Laura Siegel and Nancy Lamkin Olson are both the proud mothers of gay sons. You could say that both women are practically bursting with pride. The anthology Out of The Closet, Into Our Hearts: Celebrating Our Gay/Lesbian Family Members (Leyland Publications, San Francisco, 2001, $15.95), co-edited by Siegel and Olson is proof of their feelings. A labor of love, if ever there was one, this collection combines poetry and prose pieces written by the mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and children of gays and lesbians, honoring their relatives and extolling their virtues.

Gregg Shapiro: Please tell me about the genesis of the book.

Laura Siegel: My son came out to us in 1985. I guess that was the very first “genesis.” Pretty quickly, actually, we started to get involved, not in PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), but more in the gay community. We just started being there a lot. I found immediate joy and a certain kind of energy that I had not encountered before. A kind of celebration, and I saw a celebration in the gay community that I don’t think we have in the straight world, personally. Then my husband and I started going to PFLAG. I wasn’t going there for support. My first introduction to PFLAG was marching in the (Pride) parade with them. Again, the outpouring of energy and love was something that drew me in. I think that my experience (at PFLAG meetings) was quite different from the majority of the people who came to PFLAG. I soon began doing the newsletter for San Francisco PFLAG. I was just drawn to telling the stories that were about joy. There were many out there. I felt there was a lot out there about the grief and the pain. I was drawn to the stories about joy. Then I went online, to a group called PFLAG Talk. It’s a PFLAG list serve, not affiliated with PFLAG. I met 12 other moms on there who I felt had my kind of spirit. We formed our own little group. Nancy Lamkin Olson, my co-editor, is one of those moms. She said, one day, “We’re hearing so much joy in our children, don’t you think other people do too? We should compile these stories.”

GS: How did you go about soliciting material?

LS: PFLAG has a national newsletter. We put an ad in that. We sent letters to all of the chapters. I put an ad in a writer’s magazine and on bulletin boards. We got a huge response. A fair number of the people were (telling) the stories that we had seen before…about transition and grief and angst. We wanted a little something different for this book.

GS: One of the striking things is the mix of published and never-before-published writers…was your intention to have the writing in the book be from both the literary community as well as pieces of a more personal nature?

LS: No (laughs). I had no expectation of what was going to come in at all. We took it as we got it. Some of it was previously published. That was another way that we got stories…by going out and looking for them. The Internet was a great source for that, and magazines.

GS: Two of the most notable contributors to the book are NBC-TV movie critic Gene Shalit and Matthew Shepard’s father Dennis Shepard.

LS: They’re both previously published (pieces) and they own the rights to them, so we did have to get permission.

GS: What books did you find to be of value to you during your son Stuart’s coming out?

LS: I gravitated towards gay male fiction because I wanted to know what my son was experiencing. I knew what I was experiencing. I had no need to read any of the books about parents and how to deal with having a gay child. I remember Edmund White’s novel, A Boy’s Own Story. That was the first really striking book that I read. The boy’s angst really resonated for me with what I saw in my son. I really liked Aaron Fricke’s Reflections Of A Rock Lobster.

GS: Was it your intention for your book to take its place on the shelf in the PFLAG library?

LS: That’s my first intention…to have these voices of celebration heard. Too often we hear the anger and the grief and the angst. I have even had people say to me that they’re (the voices in the book) not real, but they are real. It’s curious that people say that, because I think it’s the direction that we want to move in. If you ask anybody, they’ll tell you that they want their parents to be part of their life…to celebrate who they are. If that’s what we want…then here it is…why wouldn’t it be real? I think it would be a great addition to every PFLAG library. I think it would be a good book for gay/lesbian/bi/trans people to give to their family members.