I’d hoped to avoid ground combat by enlisting in the Navy, but within nine months of joining, I found myself in Vietnam.

During those long 13 months at war, the one good thing was the circle of friends I made, first as a hospital corpsman in an aid station in the jungle, and then onboard the hospital ship Repose.

The first gay man I met was at the aid station located in Dong Ha near the DMZ. His name was Matt, and we laughed when we found we both loved the movie The Group, based on the 1963 novel of the same name by Mary McCarthy. The story of the friendship of a group of Vassar College women who deal together with discrimination, jobs, and men, The Group also had a secret lesbian character who gave us an idea. Matt introduced me to a buddy of his, Joe, and together we bonded like the girls of The Group, and for the same reasons. We added more members who also loved the name—ultimately seven in all—and so we called ourselves “The Group.”

We were noticed, and maybe recognized as gay, but no one bothered us. I know some of our officers knew about us. It didn’t matter. We were in a war zone, and as long as we did our jobs, what the hell?

I had a difficult upbringing. I was born in a field on a farm in California’s Salinas Valley, and my father beat me from the time I was 7 years old. My mother tried to protect me, but one day my father nearly killed me by beating me with a pipe. He left, at my mother’s insistence, abandoning her to raise three children by herself. The last time I saw my father, he said, “I know what you are. I never loved you. I hate you.”

I hated the war, but suddenly because of the Navy, I had a place where I belonged. A family called The Group to share a life with.

Then in mid-December 1969, back stateside and stationed at the Quantico Marine Corp Base, the bottom fell out. I was summoned by the commanding officer of the Marines, who directed me to report to OSI, the Office of Special Investigation. I sat in a small room, where I waited for what seemed like hours. Finally, a man dressed in civilian clothes came in and introduced himself as a special agent of the OSI. He said allegations had been made against me.

I knew immediately what this was about. It was my secret, and it’d been found out.

“What allegations?” I asked anyway.

“You being a faggot,” he said.

I’d been turned in by a man called Anonymous. My military career ended even as I was coming to the very end of my enlistment. My year of service in a war zone counted for nothing. My passion for saving the lives of my fellow servicemen counted for less.

The OSI man said he wanted names and ranks of other homos I knew, and that I was going to have to submit to more detailed questioning by other agents.

“You will report back here to my office at 0900 tomorrow. Do you understand?”

A shipmate in Vietnam, David Monarch, had been arrested for being gay and removed from the ship. A very private man who’d kept to himself, he wasn’t part of The Group. But we all found out that he’d been court-martialed and sentenced to prison. Just months before OSI called me in, I’d gotten word that David had died at Leavenworth Federal Prison. I never learned how and why, but in 1960s America, we gay men deserved to die, according to popular thinking. So, who was going to investigate the fate of a queer Black man behind bars?

I was filled with terror at the prospect of dying like David.

I might as well die now, I thought. On my own terms.

Hours before I was supposed to return to the OSI office, I went to the small laboratory, where I worked as a medical technician. The bottles and beakers looked frightening in the thin 2 a.m. light.

Removing a Bunsen burner from the gas valve, I used the attached tubing to fill up a large plastic bag, which I then taped securely around my neck.

I shut my eyes. Was it the war? Was it the harassment for being gay? I didn’t know. All I knew was that I hated being gay and that I felt like I didn’t deserve to live.

As the gas replaced the oxygen in my system, my head started spinning, and I heard squeaky noises inside my skull. But then I realized I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to give into them. I pulled the plug on the gas pipe, tore off the bag, and sat up.

After I reported my suicide attempt to the psychiatrist in my clinic, that stopped the legal proceedings in their tracks. Even the U.S. Navy wasn’t so cruel as to deny treatment to someone endangering his life.

I was first treated with strong psychotropic drugs and kept in a padded cell to protect the other patients from the “homosexual.” Later, I was released into the general population but kept on drugs with regular interviews and discussions with a military psychologist, all to treat my homosexuality rather than the PTSD I’d suffered because of the war, which remained undiagnosed. I spent nine weeks in the hospital.

Ultimately, it was decided that I must be discharged. A military medical board promised me a General Discharge under Honorable conditions—but it was qualified. On my Military Separation Paper DD214 were three codes: #265, unsuitability because of a character disorder; #256, admission of being a homosexual, acceptance of discharge in lieu of board action and punishment; and a re-enlistment code of RE4, unsuitable for military service.

This is known as a “bad paper discharge.” Other codes tell stories of drug use/sales, anger/aggression toward others, drunk driving, and any number of crimes or misdeeds. And there are other types of discharges, too, including Dishonorable and Bad Conduct Discharges.

These codes, and your DD214 form, follow you for the rest of your life. Employers can demand to see the form, for government jobs, especially; it indicates your job worthiness. The Veterans Administration will use it to see if you qualify for benefits, such as medical and retirement pay. Some of these General or even Dishonorable designations are the result of PTSD or traumatic brain injury; others are the result of the same mistakes a civilian young person may make, but in the civilian world there’s a chance they’ll forgive and forget these errors of youth. The DD214 is always the same and never changes. The codes give a picture of a person that is as one-dimensional as the ink on the paper.

