• In July, Weston Brown, a gay man who lives in San Diego, recognized his mother in a Texas school board meeting as she opposed books depicting sex or LGBTQ themes.
  • His mother, Monica Brown, had previously told him in 2018 that he wasn’t invited to the family’s home after he came out as gay.
  • Weston has spoken out against his mother’s views, prompting her to text him: “I did not come out against LGBTQ at all — ever … I love you, and I pray for you.”

GRANBURY, Texas – Weston Brown was scrolling through Twitter last month when he came across a video that made his chest tighten. It showed a woman at a school board meeting in North Texas, calling on district leaders to ask for forgiveness.

“Repentance is the word that’s on my heart,” she said near the start of the video.

For months, the woman in the clip had been demanding that the Granbury Independent School District ban from its libraries dozens of books that contained descriptions of sex or LGBTQ themes – books that she believed could be damaging to the hearts and minds of students. Unsatisfied after a district committee that she served on voted to remove only a handful of titles, the woman filed a police report in May accusing school employees of providing pornography to children, triggering a criminal investigation by Hood County.

Now, in the video that Weston Brown found online, she was telling the school board that a local Christian pastor, rather than librarians, should decide which books should be allowed on public school shelves. “He would never steer you wrong,” she said.

The clip ended with the woman striding away from the lectern, and the audience showering her with applause.

Weston Brown, 28, said his heart was racing as he watched and rewatched the video – and not only because he opposes censorship. He’d instantly recognized the speaker.

It was his mother, Monica Brown.

The same woman, he said, who’d removed pages from science books when he was a child to keep him and his siblings from seeing illustrations of male and female anatomy. The woman who’d always warned that reading the wrong books or watching the wrong movies could open the door to sinful temptation. And the one, he said, who’d effectively cut him off from his family four years ago after he came out as gay.

“You are not invited to our house for Thanksgiving or any other meal,” his mother had texted to him in November 2018, eight months after he revealed his sexual orientation to his parents.

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Weston Brown, who lives with his partner in San Diego, had long ago come to terms with the idea that he would never again have a meaningful relationship with his parents. He still loved them and desperately missed his younger siblings, he said, but he was done trying to convince his mom and dad that his sexuality wasn’t a choice or a sin. He was done challenging their religious beliefs and praying for them to change.

Until he saw the video of his mom at a school board meeting.

In recent months, Weston Brown has watched as the same foundational disagreements that tore his family apart have begun to divide whole communities. Fueled by a growing movement to assert conservative Christian values at all levels of government, activists across the country have fought to remove queer-affirming books from schools, repeal the right to same-sex marriage, shut down LGBTQ Pride celebrations and pass state laws limiting the ways teachers can discuss gender and sexuality.

Monica Brown, who served on a school district book review committee in Granbury, Texas, has called that process a sham. She filed a police report in May 2022 accusing school employees of providing pornography to children.

Much as the seemingly intractable arguments over America’s pandemic response and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election have led to fractured personal relationships in recent years, these clashes over gender and sexuality have pitted neighbors against neighbors, parents against teachers and – in the case of the Browns – a son against his mother.

“It was one thing when my parents’ beliefs were causing this rift between us and it was just a family matter,” Weston Brown said. “But seeing now that she’s applying those same views to public activism, at a time when so many basic rights are being challenged, I couldn’t stay quiet about that.”