Sara Cunningham is a woman that got national attention last summer when she posted on Facebook that she would attend weddings as a stand-in for the so many LGBTQ people that have been rejected by their parents.
The film rights to Cunningham’s 2014 memoir have been purchased by Jamie Lee Curtis, and it’s called How We Sleep at Night. It’s about her relationship with her gay son, and she told the Washington Post that she was moved by her journey, and she continues to be thrilled as her movement is catching on.
She hopes to do justice to her story and the story of so many other marginalized people in the LGBTQ+ community.
Cunningham wrote about her own process in accepting her gay son when he came out in 2011 in the book. She said that she thought it might just be a phase, but he “came out” when he turned 21 to her and said that he’d met someone and he needed her to be Okay with it. She also wrote that she become depressed at the moment because she didn’t know how to react and she wasn’t “the perfect PFLAG mom for her son when he initially came out”.
She wrote that she prayed, she fasted, and she even shamed her son into burning his journals.
Her son Parker said that they were fighting a spiritual battle inside the walls of a non-affirming church, and his mom and himself both were struggling. However, things started to turn around when she went to pride with her son in 2014, and it was her first encounter with the LGBTQ community. She said that it was as beautiful as it could be, and she realized that she had been alienated for years by her own ignorance and fear.
She went back the next year and offered “Free Mom Hugs”, and the rest is history.