A bad paper discharge can lead to higher rates of unemployment, homelessness, and suicide. For gay and lesbian people, the discharge has designations showing you as a criminal for many decades.

After getting out, I tried for a job at a city agency in Los Angeles. They refused to hire me after seeing the character flaw designation on my DD214. Later, I applied at Pacific Bell Telephone to become a janitor. They didn’t check my discharge; it wasn’t necessary for someone being hired to clean toilets.

On my discharge day, in February 1970, I went to Arlington National Cemetery to visit the grave of a man I loved. Matt had died a hero in my arms, the last week I was in Vietnam. I remembered how we had decided to create a tribe of our own. The other men, Matt said, had their support system all laid out for them. Surrounded by killing, we gay men needed to protect our minds, and strengthen one another.

As I stood at Matt’s headstone, rivulets of tears ran down my cheeks.

I was never religious. But I looked to the sky and hoped there was a God and that my Matt was with Him. I spoke the words I had said that moment when he died: “I wish we could have been lovers. I love you, man. I love you.”

Over the past 50 years, I have had many battles with the PTSD I suffer because of my war experiences, but I have also fought hard for the rights of Matt and other men and women like me.

It was only after I retired, though, that I began to think about correcting the injustice of my own discharge.

In 2016, I was volunteering at the Los Angeles County Department of Veterans Affairs, where I befriended the chief deputy director. She heard my story and helped me use her office’s resources to start my petition for a change to my discharge. It took four years, the help of a young gay psychologist at the VA Hospital and a high-powered legal team, and it changed my life. On June 3, 2019, my DD214 was administratively reissued to show a full and unqualified Honorable Discharge.

I now belong to veterans’ organizations where Afghanistan and Iraq veterans meet. They have struggles from their wars, and I suspect some have bad paper discharges. I show them that they can have a life—a long life—after service. They are my family now, my Group.

The post The Navy Gave a Gay Man a Home—And a ‘Bad Paper’ Discharge That Haunted Him for Decades appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Napoleon Sarony, Portrait of Oscar Wilde, 1882.

When his health collapsed, he was laid up at the Hotel d’Alsace, in a seedier part of the Latin Quarter. He expired there—surrounded by hideous wallpaper—at age 46. A discreet burial took place at suburban Bagneux. At the time, it looked as if Wilde’s tarnished name would sink with him into the grave.

An exhibition now underway at the Petit Palais in the heart of Paris proves otherwise. Oscar Wilde: L’impertinent absolu offers as stunning array of artworks, manuscripts, and photographs that illuminate—as never before—Wilde’s legendary career.

This exhibition, on display until January 15, 2017, leads visitors through his phenomenal achievements, along with his difficult years of exile in Paris, and includes previously unseen materials from private collections.

The exhibition’s provocative title very loosely translates as “Insolence Incarnate” in recognition of the irreverent style that defines Wilde’s tremendous legacy. I recently spent several hours shuffling through with a busy crowd, all of us eagerly viewing the displays, arranged chronologically, beginning with letters from the time he excelled in Classics at Oxford and then moving to the paintings that he reviewed at the opening of the avant-garde Grosvenor Gallery in London.

Such works include G.F. Watts’s Love and Death. Wilde admired the strength with which “Love, a beautiful boy with lithe brown limbs and rainbow-coloured wings” tries to “bar the entrance” to the “giant form” of Death. Equally impressive among the artworks at the Grosvenor is Evelyn Pickering de Morgan’s Night and Sleep, featuring two entwined figures floating through the air, the one holding the cloak of darkness while the other scatters poppies on the earth below. Truly stupendous is James Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold, The Falling Rocket, which caused outrage when John Ruskin alleged that the American artist had “thrown a poet of paint in the public’s face.” (A libel suit ensued.)

Napoleon Sarony, Portrait of Oscar Wilde, 1882.

As Wilde acknowledged, Whistler’s Nocturne—which brilliantly captures the fireworks at London’s Cremorne Gardens—counted among “the most abused” paintings at the London gallery. But he didn’t seem impressed. The painting, he observed, was “certainly worth looking at for about as long as one looks at a real rocket”—“for somewhat less than a quarter of a minute.” Together, these phenomenal paintings recreate the impact that the Grosvenor enjoyed in 1877.

