A Father’s Journey
FOR a long while, my fathers way of coping was to walk quietly from the room. He doesnt remember this. I do. I can still see it, still feel the pinch in my chest when the word gay came up perhaps in reference to some event in the news, or perhaps in reference to me and hed wordlessly take his leave of whatever conversation my mother and my siblings and I were having. Hed drift away, not in disgust but in discomfort, not in a huff but in a whisper. I saw a lot of his back. . .
But at some point Dad, like America, changed. I dont mean he grew weepy, huggy. I mean he traveled from what seemed to me a pained acquiescence to a different, happier, better place. He found peace enough with who I am to insist on introducing my partner, Tom, to his friends at the golf club. Peace enough to compliment me on articles of mine that use the same three-letter word that once chased him off. Peace enough to sit down with me over lunch last week and chart his journey, which Id never summoned the courage to ask him about before.
Its been an extraordinary year, probably the most extraordinary yet in this countrys expanding, deepening embrace of gays and lesbians as citizens of equal stature, equal worth.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/opinion/sunday/bruni-a-fathers-journey-on-gay-marriage.html?hp
by Frank Bruni