My father is gay

 

Last night, I spent several hours talking with my cousin. Real talk. On every topic under the sun. Sex, men, our kids, family. The last one was the hardest one to talk about. There was laughter, gasps and at many times, tears almost splashed down cheeks because of something that was said. I've talked about my mom on here a little bit, but sometimes I feel crazy when I think about my childhood. Sometimes I wonder if I'm mistaken, if things weren't that bad. My cousin saw how things were for me. Not everything, but some of it. That validation brought some measure of closure and healing.

Out of respect for her, I won't tell my cousin's story here. I don't have that right. My cousin had a hard time growing up, and I wasn't the only one to experience these things. Our parents had an extremely hard childhood, and they had few people to balance the abuse of their mother. It took many years until I could feel any kind of compassion for my grandmother. Even as a kid, I had such hatred of her for hurting my mother and twisting her into the kind of parent that I had.

My cousin told me a lot of things which are weighing heavily on me today. One of them concerns my father. My mother was honest to me as a child about my father, once I was old enough to ask the right questions. She never turned me against him or told me lies about him. His behavior turned my love away from him, and he had a renewable supply of lies and bullshit. I knew about the drug use, cheating, prostitution. I thought I knew it all, but I didn't. When I was old enough to know, my mother told me about my father's bisexuality. Well, last night my cousin told me it was less bisexuality and more gay. My parent's relationship ended because he was gay. Everything I always believed about myself, my parents and especially my father, was a lie.

Knowing this about him, I can look back and it's like all these pieces of a bigger puzzle have snapped together and I understand what I'm seeing now. He was disowned by his brother, ostracized by his family. He moved cross country for a new life and every time we spoke, he had a new girlfriend. It explains the frenetic sexual activity and extreme promiscuity. Maybe it even explains the drug abuse. I'm not appalled that he was gay. Who am I to judge? It's the deception that bothers me most of all. My mother's family has a history of gay men marrying women to hide their sexuality then going on to abuse the woman and or the children. I'm sick of it. I watched my mother waste two decades of her life pining for someone who could never love her back. My father has psychological and personality problems that make him a very hard person to love, and yet she did.

I wonder if my conception was a cover for him. If he felt that having another child would prove he was a man to others. Am I bisexual because of some genetic inheritance on his or my mother's behalf? And if I speak with him again, how can I talk to him and not mention any of this? I just feel like it's a huge lie that no one felt I had the right to know, which is fucked up considering how many consequences I had to deal with because of these lies.