Then, around a corner, there is the unforgettable image of Wilde as an aesthete embarking on a yearlong lecture tour of North America, where he spoke on “aesthetic” topics to bemused audiences. The famous theater entrepreneur Richard D’Oyly Carte recruited Wilde to deliver talks on the much-publicized English movement that championed art for art’s sake, seeking to bring beauty into everyday life. The tour supported Carte’s American production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera, Patience, which did much to promote the image of the modern art-loving man as an effete, sentimental, and somewhat vain fashionista. Wilde perfected this image. Especially striking at the Petit Palais is the complete set of photographs taken by renowned portraitist Napoleon Sarony in New York, just before Wilde launched his coast-to-coast adventures. He stands in a range of languid poses, sporting knee breeches, silken hose, and opera pumps, as well as a sumptuous beaver topcoat. Sold at every venue where he gave his talks, these images—over which Sarony controlled the copyright—ensured that Wilde became a celebrity icon. Americans were so taken with Wilde’s persona that caricatures appeared throughout the press. Meanwhile, advertisers adapted his “aesthetic” look for the sale of ordinary goods, including spools of cotton, carpets, and rugs.

Harper Pennington, Portrait of Oscar Wilde, 1884.

Once back in London, Wilde resumed lecturing. As he shared his “Personal Impressions of America” with British followers, he dispensed with his “aesthetic” garb and adopted more sober but fashionable attire. We can see his changing style in the full-length portrait that American painter Harper Pennington created for Wilde as a wedding gift. This imposing picture, in which the aesthete dons a fashionable frockcoat, has never before been exhibited abroad. It presents an attractive, poised 29-year-old man in the prime of life. His elegant walking cane planted firmly on the ground, Wilde returns our gaze with quiet reassurance. Initially, the painting hung in Wilde’s family home, where he moved with his wife Constance in early 1885. It was sold, however, along with his books and furnishings, during the court proceedings. Mercifully, two well-to-do friends—Ada and Ernest Leverson—rescued it, though in the wake of Wilde’s very public scandal Ernest eventually found it a source of embarrassment. Wilde ensured that it went to another friend. The public had no knowledge of the portrait until it was bequeathed to UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library by Harrison Post, Clark’s romantic partner, more than 80 years ago. In May 2017, the artwork will be a centerpiece in Tate Britain’s “Queer Art in Britain, 1885-1967.”

Oscar Wilde: L’impertinent absolu traces his evolution into a major writer. This was the period when he enjoyed a blissful marriage, for a time. Particularly joyful is a photograph of Constance embracing their oldest boy, Cyril. The mid 1880s was also the period when Wilde made his mark with his classic collection of fairy tales, The Happy Prince (1888). A central part of the exhibition shows how successfully Wilde built his relations with French authors, including Stéphane Mallarmé. Other continental figures are equally well represented: Maurice Rollinat, Pierre Louÿs, and Henri de Régnier, as well as J.K. Huysmans, whose anti-realist novel, A rebours (1884), left a deep impression on Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, revised 1891).

The Picture of Dorian Gray was a turning point. A small but vocal minority of critics denounced it for its homoerotic subtext, and so it gained Wilde notoriety. By 1892, his first comedy, Lady Windermere’s Fan, wowed the London stage with Wilde’s aphoristic wit. Three more triumphant plays followed. In the interim, he started focusing his personal life on other men. He became intimate with an Oxford undergraduate, Lord Alfred Douglas, and he slept with several younger males, some of whom traded in sex work and extortion.

The Cameron Studio, Portrait of Constance and Cyril Wilde, 1889.

Most intriguing to me was the exhibit showing a single opened-out leaf of a hefty document. This is the set of witness statements from Wilde’s libel suit against Douglas’ father, John Sholto Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry. In early 1895, Queensberry—a hotheaded Scottish lord—penned an insulting visiting card (with an infamous misspelling) declaring that Wilde was “Posing as Somdomite.” Wilde sued for libel. Yet the witness statements show the extent of Wilde’s homosexual contacts. Once the libel suit collapsed, the authorities decided to prosecute Wilde, and the controversy that followed preoccupied the press for weeks before he was sentenced to two years in jail.

Wilde’s reputation began to revive not long after his demise. Richard Strauss’s Salome (1905), which features in L.A. Opera’s current season, helped turn the tide. And the publication of Wilde’s prison letter, De Profundis, did much to rehabilitate him in the same year. More than a century later, Oscar Wilde: L’impertinent absolu reveals how strongly Wilde speaks to us now. It also reveals—for all his lasting fame—that much remains to be learned about Oscar Wilde.

The post Why Oscar Wilde’s Life Was a Work of Art appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This question haunted me growing up. My earliest and most influential childhood memory is being 4 years old and “accepting Jesus into my heart.” Did I truly know what that meant—or was I looking for love from my parents?

I was raised in a strict, fundamentalist Christian household in Los Angeles where homosexuality was referred to as “an abomination to God, worthy of eternal damnation in hell.” At church, at school, and at home, being gay was rarely acknowledged and, when it was mentioned, described with contempt as the worst sin—comparable to murder, rape, and child molestation.

I didn’t want to experience the pain of eternity in hell. I didn’t want to be despised by everyone around me. And so, when I was 16, I went to weekly meetings with an “ex-gay” Christian psychologist who tried to change my sexual orientation.

