A father’s perspective
I found this letter online. It was a known religious right website so I was surprised:
I offer here brief anatomy of a life which ended prematurely. I mean to outline difficulties associated with that life in it’s cultural context. Finally, I wish to comment on the doctrinal and spiritual implication of the these matters.
We are a Latter-day Saints family whose antecedents in the Church go back for generations on both sides. As a young man I served a mission to Denmark, my wife and I were married in the Logan Temple. We have raised four sons in the Church, have participated in its programs in the ways that are advocted by our leaders. As parents, we have tried diligently to create for our sons a vision and an example of the Christian life. All of our boys were obedient to their parents and faithful to the standards of the Church as they grew up; they were good students, good citizens. As young men, three of them carried the gospel message into the mission field. As a family we have been blessed to enjoy the good opinion of our LDS brothers and sisters in the ward and stakes in which we have resided I mention these facts because they will help the reader evaluate the perspective from which I write.
Ten years ago, when he was twenty, our eldest son, Brad, came to his mother and me and told us he was homosexual. We were caught by surprise, for neither in appearance nor behavior would have suggested this: he was a muscular, sturdy youth, not effeminate in manner, and his social life had seem normal enough. His friends included an equal number of boys and girls, he spent many of his recreation hours in mixed company, and he dated girls after he reach sixteen, though not frequently. The only difference we had observed was his being somewhat more intellectual and more interested in serious music, art, and litereature than the majority of his high school friends. Perhaps there was one sign that something was wrong, easier to recognize after the fact; he had been subject to periods of depression, which concerned us somewhat at the time but which we attributed to the general difficulties of getting through the teen period.
We responded to his declaration with the predictable dismay (I had always had visceral negative feelings about homosexual people); at the same time, we were incredulous. We suggested to him that he was probably mistaken, theat since he had had no intimate sexual experience, he couldn’t be sure at the point. We counseled him to be in no hurry to act on his “supposed” feelings to date young women seriously in the meantime. Possibly, we conceded, he might be bisexual and was thus in a postion to opt for a wife, family, and a life acceptable to the Church and society, a less problematic and more fulfilling life. Homosexuality, we contended, is sterile; it does not contribute to perpetuating life. ” Choose otherwise,” we urged him.
This was, you see, the most compelling reason to deny his assertion, in my mind, and in the doctrinal view of the Church, homosexuality was an acquired behavior, a perverse–or at the best, mistaken–choice of lifestyle. Our decent, loving son had not been reared for such a course. But he was convinced that the orientation of his sexual feelings was not a matter of choice, and he produced a holder full of articles whose authors, some of them homosexual themselves, some of them Latter-day concurred with him.
(Clearly he had been doing a lot of reading. We devoured the articles, the first of many books and articles we would sift through in the years to follow, tying to make some sense of the chaos of theories relating to this subject.) Brad told us he had known of these feelings–unequivocal sexual feelings focused toward males rather than females–since his early years in grad school, that these feelings had become even clearer during his high school years.
In retrospect, we realize that the periods of depression that plagued him during these years were substantially a result of the traumatic identity crisis he was experiencing. He told us that he prayed fervently over a long period that God would help him to reorient his feelings toward heterosexuality, and he promised God that he would repay such kindness with extraordinary devotion. (His personal journals from this period confirm this: they present a picture of a religious youth, caught up in seminary instruction, who concluded from that instruction as well as from all the implicit messages received from home, Church, and society that he was flawed, sinful, cursed as it seemed to him in spite of his wish to be otherwise.) If we were deeply sorrowful in those first days after his disclosure, it was not least of all because we realized how deeply he had suffered alone, while we, unaware, had done nothing to help him.
And we now understand why, after considerable vacillation, Brad had decided not to fill a Church mission. Though he had not, at nineteen, engaged in homosexual relations and thus was presumably worthy in this and other respects, he could not square his troubled self-image with his understanding of what a missionary should be; he knew that the only way he could represent the Church was to deny the legitimacy of who and what he felt deeply he was, and that seemed to him unfair both to the Church, because it was hypocritical, and to himself, because it was a violation of himself. I did not understand at the time, though now I do, how much personal integrity was evidenced in that decision.
