- Feb 5, 2002
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Much of my life was chaotic. But it wasn’t always so. At home, as a child, before I became exposed to the wider world, I often felt safe and loved. Yet, almost immediately, in school, on the play-yard, at the neighborhood park, I floundered. I was terminally fearful and insecure. In the animal kingdom, I would have been quickly picked-off by an opportunistic predator. My parents protected me. But this became increasingly the duty of my mother and other female members of my family as my dad was preoccupied or too busy with work.
At school, I was the boy who only a few wanted to befriend. I imagined myself as a wayward street urchin cast out into the cold, doomed to always remain an observer of a world that rejected me. As a result, I sometimes clung to anyone who showed me a modicum of warmth and affection. This mentality persisted into my young adulthood when I sought out affirmation and inclusivity in the only place that I perceived as open to me – the gay male community.
In San Francisco, I honestly found friendship, but that comradery often came at a price. Due to my interminable loneliness, and despite the constant threat posed by HIV, it seemed like a reasonable bargain. But, by the end of the 1990s, though the disease was far more manageable and no longer a death sentence, I was looking for a way out; for me, the best possible exit meant death.
In the days leading to my attempted departure from life, I’d spend hours in city parks watching the rare family in San Francisco. I had particularly keen interest in the interaction between fathers and sons. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, this phantasm from my past, from a boyhood that didn’t happen, from a memory of a statue in my dad’s room of a man pressing the Christ-child to his chest, represented my lifelong wound.
Continued below.
Conversion, Coming Home, and Hope in a Time of Chaos
At school, I was the boy who only a few wanted to befriend. I imagined myself as a wayward street urchin cast out into the cold, doomed to always remain an observer of a world that rejected me. As a result, I sometimes clung to anyone who showed me a modicum of warmth and affection. This mentality persisted into my young adulthood when I sought out affirmation and inclusivity in the only place that I perceived as open to me – the gay male community.
In San Francisco, I honestly found friendship, but that comradery often came at a price. Due to my interminable loneliness, and despite the constant threat posed by HIV, it seemed like a reasonable bargain. But, by the end of the 1990s, though the disease was far more manageable and no longer a death sentence, I was looking for a way out; for me, the best possible exit meant death.
In the days leading to my attempted departure from life, I’d spend hours in city parks watching the rare family in San Francisco. I had particularly keen interest in the interaction between fathers and sons. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, this phantasm from my past, from a boyhood that didn’t happen, from a memory of a statue in my dad’s room of a man pressing the Christ-child to his chest, represented my lifelong wound.
Continued below.
Conversion, Coming Home, and Hope in a Time of Chaos
