When I was a divorced single mom, with no family help, two little girls, one with special needs, I was very frustrated with a church where the decisions made about how to “help” people like me were made by people who had personally never known or experienced anything at all like what I was going through. And the uncanny thing? They never thought to ask those of us who were there what our life was like, what we truly needed, how they could truly help us. They wanted to make that decision themselves.

That seems to be the sentiment from protracted singles who visit out here, too, as Amir has stated in numerous ways over and over.

Hence why this piece intrigues me. It’s written by a man who has been there, done that, and has the infinite, painful scars to prove it. Do you really want to know the truth about growing up with same-sex parents? Ask someone who did and who is able and willing to tell the truth, despite the consequences.

Despite the consequences? What? There are consequences for telling the truth? Yes … always.

Here are some quotes I found interesting:

“Forty-one years I’d lived, and nobody—least of all gay activists—had wanted me to speak honestly about the complicated gay threads of my life.”

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“Once I was a father, I put aside my own homosexual past and vowed never to divorce my wife or take up with another person, male or female, before I died. I chose that commitment in order to protect my children from dealing with harmful drama, even as they grow up to be adults. When you are a parent, ethical questions revolve around your children and you put away your self-interest . . . forever.”

“… it is a reminder of the burden I carry and a goad to concern myself first and foremost with my children’s needs, not my sexual desires.”

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““But you are conservative.” Yes, I am. How did I get that way? I moved to the right wing because I lived in precisely the kind of anti-normative, marginalized, and oppressed identity environment that the left celebrates: I am a bisexual Latino intellectual, raised by a lesbian, who experienced poverty in the Bronx as a young adult. I’m perceptive enough to notice that liberal social policies don’t actually help people in those conditions. Especially damning is the liberal attitude that we shouldn’t be judgmental about sex. In the Bronx gay world, I cleaned out enough apartments of men who’d died of AIDS to understand that resistance to sexual temptation is central to any kind of humane society. Sex can be hurtful not only because of infectious diseases but also because it leaves us vulnerable and more likely to cling to people who don’t love us, mourn those who leave us, and not know how to escape those who need us but whom we don’t love. The left understands none of that. That’s why I am conservative.”

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