After finishing his sophomore year at college, he returned from Salt Lake City and discussed his situation with us. He had during the semester made contact with the gay “underground,” and he was planning to move with a close friend to Los Angeles. Moreover, he had virtually dropped out of the Church. These decisions were deeply upsetting to his mother and me. We knew the dangers that awaited him in that city, we knew that the ballast he need to stabilize him was now lessened considerably. But from my present vantage point, I see it was a risk he had to take; for the sake of his own self-esteem he had to discover and test the truth of his unique identity. He had emerged from is teen years with his sense of self-worth severely undermined. It is not too much to say that our culture had encouraged him to hate himself, and the Church, in it’s general attitude toward homosexuality, had contributed substantially to that despairing self-estimate. Since gay people could not easily live openly in Idaho and Utah, he had to go were there enough others of his kind that he could feel his essential identity was acceptable. I think he did not leave the Church so much as it left him by tacitly denying his personal reality.
Meanwhile, his parents wrestled with demons of their own. What had we done wrong? Was I a wimpy father? No. Was his mother domineering, over protective? No, no. Had I overpowered him, had I been distant, absent, had he and I failed to relate will to each other? No, no, no. Had he been Oedipally attracted to his mother? No. None of the facile theories about parental influence on the development of homosexual behavior made much sense in our case. Did real love exist in our family? Yes. Had we shared much quality time together? Yes. Had his parent’s marriage been a good one? Better than average. Ultimately, we came to the conclusion that Brad’s homosexuality was not a matter of failed parenting or inadequate family relationships.
When he left for California, we were extraordinarily concerned about what we could do to help him. Clearly he was at the juncture in his life where he had to establish his independence, and we had to recognize his need to determine his own course. So we tired not to be intrusive, while at the same time keeping our lines of communication open. We did not want to jeopardize the good relationship we had always had with him.
In Los Angeles, Brad was thrown on his own resources, earning his own living, making all his own decisions, acquiring sreetsmarts, learning to negotiate traffic in the fast lane. Inevitably there was a clash between the values of his Idaho upbringing and the aesthetic hedonism of West Hollywood. He wanted to have the best of both lives, but he could not reconcile them. To us he praised his brave new world, yet it seemed he protested too much. His relationship with a lover came to an end. After two years, he began to sense the desperation that lay beneath the surface of the frenzied life he was participating in. After the third year he saw clearly that the behavior of many of his gay friends was self-destructive, nihilistic. It was the behavior of the people who do not accept themselves because society does not, the behavior of people who have no joy and hope in contemplating the future.
It is never easy to leave a supportive community, but Brad felt he must get out of that environment if he was to put his life back on a solid basis–with education for a meaningful career, with positive attitudes about life. Most importantly, he knew he had to overcome the isolation of the ghetto and renew contact with the mainstream. But where to go? To come back to Idaho and Utah was a plunge again into an earlier experience of cultural alienation, to renew the conscious tension between himself and the Latter-day Saints. On the other hand, he felt that the deeply loved mountains environment in which he had grown up and nearness of his family might steady him. His decision to attend a university in Utah for the sake of one of its nationally reputed professional programs was a calculated risk: would he be saved by closeness to the moral influence of those cultural roots, or would he be suffocated in a closed environment?
He did return, and for two years pursued this experiment in personal growth and professional education. On the positive side, he left behind the promiscuity that had become part of his life in Los Angeles, and he was advancing toward a career. On the other, he felt terribly isolate in that Utah community, angry at the smugness of the comfortably religious around him, concerned lest his homosexual identity be discovered by his acquaintances, fearful of the toll that would be exacted from him if it were.
