When Advocacy Gets Hard: How Parents of LGBTQ Kids Can Show Up Boldly and Find the Joy

In today's episode, you will discover how to completely reframe how you show up as an ally. Welcome to More Human, More Kind, the podcast for parents of LGBTQ+ kids and anyone trying to stay human in a world that keeps hardening. I'm Heather Hester, and here we talk about fear, belonging, boundaries, courage, love and what it means to protect what matters without losing yourself in the process. Your child doesn't just need a parent who's informed, they need a parent who is grounded and strong. Let's take a breath and let's begin. So before we begin today, I need to stop and mark something. Today is episode 300. 300 conversations. 300 times I sat down here at this mic with something I needed to say or wanted to say and trusted that someone out there needed to hear it. 300 episodes across almost 7 years, a name change, 4 kids growing up alongside every single one of them, and a community that has become one of the greatest gifts of my life. I started this podcast in November of 2019 because Connor came out and I couldn't find what I needed. I couldn't find a space that spoke to the parent in the middle of the unlearning, the one who loved fiercely and who was still figuring it out. So I built it and perfectly and consistently the same way I try to do everything that matters to me. 300 episodes later, here is what I know. This work changes people, not because I have all of the answers, far from it, but because I am willing to keep showing up without them. And so are you. Every single one of you who has ever pressed play, who has shared an episode, left a review, sent me a message, or found your way into the Kindred Collective, you are why this exists. You are why episode 300 exists. So thank you from the very, very bottom of my heart. Now let's get into today's episode because episode 300 deserves a topic worthy of this moment, and I think this one is. Advocacy is serious. The stakes are real. The world your LGBTQ+ kid is navigating right now demands that we show up with everything that we have. And also, what if it could also be joyful? What if the courage it takes to be a bold and intentional ally could feel Sometimes like something worth celebrating. Today we are going to talk about exactly that. By the end of this episode, you are going to have a new framework for what intentional kindness and allyship actually means and what it looks like in practice. You are going to meet the threshold moment, the instant just on the other side of discomfort where courage becomes action. And you're going to walk away with one question that has the power to completely reframe how you show up as an ally. So I want to take you back first to the day of my sister's funeral. It was in May of 2024, and I was talking to a group of people at one point who I had known for over 40 years. One of the women in the group was someone I hadn't seen in over a decade, and she asked what I do. And I told her a few sentences about this podcast, about my book that was just about to publish at that point, and about all of this work. The look on her face when I told her was something I will never ever forget. And the silence that followed by everyone in that group, even more so. I did not walk into that conversation thinking, "This is my moment to be bold," and I did not brace for it or prepare for it or decide in advance how I would handle it. I just told the truth about who I am and what I do, and the room shifted around it. That is what I have come to understand about intentional allyship after years of practicing it. The boldness stops feeling like a decision you have to make every time. It just becomes an orientation, a way of moving through rooms, of telling the truth without softening it for other people's comfort. Not in an aggressive way, Just clearly, simply. I want to talk today about how you get there and how somewhere along the way it starts to feel less like a burden and more like something that is actually yours. So let's start with the words themselves, because I think we throw them around without always stopping to feel what they actually mean. So the word intentional means on purpose, with awareness, with meaning, not reactive, not accidental, chosen. Kindness, not the same as niceness, and this is important. Niceness is smooth and comfortable and often avoids the truth to keep the peace. Kindness tells the truth with genuine love. Kindness sets a boundary as an expression of care. Kindness does not sacrifice itself to make other people feel comfortable. It is thoughtful and real, and sometimes it costs something. And then allyship: advocating for a group you are not part of, showing up, speaking up, messy and imperfect and doing it anyway. It is not a title you earn once and keep forever. It is a verb, something you practice, something you choose again and again in ordinary moments and in extraordinary ones. Put those three things together and you get something really powerful. Intentional kindness and allyship is showing up on purpose with genuine love and truth for people who need someone in their corner. It's not waiting until you feel ready. It's not waiting until the moment is perfect. It's moving toward the hard thing because your kid, your person, your community needs you to. So I want to introduce you to something I'm calling the threshold moment. You know it when you feel it. It is the instant just on the other side of recognizing your discomfort. The moment where you could stay quiet and no one would blame you, where it would be easier, smoother, less complicated just to let it go. But