Kyle and the author the year before his revelatory phone call.

The worst tragedy of my life began with those words, though not for the reasons you might think. When my phone woke me, I saw it was my 23-year-old son, Kyle, calling from the other side of the country at 4 a.m.

As a queer person, I thought I had pretty good gaydar, and I imagined my son and I were close, yet his revelation left me open-mouthed.

I’d never had the slightest inkling Kyle might be gay. He’d always had crushes on girls, starting with little Kathy on his favourite toddler show, ”Barney & Friends.” He’d pined over girls in middle and high school and worried over the phone with me about his relationships with girls in college. Now he was calling me from Seattle, where he’d moved for love after following a woman from New York. Never once had he expressed sexual interest in men.

I tried to respond with sensitivity and support. Yet I could barely muster any affirming words — especially when Kyle revealed that when he was 16, he’d started arranging online encounters with grown men who met him in a local park for blowjobs. While I fought back my horror over how unaware I’d been that my young son had been meeting with adult predators, Kyle told me he was wondering if he might really have been gay — or maybe bi — all his life.

I could not have been more shocked, or so I thought, until the other reason he’d called became clear.

“I think maybe I’ve turned to drugs because I’ve been afraid to admit I’m gay,” he said.

I soon realised Kyle was calling for help. He’d been arrested for pot and “party drugs,” such as mushrooms and ecstasy, in high school and college, but had seemed to be doing well the prior two years. He now confessed he’d “tried” crack cocaine and 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. He was calling because he was afraid he was about to start trading away his roommates’ electronics too.

Questions about his sexuality fell by the wayside. I suspected he’d only told me about his attraction to men because that felt easier than announcing his addiction to crack.

When I found a rehab that would take him, I cried with relief, thinking all of our problems would now be solved. Instead his fellow rehab residents told Kyle about the ultimate high, heroin, which Kyle later told me he “knew immediately” he’d have to try. A friend from long-term rehab helped him shoot up for the first time a year later, and he spent the remainder of his too-short life in and out of rehabs and halfway houses. He died tragically of an overdose of heroin and meth when he was 26.

Kyle was a poet who wrote love sonnets. He was a thoughtful gift-giver who bought the........

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