At this stage Brad contemplated the future with great ambivalence. There were so many things in life that he loved–the beauty of the natural world, the monuments of man’s achievement in art and culture. Yet those deep pleasures were undermined by the ever present awareness of being an outsider and thereby permanently cut off from so much that his religion had taught him to desire. Not least of these inaccessible opportunities was the family, with children, he had always wanted, for he now felt he could never in good conscience ask a woman to marry him. With reduced possibilities before him, he was coping; he had separated himself from the extremes of nihilism and self-destructive behavior.
In view of this, what happened to him next seems a cruel irony. When he came home in the summer of 1985 to help us with the construction of our new family home, he was clearly not well. Apparently incubating in his blood since the period in Los Angeles, the AIDS virus had reared its head and begun its deadly work. As it turned out, his homecoming was to last for the remainder of his life. His condition grew steadily worse over the summer and fall; in November he nearly died from pneumocystis pneumonia. A period of brief remission, during which he gamely attempted to continue his studies at our local university on a part-time basis, was followed by inexorable decline. He died in December.
AIDS is a devastating antagonist. It dismantles a person ounce by ounce, nerve by nerve. Brad fought this horrible disease courageously, with the independent, self-reliant spirit he had always had; and he did not attempt to evade responsibility for what had happened to him. At the same time he tried so hard to find some deeper religious significance in his physical and spiritual suffering (and so did we). To the very end of his life he was struggling to find a faith that could comfort him. Indeed, he had been engaged in a spiritual odyssey for years. After he concluded that he was unacceptable to the LDS Church–and therefore rejected fellowship in it–he looked at oriental religions, born-again Christianity, and pantheism. But his personal integrity was such that he could not accept easily explanations that did not seem compatible with reality as he perceived it. We will never forget the conversations in which we shared over convictions and our uncertainties.
The final year of Brad’s life was the most difficult one our family has known, a year of perplexity, a year of grieving. Paradoxically, it was also the most profoundly meaningful year of our lives. Sharing his ordeal exposed us to dimensions of experience that enlarged our awareness of the human condition. We learned so much from him in the way he faced the difficult circumstances of his illness and hi life. We are grateful to him; we are proud of him. He was such a fine young man. At this point, we can say that we feel blessed to have had a son who was homosexual.
I offer here brief anatomy of a life which ended prematurely. I mean to outline difficulties associated with that life in it’s cultural context. Finally, I wish to comment on the doctrinal and spiritual implication of the these matters.
We are a Latter-day Saints family whose antecedents in the Church go back for generations on both sides. As a young man I served a mission to Denmark, my wife and I were married in the Logan Temple. We have raised four sons in the Church, have participated in its programs in the ways that are advocted by our leaders. As parents, we have tried diligently to create for our sons a vision and an example of the Christian life. All of our boys were obedient to their parents and faithful to the standards of the Church as they grew up; they were good students, good citizens. As young men, three of them carried the gospel message into the mission field. As a family we have been blessed to enjoy the good opinion of our LDS brothers and sisters in the ward and stakes in which we have resided I mention these facts because they will help the reader evaluate the perspective from which I write.
Ten years ago, when he was twenty, our eldest son, Brad, came to his mother and me and told us he was homosexual. We were caught by surprise, for neither in appearance nor behavior would have suggested this: he was a muscular, sturdy youth, not effeminate in manner, and his social life had seem normal enough. His friends included an equal number of boys and girls, he spent many of his recreation hours in mixed company, and he dated girls after he reach sixteen, though not frequently. The only difference we had observed was his being somewhat more intellectual and more interested in serious music, art, and litereature than the majority of his high school friends. Perhaps there was one sign that something was wrong, easier to recognize after the fact; he had been subject to periods of depression, which concerned us somewhat at the time but which we attributed to the general difficulties of getting through the teen period.
We responded to his declaration with the predictable dismay (I had always had visceral negative feelings about homosexual people); at the same time, we were incredulous. We suggested to him that he was probably mistaken, theat since he had had no intimate sexual experience, he couldn’t be sure at the point. We counseled him to be in no hurry to act on his “supposed” feelings to date young women seriously in the meantime. Possibly, we conceded, he might be bisexual and was thus in a postion to opt for a wife, family, and a life acceptable to the Church and society, a less problematic and more fulfilling life. Homosexuality, we contended, is sterile; it does not contribute to perpetuating life. ” Choose otherwise,” we urged him.