something inside you decides not to. You've seen it in the movies, the kid in the cafeteria standing up for the one everyone else is laughing at. The person in the meeting who says, "Actually, that's not okay." The parent at the family dinner who stops the conversation that is quietly dismantling their child. I've had many of these moments in the past decade, but the one that I want to share with you happened in June of 2019. My brother said something at Connor's high school graduation party that I will not repeat here because it does not deserve repeating. What I will tell you is that I let my kids respond to him first. I gave them that, and then I stepped in and I shut it down clearly without apology. I named what he said as unacceptable, and I meant Every single word. And that conversation cost me something. The relationship with my brother has never recovered, and I would do it again every single day without hesitation, because on the other side of that threshold moment was my kid. And actually in that case were my kids, and there was never really a choice. Here's what I want you to understand about the threshold moment. Early on, it feels enormous. The discomfort is loud. The stakes feel impossibly high. But the more you practice crossing it, the more natural it becomes until one day you realize, as I did at my sister's funeral, that you walked straight into a hard moment without even bracing for it. The courage had become an orientation. Armor had become a second skin. That is what intentional allyship builds over time. Not just the willingness to speak, the automatic orientation toward the truth. So here is your first tool. Find your threshold moment. Think back over the last few months. Was there a moment where you felt the discomfort and spoke up anyway? Where you let somebody know in however small a way that you were not going to stay quiet? Where you told the truth about who you are or who your kid is without softening it for someone else's comfort? That was your threshold moment. Name it. Own it. Because it matters more than you know. Every time you cross that threshold, you are building something in yourself and in your kid who is watching more closely than you realize. And if you cannot find one yet, that is okay too. Now you know what to look for. The discomfort is the signal. What you do with it is the practice. Here is your second tool, and this one came from a friend of mine who is an intuitive business coach. Whenever I feel stuck or heavy or overwhelmed by something, she asks me a simple question: What if it could be fun? I know. Stay with me for a moment. Advocacy is serious, and I am not minimizing it for a single second. The stakes are real and the work is hard, and some days it is genuinely heavy. But I want to ask you, in the middle of that heaviness, what if you paused and asked yourself that question? Not to make light of what is hard, but to find the joy that is also there if you look for it. The gratitude that you get to do this work, the people you have met because of it, the relationship with your kid that has deepened in ways you could never have predicted, the version of yourself you are becoming through all of the unlearning. That's the fun. Not fun as in frivolous, fun as in alive, as in meaningful, as in worth showing up for. What if your allyship could hold both the seriousness and the joy, the courage and the gratitude, the threshold moment and the celebration on the other side of it? I have been doing this work for close to a decade, and I can tell you that the heaviness is real. There are days when the news cycle alone is enough to make me want to just close my laptop and not come back. Days when the weight of what our community is navigating feels like just too much to hold. And then there are also days when I am laughing with my kids or chatting with somebody in the Kindred Collective about something that only people in this particular community would find funny. Days when a listener sends a message that makes me cry in the best possible way. Days when I watch my kids move through the world and I think, "This. This is why." The joy and the weight live in the same body. The same way the alertness and the laughter do when I'm traveling with my family. The same way compassion fatigue and compassion satisfaction do when I am deep in this work. Both are real. Neither cancels the other out. What I want for you as we begin to close out the summer and head toward whatever fall brings, is the capacity to hold both. To be serious and joyful. To be courageous and grateful. To cross your threshold moment and celebrate that you did. You are an ally, messy and imperfect and showing up anyway. That is the whole thing. So if you haven't already, take a few moments right now and think about what your threshold moment is, whether it's the one you have already crossed or the one you can feel that's waiting for you. And where in your allyship could you ask yourself, what if this could also be fun? Thank you so much for being here for episode 300. Truly, And if this episode or any episode this summer has meant something to you, I would love to hear about it. Please either leave me a review on Apple Podcasts, send me a message, or come find me in the Kindred Collective. Your words matter more than you know. I will see you on Friday for The Butterfly Effect. And until then, keep becoming more human. And more kind. Your space says something before you ever do. Whether it's an office, retail space, commercial property, or national rebranding work, the quality of your environment reflects your brand. 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