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Atlantan John-Paul Griffin grew up being called a ‘mama’s boy,’ but now doesn’t speak to his mother. (Photo by Richie Arpino)
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HOME > SOVO SCENE > FEATURE
By: DYANA BAGBY
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Antroine “Tron” Majette says he’s probably more of a grandmother’s boy.
“She spoiled me more,” he says with a laugh.
Now 27, Majette says he knows about the stigma some gay boys face in school by being called “mama’s boy.” But he never had to deal with such labels growing up. Raised by his single mother and grandmother, Majette says they were his mentors, and he wasn’t ashamed to be close to them.
“I never had to deal with [teasing], not at all,” he says. “I’m black, so maybe it’s different for me. I am a mama’s boy. I love my mom. She taught me everything I know.”
Majette now works for Sprint in Atlanta while also serving as the CEO and founder of WhatsTheT.com, a website that promotes urban gay events across the nation. He came out to his mother when he was 18. At first, she was uneasy with her son’s sexual orientation, but he says she was supportive, they remain close, and she became even more welcoming as he got older.
Majette attended the May 4 Atlanta concert by Kanye West — a mama’s boy himself? —and was so moved by the performance as well as the song West sings about his mother, “Hey Mama,” that he’s sending his mother and 12-year-old brother tickets to the Kanye West concert as a Mother’s Day gift.
“I really love that song, and it was so beautiful seeing him sing it,” Majette says. “I thought it would be nice to give to my mom.”
being teased for being a “mama’s boy,” but many effeminate men who prefer to read or sew rather than play baseball are given the derisive label as a way of calling them gay. Even psychiatrists and therapists at one time thought the term “mama’s boy” was a legitimate diagnosis for homosexuality, says gay psychiatrist Jack Drescher, author of the 1998 book, “Psychoanalytic Therapy and the Gay Man.”
In the early 1960s, psychoanalyst Irving Bieber conducted a study that asserted, essentially, that boys who are too close to their mothers will grow up to be gay. Extolled as groundbreaking research at the time, Bieber’s study stated that homosexual men typically came from absent or hostile fathers and smothering mothers. Gay men even feared baseball, said Bieber, because, in the world of psychoanalysis, the sport symbolized castration.
“Despite its shortcomings, this theory does lend the weight of medical authority to a cultural belief that a father should be the head of his household,” Drescher wrote in his book about Bieber’s research. “However, it is essentially the story of a boy who is closer to his mother than he to his father, the stereotype of the mama’s boy.”
This “faux science” has now been shoved aside for more accurate portrayals of gay men, says Drescher, a New York City-based psychiatrist and former chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s committee on gay issues.
“In my field, we don’t think moms create homosexuality,” he says. “Your child being gay has nothing to do with how you raised your child.”
But the term “mama’s boy” is still used to degrade another person, Drescher says.
“‘Mama’s boy’ is not a psychological term, but basically a social judgment about boys who are closer to their moms than they’re ‘supposed’ to be,” he says. “In our culture, you don’t call someone a mama’s boy and mean it as a compliment.”
true for Kevin Jennings, founder of the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network. In his 2006 memoir, “Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son,” Jennings retells stories of constantly being beaten and berated by his brothers and cousins in rural North Carolina and often called a “mama’s boy.”
Using “preacher’s son” in the title was easy — his father, who died when Jennings was eight years old, was a fundamentalist Southern Baptist preacher. Putting the words “mama’s boy” in the title was deliberate as well, Jennings said.
“I picked ‘mama’s boy’ because it was used very much as an epithet when I was a kid; it was used in a very derogatory way,” he says. “But it also has an ironic twist, because my mother was a huge influence on me. I’m very proud to say I’m a mama’s boy. So the term I hated as a kid because it was used in such a hateful way, now I embrace it.”
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