This was, you see, the most compelling reason to deny his assertion, in my mind, and in the doctrinal view of the Church, homosexuality was an acquired behavior, a perverse–or at the best, mistaken–choice of lifestyle. Our decent, loving son had not been reared for such a course. But he was convinced that the orientation of his sexual feelings was not a matter of choice, and he produced a holder full of articles whose authors, some of them homosexual themselves, some of them Latter-day concurred with him.
(Clearly he had been doing a lot of reading. We devoured the articles, the first of many books and articles we would sift through in the years to follow, tying to make some sense of the chaos of theories relating to this subject.) Brad told us he had known of these feelings–unequivocal sexual feelings focused toward males rather than females–since his early years in grad school, that these feelings had become even clearer during his high school years.
In retrospect, we realize that the periods of depression that plagued him during these years were substantially a result of the traumatic identity crisis he was experiencing. He told us that he prayed fervently over a long period that God would help him to reorient his feelings toward heterosexuality, and he promised God that he would repay such kindness with extraordinary devotion. (His personal journals from this period confirm this: they present a picture of a religious youth, caught up in seminary instruction, who concluded from that instruction as well as from all the implicit messages received from home, Church, and society that he was flawed, sinful, cursed as it seemed to him in spite of his wish to be otherwise.) If we were deeply sorrowful in those first days after his disclosure, it was not least of all because we realized how deeply he had suffered alone, while we, unaware, had done nothing to help him.
And we now understand why, after considerable vacillation, Brad had decided not to fill a Church mission. Though he had not, at nineteen, engaged in homosexual relations and thus was presumably worthy in this and other respects, he could not square his troubled self-image with his understanding of what a missionary should be; he knew that the only way he could represent the Church was to deny the legitimacy of who and what he felt deeply he was, and that seemed to him unfair both to the Church, because it was hypocritical, and to himself, because it was a violation of himself. I did not understand at the time, though now I do, how much personal integrity was evidenced in that decision.
After finishing his sophomore year at college, he returned from Salt Lake City and discussed his situation with us. He had during the semester made contact with the gay “underground,” and he was planning to move with a close friend to Los Angeles. Moreover, he had virtually dropped out of the Church. These decisions were deeply upsetting to his mother and me. We knew the dangers that awaited him in that city, we knew that the ballast he need to stabilize him was now lessened considerably. But from my present vantage point, I see it was a risk he had to take; for the sake of his own self-esteem he had to discover and test the truth of his unique identity. He had emerged from is teen years with his sense of self-worth severely undermined. It is not too much to say that our culture had encouraged him to hate himself, and the Church, in it’s general attitude toward homosexuality, had contributed substantially to that despairing self-estimate. Since gay people could not easily live openly in Idaho and Utah, he had to go were there enough others of his kind that he could feel his essential identity was acceptable. I think he did not leave the Church so much as it left him by tacitly denying his personal reality.
Meanwhile, his parents wrestled with demons of their own. What had we done wrong? Was I a wimpy father? No. Was his mother domineering, over protective? No, no. Had I overpowered him, had I been distant, absent, had he and I failed to relate will to each other? No, no, no. Had he been Oedipally attracted to his mother? No. None of the facile theories about parental influence on the development of homosexual behavior made much sense in our case. Did real love exist in our family? Yes. Had we shared much quality time together? Yes. Had his parent’s marriage been a good one? Better than average. Ultimately, we came to the conclusion that Brad’s homosexuality was not a matter of failed parenting or inadequate family relationships.
When he left for California, we were extraordinarily concerned about what we could do to help him. Clearly he was at the juncture in his life where he had to establish his independence, and we had to recognize his need to determine his own course. So we tired not to be intrusive, while at the same time keeping our lines of communication open. We did not want to jeopardize the good relationship we had always had with him.