The harmful practice of sexual orientation change efforts—also known as ex-gay, reparative, or sexual conversion “therapy”—involves attempts by a therapist to change the sexual orientation or gender identity of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) clients. In fall 2012, California became the first state to ban licensed mental health practitioners from using this practice on minors; I testified in favor of the legislation. I wept when I heard the news that the bill had been signed into law. And I celebrated last month when the U.S. Supreme Court denied an appeal by anti-gay groups that sought to overturn the ban.

I was 9 years old when I recognized my attractions for the same gender. Praying to God every night and pleading with Him to take them away didn’t work. Practically living, eating, and breathing the Bible didn’t work. I tried repressing and denying who I was—but nothing changed inside of me. I was taught by my pastors, parents, and peers to hate myself—and that worked.

My family attended Grace Community Church in Sun Valley. John MacArthur, head pastor for more than 40 years, has always had a strong anti-gay perspective. In a recent video, he tells parents to “alienate, isolate, not have a meal with, and give over to Satan your homosexual adult children.”

I was bullied and harassed in middle school and at Los Angeles Baptist High School. I would stand on cliffs, fantasizing about killing myself. Fortunately, my fear of experiencing worse pain in hell for eternity kept me from actually committing suicide.

My saving grace was competitive gymnastics. I felt a sense of mastery over my body, whereas I wasn’t able to control my same-gendered attractions. I used the physical pain of gymnastics to numb the emotional pain.

When I was 16, my parents saw self-inflicted cuts on my arms. I confessed that I was struggling with same-sex attractions. They were concerned and wanted to help me change so that I could join them “in eternal life with God.” My dad found a Christian psychotherapy group practice in Van Nuys that dealt with issues my church didn’t want to deal with, like satanic ritual abuse and homosexuality. I was so tormented that I begged my Dad to let me see the “ex-gay” psychologist after they had an argument over the fee.

For a year, I attended weekly individual therapy sessions where I was encouraged to blame my distant relationship with my father and over-involved relationship with my mother for my same-sex desires. I was also guided to “remember” an original wounding—in particular, sexual or physical abuse—that I had not experienced. The main cures were to build “healthy same-sex non-sexual friendships,” become more “masculine,” and date girls.

Initially I felt better. I wasn’t alone. I even quit gymnastics for a few months to fully dedicate myself to changing my sexual orientation.

I also went with my dad to conferences put on by Exodus International, the nation’s largest ex-gay organization. At 16, I was the youngest participant among 300 others struggling with their sexual orientation and religious beliefs. In breakout groups, we learned about how to become more “manly.” We were told that if one walked, talked, and sat different from others of our gender, this was evidence of dysfunction that could be altered to instill heterosexual desires.

And I read books and listened to audiotapes about how to have a “corrective and healing relationship with Jesus Christ.” These materials talked about how the “gay lifestyle” would create disease, depravity, and misery. I was convinced that doing what I was told would change my attractions—and confused about why these methods supposedly worked for others but not for me.

I eventually realized that this “treatment” wasn’t working for me—or for others. It was a painful process, but I also experienced freedom in knowing I had done my best to change before recognizing that it wasn’t possible.

At 20, I attended my last ex-gay conference. Shortly thereafter, I fell in love with a man. My love for him felt natural. My experience was nothing like what I had been told about the evil and impossible nature of same-sex relationships.

In 1991, I attended my first Halloween in West Hollywood, a place I had been told was a gay ghetto of the worst kind of sinners. I discovered something quite different, and it opened my eyes to hopeful possibilities. I saw people smiling, dancing, and celebrating their authentic selves. I saw couples and friends enjoying life. I wanted that, too.

My journey out of self-rejection was not easy. At the time, I was living with my parents in the Santa Clarita Valley. My parents eavesdropped on me and learned about my relationship. They gave me an ultimatum: If I broke up with my boyfriend and started seeing another Christian psychologist who specialized in sexual orientation change efforts, they would continue to support me while I tried out for the U.S. Gymnastics Olympic Team. If not, I would have to move out.

I moved out a week later, on Easter Sunday. It was an extremely painful departure. When I didn’t make the Olympic team, I transferred to UC Berkeley to join their gymnastics team—one of the only college gymnastics teams at the time that was truly gay-friendly. I joined a gay support group and saw several therapists in my 20s. In my 30s, I began my long-term work with a psychotherapist who helped me to break through my residual shame and self-harming behaviors.

Psychology became my new spirituality. It helped me to make sense of what I endured in childhood. And it turned out to be my calling. Today, I have a psychotherapy practice in West Hollywood where I work with LGBTQ clients to help them recover from homophobic environments and experiences.

My own family found some peace. Throughout my adult life, my father apologized for kicking me out of the house for being gay. Two years ago, a week before he passed away, he told me that we would be reunited in heaven because of my childhood acceptance of Jesus. He had evolved. His admission was a final act of love and desire for connection.

