Mark My Words: Thank you Mom and Dad

This week is a travel week, with my first stop in Chicago — a city that has always held a special place in my heart. After landing at Chicago O’Hare International Airport, I head straight for the Blue Line train. Anyone who has flown into O’Hare knows it’s a traveler’s challenge: if you choose a cab, Uber or rental car, you’ll almost always face gridlock that stretches the drive into an hour, no matter the time of day. The train, on the other hand, takes about 45 minutes. So, train it is.

I always sit on the right-hand side of the train, and here’s why: It brings back some of my sweetest memories. Along the route, we pass the Hyatt Regency O’Hare Chicago. That was the hotel where I stayed during my very first visit to Chicago, more than 52 years ago. At that point, I had never experienced such an upscale hotel, but the memory isn’t really about the hotel itself. It’s about why I was in Chicago — and who I was with.

Not long before that trip, I had disrupted the “CBS Evening News” with Walter Cronkite. At the time, with only three major TV networks, Cronkite’s show was the nation’s most-watched, yet our community was invisible. My campaign was to change that, to bring LGBTQ+ people into view. (A quick side note: Wanda Sykes later produced a documentary about that movement called “Visible: Out on Television,” which features that campaign.)

Phil Donahue, who then had a nationally syndicated talk show, invited me on to discuss my “zap” — as we called those disruptions — and the larger issue of LGBTQ+ invisibility. He went against FCC expectations to give me a national platform to talk about it.

But here’s why that hotel means so much to me. On my second appearance with Phil Donahue, he asked me to bring my parents along. He wanted to talk not just with me, but with them — about what it was like having a gay son. That conversation became the first of its kind on American television. Each time I pass that hotel, I can still see my mom and dad’s faces: their excitement about the trip, their nervousness about being on TV and their courage in stepping into such unfamiliar territory.

And as I sit here writing, I’m filled with emotion. I can still hear their voices from that show — full of love, pride and a quiet determination. They spoke about family, about standing by one another and about how proud they were to see their son fighting for a cause that, as they put it, “helped people.”

So I’ll stop here before the emotions overwhelm me. All I really want to say is: Thank you, Mom and Dad.