By Rick Clemons for YourTango.com At 19, I came out of the closet to my parents. It was a shock, but not a surprise. At the time, I wasn't quite r...

As our children grow, we look around and wonder, "Is this the right place for us to be? Is this where we want our children to grow up? What is the environment we've chosen teaching them?" These questions were heightened after our oldest son started identifying as gay at a young age.

If our son realizes at a later date that he isn't gay, I won't be embarrassed. No matter who he is, we want him to know that we love him. And whom he loves and is attracted to doesn't change a thing. If anything, we are setting an example to all our kids that our love really is unconditional.

My son never lived in the proverbial closet. He's never thought of himself any other way or pretended that he did. So what do I think he was coming out of? His narrative is so different from the ones that came before that I don't even have the terminology to talk about it appropriately.

Yes, at times it is different. At times it is hard, emotional and challenging. It's not something people are used to seeing, which can make them uncomfortable, so it requires extra work of me as a parent. But that doesn't mean it's bad. And he's worth it. All my kids are.

Over the past few months my wife has been asked numerous times what I think about our 7-year-old son identifying as gay. The idea that I would be disappointed/angry/suicidal that my son identifies as gay offends me, both as a father and simply as a human.

This week on aNoteToMyKid.com, a devout Christian mother named Shelley from Iowa City, Iowa expressed her personal journey toward accepting her gay son, Michael, while maintaining the religious faith she holds so dear to her heart.

There is only one gift I want to give you this year: I want to give you equality. I want to wrap it up in a beautiful box, and I want to put it under our tree right now. I want to see you open it on Christmas Eve and with great joy live with it all your days.

Many of those people are LGBT, but they aren't our chosen family because they are LGBT or in spite of it; they are our chosen family because they are good people, the kind of men and women who set good examples for our kids, the kind of people we want them to grow up to be.