I’m so relieved that California, and now New Jersey, have laws to protect LGBTQ youth from this dangerous practice. It means that fewer teenagers will be placed in the position that I was—a position of self-rejection and self-loathing. But sexual orientation change efforts are still being practiced across the United States, on both minors and adults. As someone who underwent this damaging “therapy,” I’m heartened by efforts like #BornPerfect, a new campaign that aims to bring about a nationwide end to the practice. That message—that we are all worthy no matter who we love—is one that every child should receive.

The post Could I Stop Being Gay? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The funeral was for my friend’s mother, Alicia—a formidable Cuban matriarch who left behind a beautifully close and immensely bereaved family. Driving into the church parking lot, I recognized the dome and ornate architecture of the churches I’d grown up in. Inside, the chapel was spacious and flooded with shafts of sunlight streaming through the glass-stained windows along the nave walls and around the cupola high above the crossing. The light seemed to coalesce around the altar, lending a strange luminescence to the murals around the apse.

The service was as formal as I remembered, but everything else was different. I’d expected judgment or condemnation. Instead, I was beckoned to forgive and be forgiven. It felt tender and loving.

I truly couldn’t remember the last time I had gone to church. My early years were spent in the small town of Reynosa in northern Mexico in the 1960s, when almost every facet of the culture was ruled by Catholic religiosity: Men and women were supposed to follow strict gender roles, sex was forbidden before marriage, and any unsanctioned behavior having to do with the body triggered guilt, shame, and persecution from all quarters.

I was a young gay kid wrestling with feelings that were definitely not sanctioned—not by church, not by society, and not by my parents. It was made worse for me by the fact that I couldn’t hide my gayness. I was a sensitive kid, interested in learning and the arts. I wore glasses and carried too many books. I used to dance in the talent shows, and my mother dressed me in little suits with matching shirts and shorts, which usually prompted a beating in the schoolyard. It was all out there in plain sight, and so I learned early to shield myself against a world hostile to my kind.

As an outsider, you long for someplace safe to belong, and until I was 8 or 9 years old, the Catholic Church fulfilled that for me. My parents were not religious and did not go to church much except for holidays like Easter and Christmas. It was my grandmother who used to take me by the hand each Sunday and walk me downtown to the main church across the plaza. It was a cavernous structure filled with life-sized statues of rosy saints and virgins, the sounds of the choir and organ, and the smell of clouds of incense, which nearly asphyxiated me on a weekly basis. On Palm Sunday, my grandmother would buy palms from the dozens of vendors stationed outside.

Then the church stopped being safe for me. I had to attend weeks of catechism school before being allowed to take the wafer of my first communion. I befriended a boy I sensed was also gay, and the two of us became inseparable. Our teacher was a lovely old lady named Doña Carmelita. But before our final class, a priest came to speak to us. I don’t remember his name. I only remember that he stared daggers at my friend and me while he spoke of “sins of the flesh” and how girls need to “cover themselves” and boys must not “touch themselves”—and how he became especially angry when he said the biggest sin is for “boys to touch each other.” “How dare you!” I wanted to scream at him. But I didn’t. I just sat there and listened, chastised.

After that, my excitement for the church tapered. Eventually, I stopped going altogether. I was angry and isolated, finding no solace in a church that considered me an abomination. So I left and never looked back. I said “Fockate” to the Catholic Church, in Spanglish.

Why would I continue to follow a church that actively discriminated and encouraged others to discriminate against people like me—and other groups of people considered less worthy in God’s eyes? Like most religions, the church teaches that divine salvation is every human’s birthright, yet does a brisk business denying it daily to its own followers.

My break with the Catholic Church, and a disdain for all organized religion, has sustained me throughout my adult life. Living in cosmopolitan areas like New York and Los Angeles, many of us lead a secular life; we make an art of deriding the church and its prelates as jokes and brazen hypocrites. Over the past few years, it was easy to become downright outraged by the church’s criminal child abuse.

However, sitting there, praying for Alicia’s soul, I felt a sense of peace and relief that I had not experienced in quite some time. Suddenly I was back in the church of my early childhood, lying on my grandmother’s lap, listening to her high-pitched singing along with the choir. Tears began to roll down my face. I could see the beauty and love and goodness that the Catholic Church is supposed to embody. The omnipresent and debilitating shame and guilt I remembered were nowhere to be found.

I closed my eyes and opened my heart as I prayed for Alicia’s soul. I also prayed to be forgiven by all those I have judged not worthy of my love. I prayed for the strength to forgive those who have wronged me and to let go of my anger and resentment against them.

The only words that can describe that moment seem cliché, and almost embarrassing for someone who’s spent so long joking about the church. But it was truly a religious experience and a spiritual homecoming. I was back where I began, but seeing it all for the first time.

