“It’s a trusting and bonding experience.” Blaise Aguirre, an adolescent psychiatrist at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., and an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
“It’s a nice break from a digital way of connecting,” said Dr. He knows that limiting sleepovers was his father’s way of protecting him, but at the time, he recalled, “I felt like it was a planned attack against me.” Instead of sleepovers, he drives home after hanging out with friends. Now at 16, with his family in the audience, Trey performs in drag at a local club. “If they knew for sure my son was gay, I doubt they were going to let them come over,” he explained. He thought about bullying, and about how other boys’ parents might react. So when he told his family he was gay, his father, Jeff Freund, a principal at an arts magnet middle school, asked himself, “Would I let his sister at that age have a sleepover with a boy?” When Trey Freund of Wichita, Kan., was 13, sleepovers and closed-door hangouts were part of his social life.
