My Father's Closet
Jerry Deck
July 1, 2000
Lying down beside me, my mother softly said, "I can't tell you why, but if you guess it I won't say no." I was eleven years old, and my picture-perfect life had unraveled in the past six months. But finally, perhaps, I would discover why my father had left. "Is it another woman?" I asked. "No," she responded in a peculiar way. Laughingly I retorted, "Another man?" … and there was silence.
Fifteen years later, that silence still rings in my ears. It is a silence that has changed my life forever, a silence broken only to a few close friends and family members, for fear of what people might think if they knew the truth. When Christians talk about having loved ones who are homosexuals, the conversation nearly always focuses on either what we can do to help that person adjust to their new life, or how we can bring them back into the Kingdom. But few have paid attention to those who are left behind.
After my parents' separation, my sister and I began spending every other weekend with my father in the city. He shared a condo with a man who had also left his wife and children. The man's two daughters seemed to have adjusted to the situation. It was as if everything was "normal." But I felt anything but normal. It was as if I had fallen asleep and woken up in a bizarre alternate reality. At the end of the day, my father would not walk into the bedroom with my mom, like he had done only weeks before. Instead, he headed off to bed with a man I had met only days before.
To be honest, those weekends were a nightmare for my sister and me. Not only were we forced to leave our mother and friends, but we were placed in a culture we knew nothing about. It was not just a foreign culture, it was one which was anathema to the community in which ...
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