On Bob Bernstein's passing at 98: A Hero

The first book we read when our Dan came out in 1997 was Bob Bernstein’s Straight Parents, Gay Children: Keeping Families Together. Bobbi’s sister sent it to us. We will be forever grateful to both of them. 

Five years later I found myself on the Montgomery County (MD) Board of Education's Family Life and Human Sexuality Advisory Committee which was assigned the task of helping develop curriculum which led to the end of what was effectively a “Don’t Say Gay” policy in the Montgomery County Public Schools.  Bob’s wife Myrna was a member of that Committee as well, although I did not make the connection until later. The huge progress we made in Montgomery County in the years that followed was due in significant part to the work, dedication, and example of both Myrna and Bob. The phrase “may his memory be a blessing” applies, but it is more accurate to say that Bob Bernstein’s memory and legacy has been and will continue to be a blessing. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/10/16/robert-bernstein-gay-rights-dead/?outputType=comment

Robert Bernstein, father who championed gay rights, dies at 98. After his daughter came out, he became an ambassador to parents of gay children, inviting them to join the movement for equality.

By Emily Langer October 16, 2024 at 10:44 p.m. ET

On the day in 1987 when Robert Bernstein’s college-age daughter told him she was gay, he stayed up late writing a letter that she found waiting for her on the kitchen table the next morning.

 

“Dear Bobbi,” the letter began. Like the color of her hair or her taste in music, Mr. Bernstein told his daughter, her sexuality was an “irrelevancy,” because it had no bearing on her “inherent decency as a human being.” By embracing her identity, she had given him yet another “reason for the love and respect,” he wrote, that he had always felt for her.

 

Mr. Bernstein, who died Sept. 22 at 98, spent most of his professional life as a lawyer in the Justice Department’s tax division in Washington. His devotion to his daughter motivated a second career in gay rights activism, a movement that he helped power with a force that was, as he often noted, greater than perhaps any other: a parent’s love for a child.

 

When Mr. Bernstein undertook his advocacy in the 1980s, gay people enjoyed few of the rights that exist today. They could not marry. They could not serve openly in the military. In other professions, they often hid their sexuality for fear that they would be denied jobs or promotions. When they came out to their families, they often were met with rejection.Mr. Bernstein, a self-described “recovering homophobe,” had long harbored the prevailing prejudices against gay people. He admitted to being “repelled” at one time when he saw two men kiss in a restaurant. But his views had begun to shift before his daughter came out to him, he said, and were upturned entirely when she did.“

 

My education began when I realized, the next day, that she remained the same warm, talented and gracious young woman who had always made her family proud,” he wrote in a commentary published in The Washington Post in 1993. “We now simply had another piece of information about her.”Mr. Bernstein became an ambassador to parents of gay children, inviting them to celebrate their children for who they were and to join the movement for their equal rights in society. Vic Basile, a former executive director of the Human Rights Campaign, described him in an interview as an “incomparable supporter of LGBTQ+ issues.”

Eight months after Bobbi told him she was gay, Mr. Bernstein wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, a father’s cri de coeur.

 

“Typically,” he wrote, “the parent of a gay child passes through successive stages of shock, disbelief, sorrow and, sooner or later, acceptance. For many of us, however, there is yet another phase: outrage against society’s stereotypical thinking that would relegate our gay loved ones to second-class citizenship.

 

“Some of us have a dream. It is that millions of angered parents will someday coalesce in a powerful crusade for societal change,” he continued. “The primal instinct to love and protect one’s young, however latent, embodies an immense potential for social reform.”Newspaper headlines are typically crafted by editors, and Mr. Bernstein’s commentary appeared without his foreknowledge under the headline “My Daughter Is a Lesbian.”

 

Worried that Bobbi, then a student at Stanford University, might be upset by the boldfaced reference to her sexuality, he phoned her to apologize. “What are you sorry for?” she recalled asking him incredulously. The article was a sensation on her campus 3,000 miles away in California, she said, where “everybody was talking about it.”Basile said that given the time when the article was printed, “I think for a lot of readers it probably opened their eyes to the issue and probably broke down a lot of barriers for other families.