Will I go back to church regularly? I don’t know. I do know that people like me are feeling a new kind of welcome there—maybe because times have changed, maybe because of Pope Francis, maybe because we have changed, too. And I know, too, that I was meant to go that day, and that Alicia’s spirit brought me there to receive the healing I needed. Events conspired—a canceled flight, a case of the flu—in making my return to the church possible. I wish Alicia Godspeed, and offer her my thanks for giving me what I had been missing.

The post Gay—and Returning to Mass appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We had stopped in the deli section of a supermarket near my father’s home in metro Detroit to pick out some meat for a party. Dad must have said something, done something, that pricked my subconscious.

My father gave me a look of pure astonishment. “We’ll talk about it later,” he finally said.

The year was 2004, the month November, that dreary time when Michigan can’t decide whether to clothe itself with leaves or snow. We were both about to have a rough night.

I had never considered my father’s sexual orientation before. As a seventh grader, I was more concerned with school and acne and the cute boy in my English class. And Dad had always been a man’s man. He once drove from Detroit to Chicago overnight to buy a 1966 Chevy Corvair that he named Veronica. He spent years rebuilding our house, immersing himself in everything from electrical wiring to tile flooring. He dressed smartly but not fashionably, and his favorite store was Home Depot, which we visited multiple times a week.

So I had no basis to ask the question I did. It was only six months since I’d even understood the word “gay.” But somehow, I knew.

Later that night, my father, sitting on his bed, revealed his secret to me. “So you are gay?” I asked. “Yes,” he answered. The rest was a blur. I screamed at him and sobbed. I wanted to know how I would be affected by this change. Was homosexuality genetic? Did this mean I had to be gay, too? I was too hysterical to consider his feelings. I found out later that my sister, age 9, had heard my crying through the thin walls that separated her bedroom from my father’s. She knew everything. I regret that she had to find out so soon, overheard instead of explained.

My parents had divorced five years earlier, when I was 7. “Irreconcilable differences” was the legal cause, as it is for so many other couples, and it described my parents perfectly. Dad was the extrovert who worked long hours and surprised us with gifts and vacations. Mom was the introvert who preferred immersing herself in the beauty of nature and spending time with friends and family. They’d gotten engaged only three months after meeting each other. They’d also gotten divorced, after almost 12 years of marriage, before he realized he had a preference for men.

After coming out to me, Dad made an appointment with Mom to tell her, too. I don’t know how she reacted; her main concern was for my sister and me. In April 2005, Dad finally told my sister he had a partner. She had found a pair of unfamiliar shoes in his closet.

The first time I’d met this partner, I didn’t know my father was gay. Dad had taken me to an arts-and-crafts show to say hi to some friends and introduced me to one of them, a tall guy in his 20s with bleached-blond hair and a high voice. He was selling candles. I smiled and nodded, but this wasn’t my scene, and I didn’t think anything of it.

A few weeks after my dad’s conversation with my sister, Dad reintroduced his partner to us during a Sunday brunch. This man, 16 years younger than my father, was our stepfather now, Dad said. And he’d be a big part of our lives, joining us on our annual camping weekends at Cedar Point amusement park and our 10-day summer vacation. Dad said his partner would be moving in with him in the fall, but we soon found out that the partner had already moved in.

I threw tantrums; my sister retreated into herself. My mother told my father he had to give his daughters time to adjust and understand before they could process having a new stepparent. Dad interpreted our reactions as homophobia and suspended our fortnightly weekend stays with him.

Meanwhile, insomnia took hold of me, and I would stare at the ceiling as minutes turned into hours, my thoughts wrestling in the darkness. Would my life ever be normal? Where had my father gone, and who had given him this new identity? My sister—normally a chatterbox—had gone mostly silent, speaking only to communicate basic needs. After a few months of unsuccessful sporadic day visits working to rebuild his relationship with his daughters, Dad felt he had waited long enough. He wanted to live his life in daylight, and he wanted to resume our regular visitation schedule. That December, he took my mother to court.

One requirement of the court was that my sister and I attend therapy sessions. In my memory, our therapist is the mirror image of Professor Trelawney, Harry Potter’s divination teacher as played by Emma Thompson. Her hair wasn’t as frizzy, and her woolens were less threadbare, but she had the same dazed, helpless look about her—as if a storm were coming, and she could do nothing but wait for it. She would start each weekly session with mundane questions about school and life and then move on to Dad-related drama. I worked my way through Kleenex boxes, crying in anger.

I didn’t like that Dad was gay, but that wasn’t my main concern anymore. It was that I never felt as if he listened or tried to understand. Sometimes, in an obvious plea for conversation with him, I’d lock myself in my small square room at his house, emailing and messaging friends on my computer. Dad would turn off the electrical breaker, forcing me to open the door and giving me the opportunity I wanted to talk. Yet I always ended up screaming at him instead, trying to break through his calm and patronizing answers. I wanted him to be as angry as I was or, at least, to feel something.

