My parents disowned me for being gay, but they have just weeks to live – can I forgive them?

His parents are close to death, and just this week he almost died himself. It has left Alan Downs, celebrated psychologist of the modern gay psyche, in a reflective mood. He speaks exclusively to Gary Nunn

Illustrations iStock (Illustrations iStock)

For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me,” Alan Downs says, “I’m sharing more with you than I ever have anyone else.” Downs is far more accustomed to being in my position: listening intently to clients sat opposite him on the couch. He’s a clinical psychologist. This time, I’m listening intently as he shares something that, for most people, would be extremely painful: both his parents are critically ill. It’s likely they’ll die any day now.

But for Downs, the grief comes with an element of resignation. “It’s a sadness I’ve come to realise I have to accept in life,” he says with the gentlest of sighs. But that acceptance, that resignation, isn’t about them dying. It’s about the fact they haven’t seen or spoken to him in more than 11 years. “I’ve never had accepting parents,” he says. “It’s a loss and a hunger that’ll never be satiated.”

Downs’ parents have never wavered in their opposition to his sexual orientation. “I grew up in a family that’s even more conservative than the Jehovah’s Witnesses,” he says. “If that’s possible.” Once they knew he was gay, his Pentecostal parents were definitive. “My mother said: ‘We will never discuss this again.’ And we never did.” That was 34 years ago.