good home and the quality time — and the love.

She turned sullen. It was that wrestling coach you had worshiped — he did this to you! It was the Boy Scouts, the summer camps, those damn GQ magazines!

At home your lover told you to give her time. He had, after all, lived through this with his Mom. Remember how rough it was to come out to yourself, he urged. Your mother is coming out too, in her own way.

Not long after, calm did indeed settle upon your mother. On her bed table you spotted a pamphlet from PFLAG and a copy of Consenting Adult, Laura Z. Hobson’s discreetly autobiographical novel about a woman who learns to accept her gay son.

That Christmas, she told you to bring your lover to unwrap presents around the tree. She wanted your father to meet him. She hugged you at the door when you arrived, then hugged your boyfriend just as hard. By the time you left, she was calling him her “second son.” Mom and Dad behaved beautifully that evening — though your mother did wince when she happened to peek out the window just as you leaned toward the passenger seat to kiss your lover on the lips.

Today, your mother worries when you and your boyfriend quarrel. She has marched beside you in the gay parade, been the president of her local PFLAG chapter, and spoken in private — and sometimes from lecture stages — to mothers in the first wave of shock and grief.

“Your son’s entire sense of self-worth,” she tells them, “may hinge on whether you meet his announcement with shame or acceptance. It may surprise you to learn that one out of every four families has a gay member. Yet in our society, coming out to one’s mother is an ultimate test of love — for both mother and son.”

“I’m glad my son took that chance,” she declares. “I’m grateful he chose to live a full, open life. I’m here today to tell you I’m the mother of a gay son and I’m damn proud of him!”

You’re damn proud of her too.