Looking back, I’m sure he did feel something. I imagine that all the fears he felt of being rejected by his own family were turning into reality, and he was furious about it. But it was also causing him to lose sight of what to expect from ordinary people, and especially kids, confronted by major change. Even a new woman in Dad’s life would have been hard on us, let alone a new man.

Dad’s efforts to place his partner in more of a parenting role just made things worse. If I wanted to see a movie, or make some food, Dad would tell me to ask my “stepfather” for permission. But only Dad was my dad. This new person, who listened to techno and swore at me when I made salads in a way he was not accustomed to, was not my dad, or stepdad, or even someone I could think of as a credible authority figure.

I was desperate for Dad to convey that he was fundamentally the same man I’d known and loved and to whom I’d been so close in both appearance and manner. Instead, the changes in his personality and behavior grew more pronounced. When I was younger, Dad took us to Episcopal Church services every Sunday morning and even taught Sunday school. After Dad’s coming out, his religion became invisible. Home furnishings began to consume more of his budget. My father was never one to skimp on a product that could last a long time if chosen wisely (we still have his now 20-year-old stereo), but he never took much interest in feng shui or vases full of marbles. That had started to change. One day, I noticed that the two sconces on the living room wall had undergone a transformation. Previously their lampshades had been an unremarkable gray. Now they were hunter green, with gold beads dangling from the sides. It may seem like a trivial change, but I found it horrifying and burst into tears. Who was this man with frilly, beaded lampshades?

The constant emotional tension and financial strain was taking a toll on all of us. We were drained of will and tired of fighting. Eventually, we stopped trying to put the brakes on my father and surrendered to his wishes. My sister and I visited him every other weekend, at least until my senior year, when I had a weekend job at the library, which gave me an excuse to stay home with Mom.

Gradually, I grew more comfortable with the change in Dad and even told certain confidantes, usually in an exchange of secrets—one friend’s dad was a pothead, another had cut himself amid severe depression. Mutually assured destruction gave me a sense of security and comfort in what was a small, conservative, upper-middle class town.

After high school, I ran off to the East Coast for college, creating some distance for me to start anew. My sister pasted on a smile and forged a new relationship with my father and his partner. She’s now a senior in high school, and I’m a junior in college. All of my friends in college know about my dad, and I no longer have a teenage need to conform.

Because my dad became gay so late in life, I’m sometimes asked if I think homosexuals are born gay or lesbian, or if it’s something they become over time. I don’t know, but I don’t think it matters, either. Attraction is not something people can choose or control. It chooses them, not the other way around. I’m happy that my dad has found happiness and love.

But I do wish he had introduced his new life more sensitively. I wish he hadn’t thrown accusations at my mom for trying to protect her children. I wish he had tried to explain to us that our own identities wouldn’t change just because his did. And I wish he had tried, despite my frustrating insolence and anger, to see things through his children’s eyes.

Coming out stories so often seem to fall into simple categories. Either everyone accepts the person who comes out and there’s a group hug, or family members reject the person and cut off all contact. But I think stories like mine are far more common. Anytime someone comes out, it’s going to be hard. It’s even harder when children are involved. I don’t think my dad handled things right, but I also don’t think there was a “right” way to handle it. There were just bad and less-bad options.

Today, rainbow is supposed to be the new black, and I’m happy about that. If society had been this enlightened when my dad was young, maybe he would have become aware of his latent feelings sooner. I like to think that the next generation of Americans will feel less tortured about their sexuality, so that, unlike my father, they’ll take the right path to start with, instead of painfully changing course.

The post When My Dad Came Out appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The debate over gay marriage pits two visions of America against each other, and I worry that the least enlightened one, bolstered by President Obama, is carrying the day.

I am not talking about the issue of whether marriage should be limited to heterosexual couples, mind you, but about the timeless question of whether we are to be one cohesive nation whose citizens enjoy the same “privileges and immunities” throughout–or whether, by contrast, we are to be a patchwork of states and communities whose residents’ individual rights vary according to their local community’s prevailing “standards.”

Earlier this month, the president told ABC News that he is personally in favor of gay marriage but wants the issue resolved by states. That’s deeply unsatisfying. It’s illogical for the nation’s first African-American president, a former Harvard Law Review editor and constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago, to say that the right of gays to marry whomever they want is a clear matter of equality and due process but then leave it up to the states to go their own ways. Good luck with that, if you’re a same-sex couple wanting to get married in Alabama.

President Obama was quick to say in his interview that the definition of marriage (like the issue of slavery in the first decades of our nation, I might add) has historically been a state prerogative. Never mind that in 1967 the Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage, holding that the ban violated the Equal Protection and Due Process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. Writing for a unanimous majority, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, “Marriage is one of the basic civil rights of man, fundamental to our very existence and survival.” The Constitution, Warren added, required that “the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious discriminations.” In other words: Buzz off, states.

Both competing visions of social cohesion–the national one and the communitarian one–have long co-existed in tension (“tension” being a polite euphemism to cover a brutal civil war as well). Our Founding Fathers subscribed to the belief that being an American transcended one’s narrower state identity while still bequeathing us a nation in which some states outlawed slavery and others allowed it to flourish.

