I come from a family where children are pampered. I have always been close to my parents, and in particular to my mother, who stopped working when my first brother was born. She was a cleaner in a hospital, but the conditions became more and more complicated, and my father, a railway worker, worked a lot. Together we would play video games – or rather I would watch her play. When I was in high school, I stuck it out a bit. On weekends and Wednesdays when she visited my brother’s godmother, I would join her and she would kindly laugh at me. She nicknamed me “the backpack”. The relationship with my father was more distant, because he was angry and I was too, but we still had a good relationship.
I adhered to my parents’ values. I don’t remember any fundamental discord. I had frank discussions with them, sometimes arguments, but they did not alter our bond. Things started to change when their relationship broke up. I was in senior year, I could see they weren’t happy. My mother wanted to go back to work. She found a job as a saleswoman in which she quickly blossomed. They ended up going their separate ways and selling the house.
Coming out
For my part, I was very involved in high school, I loved math, which satisfied my parents: they always wanted us to study. They already saw me as a doctor! After the baccalaureate, I did a prep, and I was admitted to an engineering school in Paris. It was that summer that I came out, first to my mother. She took it pretty well, although I think she was afraid of not having grandchildren. She is a very maternal woman.
From the moment I left my city for Paris, I confided in her less, because I rarely returned and because tensions arose between us. I remember a conversation where she confided in me that she had not had a happy life. I told him in return that I too felt miserable at times in my childhood. She took it very badly. She pointed, as if I was accusing her, when I wasn’t. She found me ungrateful. I received messages from my family asking me to be kind to her, not to make her suffer.
“For the first time, I had the impression of being surrounded by people who did not have the same apprehension of the world as me”
In Paris, I got involved in the LGBT association at my school. Frankly, we weren’t hooligans: when I arrived, the association was not very active. When I told my mother about it over the Easter holidays, she worried, she feared that I would be in trouble. “Be careful not to proselytize, she told me. It shines people. “ I got on my high horse and she withdrew her words. It’s a break for me: before, we had never had ideological opposition. During that same vacation, during a meal, one of my cousins spoke of the girls’ provocative outfits, suggesting that this could constitute incitement to rape. My mother agreed with her a little. For the first time, I had the impression of being surrounded by people who did not have the same apprehension of the world as me. The impression, too, that the tensions between my mother and me were taking on a new political dimension.
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