I received this text message from my father a long time ago, 2013, 2014, maybe? I had done something wrong, something sinful. I don’t remember what. What I do remember is copying the message - barely reading it - and pasting it into the notes app on my iPhone (that’s, The iPhone, the first one). I remember that I didn’t understand it at the time, and I thought I might understand it later. And now, several iCloud syncs and nearly a decade later, I come across it again, in all of its unhinged glory. Sometimes I think about how insane and awful it was to live with my parents and how, surely, it couldn’t be the way I remembered it, but this text message assures me that I wasn’t hallucinating. It deserves a critical reading.
Hi David,
Bear with me. This text is a little long.
I have a concern that you are about to repeat the same mistake as my father and myself. You are a 3rd generation of smart men. That is our gift from God. Our gift means that whether we like it or not we are not treated the same as others and we have different expectations placed on us. We have a choice in how we handle. My father seemed to handle it by drugs and women. I unfortunately handled by alcohol and sex outside of marriage.
Here is what we learned:
- Jesus does not exist to make us happy. we exist to glorify God by making disciples…. (sound familiar?). [he’s referencing the mission statement of our church at the time] As we glorify Him, He fulfills our deepest desires.
2. Not possible to have friends that are non believers. They can be people we r praying to receive Christ, co-workers, people we know at school but not friends.- Not possible to be in a relationship with a girl/young lady that is a non believer. I tried a few times. Only ends in heart break.
4. Hard but not impossible for guys like us to have friends. Don’t shun those who like us who r believers for those who we want to like us. Give people room to make mistakes.
5. Careful not to leave when u should stay and stay when u should leave. Seek Godly advice from an Elder before doing either.
6. What u feed lives what u starve dies
we all have weaknesses. Yes most or all movies, music, or books have sin. We each are more susceptible to some sins more than others. U have know your own triggers.
From your bloodline it may be drugs, alcohol, bitterness, lying, sex outside of marriage between man and woman (both hetero and homo).Because of my issues with alcohol. I avoid whiskey and bourbon and only drink something other than 1 beer or glass of wine with my wife present. I avoid movies or books with gay content because of childhood experiences. Plus I grew up listening to Grandpa lament over his son and I promised myself not to add to his pain. Christian counseling that opens up the Word to heal and challenge helped me. It also helped pull me from my dark depression days which is why I want u the same for u.
Please follow these guidelines and u will do well. If u don’t, God help u because I won’t be able to.
Well, first I’ll note that there’s a lot of honesty here. 100% sincere words with the desire to steer and guide my 12 year old self. which is cool, I think?
And secondly, it’s interesting how some of the…predictions about the problems and ‘sins’ I may be susceptible to have come true. I do, in fact, have ‘homo’ ’sex outside of marriage between man and woman’. I do drink too much sometimes. It really is very ‘hard but not impossible for guys like us to have friends.’ And yes, I guess I’m currently in my own ‘dark depression days.’
But, I’m burying the lede here. My father is gay. He’s gay. He just.. says it. I don’t think he knows how homosexuality works, so of course he doesn’t see himself that way. But how else can we interpret the final paragraph? ‘I avoid movies or books with gay content because of childhood experiences.’ This sentence alone could be explained away; perhaps these ‘experiences’ didn’t concern his own homosexuality but someone else’s. Yet the sentence that comes after it is, I argue, indisputable. ‘Plus I grew up listening to Grandpa [my father mostly lived with his grandfather] lament over his son [my great-uncle Tony, who was openly gay] and I promised myself not to add to his pain.’ This last half of the sentence implies that he honestly, truly fears the ‘movies or books’ with ‘gay content’ he avoids could unlock or unleash homosexual urges. And if that’s true, that just means he’s gay! That’s what it means! Case closed!
It could explain why the beatings he gave me always seemed so frantic and angry. Was he flogging himself, while flogging me? (I had breakfast recently with my father’s cousin, who said, with uncharacteristic tact, that my father is ‘not the paragon of masculinity.’) Everything I got beat for after, say, 12 involved some sort of homosexuality-based sin, something in my browser history, etc. One early evening I will forever remember very clearly, he came in, belt in hand, completely, finally dropping the pretense of Christian, fatherly discipline, and unleashed his wrath on my sleeping body. The first hit struck while I was in a dream, and I didn’t cry out in pain or really realize what was happening until the 3rd or 4th. (I was a sound sleeper.) He tried his best to get this gayness out of me and maybe out of himself too, and sometimes I wish he could have, but he couldn’t.
And who can forget his nightly affirmation, spoken over me as I went to sleep since I was very young: “You’re a strong, masculine boy growing into a strong, masculine man.” Embarrassingly literally, praying the gay away (with dubious results).
I don’t want to misrepresent things here. Despite his occasional no-holds barred, anger-soaked approach to discipline, my father is a quiet, weird, boring guy. When he says ‘most or all movies, music, or books have sin’, he means that honestly. In his car, it’s public radio or jazz (in the absence of pure, Gregorian chants, I guess). I’ve never seen him read a book. Ok, maybe something like “Being a Man in God’s Kingdom” by T.D. Jakes or whatever, but not like, an actual book. He’s supposed to be a ‘smart guy’ (a characteristic of his that I have never observed, and I’ve read his master’s thesis) but reading nothing but the Bible (and does he even really read it?) is like intellectual incest. Your mind just folds in on itself, your neurons melt like butter, and you end up with a Hapsburg-type brain.
His assertion that he’s left his ‘dark depression days’ is not clearly true. He comes home from his long commute to his dumb office job in the office park infested outskirts of Atlanta and immediately passes out on the couch or looks positively dead-eyed as he takes me to Taekwondo or Lego League or Improv class or whatever bullshit in the evenings. He doesn’t have any friends. His ‘not possible to have friends that are non believers’ thing doesn’t help,’ but I’d bet it’s his personality, not his selectiveness, that’s the limiting factor. He’s probably lonely. (Marrying an insane woman likely didn’t help things. His cousin’s comment, characteristically un-tact: “They were the two most judgmental people in Sunday school.”)
But I can understand how he ended up this way, can’t I? I feel it too, that aching sadness. I also can’t really connect with anyone. I have my own tendencies towards.. a kind of monasticism. Just today, I’ve switched my sim to a flip phone. Does my compulsion to give away furniture, delete accounts, take things down to the barest essentials, parallel my father’s revulsion to anything outside the Christian world? Does he feel the desperate urge to rearrange things in the perfect, precise way to try to minimize psychic pain? Or maybe he’s just a weird, homophobic loser, and I, a synthesis of my father and mother, am something altogether different, a new element created in a lab, with way too many protons and neutrons to exist for more than a split second. Maybe it’s that, yet, I feel like I’m becoming more like him every day.
In the message, through these guidelines, he offers his life as something to replicate. But trying to wipe sadness away with an extreme religiousity is not quite my style. If the choice was to have his life or to bash my head against the hardest surfice I can find, you’d find my limp body with a crack-an-egg-on-the-counter-type series of cracks along my skull. Are there any other paths, for guys like us?