The Civil War’s outcome, enshrined in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments of the Constitution, appeared to have settled the matter for good. We would no longer remain what the Chinese in a far different context have recently called “one country, two systems.” Liberty, freedom, equality, and the pursuit of happiness were now going to mean the same thing in Alabama as they did in Vermont.

The South’s states’ rights mantra proved more resilient than anticipated, however, and it took a concerted effort by liberals, leveraging the power of the Supreme Court and the Congress, to restore a sense that we are one nation, undivided, whose citizens should enjoy the same rights and protections, regardless of state boundaries.

The Warren Court’s jurisprudence was the highest expression of national cohesion, and it was echoed at the time by the muscular nationalism of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. “There is no issue of states’ rights or national rights,” President Johnson declared in a stirring televised pitch for his Voting Rights Act on the heels of violence in Selma, Alabama, in March of 1965. “There is only the struggle for human rights.”

Included in the speech was a nationalistic sentiment that encapsulated the era’s progressive quest to forge one America. “This is one nation,” Johnson said. “What happens in Selma and Cincinnati is a matter of legitimate concern to every American.”

Today, such a declaration rings more hollow. President Obama’s hesitation to call for a national push to enforce equality for gays–his instinct that this is a matter best left to the states–is considered sensible and wise by plenty of leading progressive thinkers and activists. States’ rights have gone bipartisan.

Today’s revitalized, bipartisan federalism is fueled by two factors. The first is the political “sorting out” of the last few decades. The nation is increasingly split into red and blue states whose politics and cultures overlap less and less. Americans self-segregate into left and right communities, consuming only one or the other’s media and entertainment, careful to filter out “the other.” Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats are endangered species. Blue states, red states; you know who you are.

As more and more Americans live surrounded by like-minded neighbors, the urge wanes to care about the prevailing norms in a community halfway across the country. If someplace else wants to round up immigrants to deport, ban gays from getting married, or allow residents to carry concealed weapons, what’s it to us? By the same token, if we want to welcome illegal immigrants, allow gays to marry, or ban guns, what’s it to them?

California is at the forefront of progressive federalism. Throughout the Bush years, California was regularly doing battle with Washington to forge its own separate path on any number of issues, from consumer protection laws to medical marijuana and environmental regulations.

That’s why an expanding range of issues, including educational standards and immigration policy, is now seen through the same prism that long defined obscenity: that of community standards. Forget about Cincinnati. Why should people living in West Hollywood concern themselves about the rights of people in Selma, or vice versa? Isn’t that a fool’s errand, whose best-case scenario will be an embrace of the lowest common denominator? Better to live and let live.

The second cause for the rise of a progressive federalism is the widespread exhaustion and unease with the role of the judiciary in enforcing constitutional rights and national standards. It’s now fashionable in liberal circles to believe that Roe v. Wade may have backfired by provoking, galvanizing and strengthening the far right for a generation to come–unnecessarily so, the theory goes, given that state legislatures were working their way, if at different speeds, towards legalizing abortion across the country. Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the liberal justice, has made this claim. Recently, Eric J. Segall, a law professor at Georgia State University, applied this argument to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ordering the desegregation of schools; Segall claimed that, because the Court was too far ahead of society, the decision backfired politically. So it’s not surprising that many leading gay rights activists share a preference for legislative triumphs over courtroom wins.

To my read, though, the constitutional rights of individuals should never be compromised by political expediency or convenience or by polling of majorities to see if they are ready to stomach the protection of another’s rights. Courts don’t, and shouldn’t, have the option of avoiding judicial review because it’s politically messy.

Besides, counterfactual history is more art than science. Who knows how less polarized the abortion issue would be had the courts stayed out of it and the struggle been confined to the political arena? And, I would add, who cares? Progressive federalism may be in fashion, but it’s a sad historical retreat. The American constitutional system is built on a non-negotiable belief that there are certain inalienable rights we possess as individuals and citizens that the state, or the prejudices of a majority, cannot wrest away from us.

Fortunately, those pesky courts are unlikely to allow this “let’s let each state decide for itself” stalemate to last indefinitely. The infamous Defense of Marriage Act (an example of conservatives tactically ditching their states’ rights fervor to advance their social agenda through Congress) is under assault in the courts, and California’s own Proposition 8 banning gay marriage has been struck down by the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court (on admittedly narrow grounds that don’t seem to apply to states that never have allowed gay marriage).

President Obama has been commended, and rightly so, for “evolving” in his thinking on whether gays should be able to commit to loved ones in marriage. Now, hopefully, he will evolve in his thinking about whether he wants to preside over one country, or two.

Andrés Martinez is the editorial director of Zócalo Public Square and a vice president at the New America Foundation.

*Photos courtesy of Jason DeFillippo cliff1066.

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