 

”Mr. Bernstein traced his activism to what was then called Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays — now PFLAG — a group that was founded in 1973 and that he described as an “alchemist of the soul that converts bereaved parents into active agents of acceptance.”He sought to serve the same role for other parents and to take them “gently through the thickets of wrong-headed conventional wisdom and back to where we belong — at our children’s sides.”Mr. Bernstein served as vice president of the Washington-area PFLAG chapter and of the national organization. He wrote a guidebook, “Straight Parents, Gay Children” (1995), and later profiled gay parents in the book “Families of Value” (2005).

In writings and speeches, Mr. Bernstein tried to lead parents not only to accept their gay children, but to also admire their “path of integrity and self-discovery,” and to recognize their own power to help bring about change.

 

Mr. Bernstein watched as that change began to come, with victories including the repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in 2011 and the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2015 declaring a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.Robert Allen Bernstein was born in Pueblo, Colo., on Feb. 20, 1926, the grandson of Jewish immigrants from Europe. His father worked in a family business that began as a junkyard and grew into a national supplier of heavy equipment, and his mother managed the home.Mr. Bernstein’s older brother, Morey, carried on the family business but was better known for his 1956 book “The Search for Bridey Murphy,” in which he recounted placing a young Colorado mother under hypnosis and leading her back in time until her previous life as a 19th-century Irishwoman emerged. The best-selling book inspired a Hollywood movie and a national craze surrounding hypnotism and reincarnation.

 

After Navy service, Robert Bernstein enrolled at Stanford, where he received a bachelor’s degree in engineering in 1952 and worked on the campus newspaper. He received a master’s degree in communication and journalism four years later and worked at the San Jose Mercury News before moving east to attend law school at American University, where he graduated in 1962.

His friendships with several disabled people led him to become active in disability rights advocacy before joining the gay rights movement. Both causes, he observed, involved overcoming ignorance and stigma.

 

Mr. Bernstein had a heightened understanding of stigma, having suffered throughout his life from mental illness, particularly depression. A suicide attempt in the 1950s led to a misdiagnosis of “schizophrenic reaction” and multiple institutionalizations.

 

Mr. Bernstein wrote about his experience of mental illness as well as his relationship with his brother, who died in 1999, in a memoir, “The Sheik and the Shadow: A Memoir of Brotherly Bond, Celebrity, and Madness” (2019). Mr. Bernstein was not ashamed of his depression, his daughter Bobbi said, and took pride in dealing with it openly.

 

Mr. Bernstein’s first marriage, to Carol Williams, ended in divorce. He described his relationship with their two daughters, Bobbi and her sister Sharon Bernstein, as “perhaps literally” a “life-saver” to him.“You two were the first … to give me a sense of worth,” he wrote to Sharon in a 1988 letter, one of many entries in his voluminous correspondence with his daughters and others in his life. “You seemed to accept me, joyfully and unconditionally, even at times when I perceived the world otherwise to be a wholly hostile force.” As a father, he wished to return to his daughters the gift they had given to him.Mr. Bernstein’s death, at his home in Portland, Ore., was confirmed by Bobbi and Sharon Bernstein, who did not cite a cause. He had been a longtime resident of Bethesda, Md.Besides his daughters, survivors include his wife of 42 years, the former Myrna Sisk Nebert; a stepson, Dietrich Nebert; and seven grandchildren. His stepson Douglas Nebert died in 2014.Mr. Bernstein often recalled the moment when he fully grasped the importance of bringing parents into the movement for gay rights.

 

On Oct. 11, 1987, he and his wife, along with Bobbi’s mother, joined a march on Washington that drew at least 200,000 people — making it, at the time, the largest LGBTQ demonstration ever in the United States.To his shock, the several hundred PFLAG members present were met by a roar of applause from the young gay and lesbian demonstrators, many of whom had tears streaming down their faces.“It was clear that the thunder and the tears were welling up out of a vast void in the hearts of these young people,” Mr. Bernstein later recalled. “By their tremendous reception, they were telling us how profoundly they longed for the acceptance and support of their own families.”

 

In his op-ed published in the Times, Mr. Bernstein expressed his conviction that their “yearning cannot be any stronger than the potential of their parents’ reciprocal affections.”“It was after the march, as I pondered the strength of the parent-child bond,” he continued, “that I could envision the doom of homophobia’s reign.”