In Los Angeles, Brad was thrown on his own resources, earning his own living, making all his own decisions, acquiring sreetsmarts, learning to negotiate traffic in the fast lane. Inevitably there was a clash between the values of his Idaho upbringing and the aesthetic hedonism of West Hollywood. He wanted to have the best of both lives, but he could not reconcile them. To us he praised his brave new world, yet it seemed he protested too much. His relationship with a lover came to an end. After two years, he began to sense the desperation that lay beneath the surface of the frenzied life he was participating in. After the third year he saw clearly that the behavior of many of his gay friends was self-destructive, nihilistic. It was the behavior of the people who do not accept themselves because society does not, the behavior of people who have no joy and hope in contemplating the future.
It is never easy to leave a supportive community, but Brad felt he must get out of that environment if he was to put his life back on a solid basis–with education for a meaningful career, with positive attitudes about life. Most importantly, he knew he had to overcome the isolation of the ghetto and renew contact with the mainstream. But where to go? To come back to Idaho and Utah was a plunge again into an earlier experience of cultural alienation, to renew the conscious tension between himself and the Latter-day Saints. On the other hand, he felt that the deeply loved mountains environment in which he had grown up and nearness of his family might steady him. His decision to attend a university in Utah for the sake of one of its nationally reputed professional programs was a calculated risk: would he be saved by closeness to the moral influence of those cultural roots, or would he be suffocated in a closed environment?
He did return, and for two years pursued this experiment in personal growth and professional education. On the positive side, he left behind the promiscuity that had become part of his life in Los Angeles, and he was advancing toward a career. On the other, he felt terribly isolate in that Utah community, angry at the smugness of the comfortably religious around him, concerned lest his homosexual identity be discovered by his acquaintances, fearful of the toll that would be exacted from him if it were.
At this stage Brad contemplated the future with great ambivalence. There were so many things in life that he loved–the beauty of the natural world, the monuments of man’s achievement in art and culture. Yet those deep pleasures were undermined by the ever present awareness of being an outsider and thereby permanently cut off from so much that his religion had taught him to desire. Not least of these inaccessible opportunities was the family, with children, he had always wanted, for he now felt he could never in good conscience ask a woman to marry him. With reduced possibilities before him, he was coping; he had separated himself from the extremes of nihilism and self-destructive behavior.
In view of this, what happened to him next seems a cruel irony. When he came home in the summer of 1985 to help us with the construction of our new family home, he was clearly not well. Apparently incubating in his blood since the period in Los Angeles, the AIDS virus had reared its head and begun its deadly work. As it turned out, his homecoming was to last for the remainder of his life. His condition grew steadily worse over the summer and fall; in November he nearly died from pneumocystis pneumonia. A period of brief remission, during which he gamely attempted to continue his studies at our local university on a part-time basis, was followed by inexorable decline. He died in December.
AIDS is a devastating antagonist. It dismantles a person ounce by ounce, nerve by nerve. Brad fought this horrible disease courageously, with the independent, self-reliant spirit he had always had; and he did not attempt to evade responsibility for what had happened to him. At the same time he tried so hard to find some deeper religious significance in his physical and spiritual suffering (and so did we). To the very end of his life he was struggling to find a faith that could comfort him. Indeed, he had been engaged in a spiritual odyssey for years. After he concluded that he was unacceptable to the LDS Church–and therefore rejected fellowship in it–he looked at oriental religions, born-again Christianity, and pantheism. But his personal integrity was such that he could not accept easily explanations that did not seem compatible with reality as he perceived it. We will never forget the conversations in which we shared over convictions and our uncertainties.
The final year of Brad’s life was the most difficult one our family has known, a year of perplexity, a year of grieving. Paradoxically, it was also the most profoundly meaningful year of our lives. Sharing his ordeal exposed us to dimensions of experience that enlarged our awareness of the human condition. We learned so much from him in the way he faced the difficult circumstances of his illness and hi life. We are grateful to him; we are proud of him. He was such a fine young man. At this point, we can say that we feel blessed to have had a son who was homosexual.
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