The Thanksgiving I Finally Brought My Boyfriend Home

A holiday visit turned into a test of family, faith, and forgiveness.

I’m Alexander Cheves, and this is LOVE, BEASTLY—a blog about sex, feelings, and manhood. It’s written mostly for men—gay, straight, bi, MSM, or just curious—but some readers are women, and some don’t fit into categories. Everyone’s welcome here.

This is one of my more personal essays. Heads up: these can sometimes include explicit content or emotionally triggering subjects.

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Last Thanksgiving, I took my boyfriend to the farm to meet my family—the first time I’ve ever brought a guy home. The entire plan came together at the last minute. Jose got his travel dates wrong—his flight back to Caracas was scheduled three days after our school kicked us out of the dorms for winter break. He had nowhere to go. I told him he should just come home with me.

As soon as I said it, I knew it would really happen. He raised one of his beautiful eyebrows and said, “Really?” He knew all the stories—the fights with Dad, the visits with my pastor, the horrible, horrible coming-out and the years of misery that followed it. He knew I hardly spoke to my parents now.

But I knew they’d be fine. They’d be uncomfortable, but fine—polite and genteel in that Southern way. The Deep South need to entertain guests surpasses even the staunchest religious fervency. When I called Dad and told him I wanted to bring Jose, I presented it as a chance for Dad to showcase the traditional, red-blooded American tradition of Thanksgiving to someone from another country.

"Jose's never experienced an American Thanksgiving," I said—as if all Thanksgivings elsewhere else (there were none) were complete garbage. "Can I bring him?"

"Of course," he said. And that was that. No fight.

In truth, Jose had no interest in the holiday, but he needed a place to sleep. It’d save him three nights in a hotel, which he couldn’t really afford. We knew he'd have to meet my parents at some point, and this seemed as good a time as any to do it.

He knew my history with them—he knew that on Thanksgiving the year before, Dad reiterated his belief that homosexuality was the work of evil spirits, and I threw a suitcase at him from the second floor, followed by a can of bug spray that exploded upon impact somewhere in the kitchen. Jose's presence would keep us from doing that again. Southern people can be trusted to deliver hospitality even when they hate you. Dad would be on his best behaviour. Mom would use her loud, cheery voice—the voice that means, I am trying so hard to be okay with this! My parents would make Jose sleep in the guest room, and I told him this ahead of time. The night before we drove down would be our last night sleeping together for a few weeks.

And the truth was, things seemed to be getting better between me and Dad. I believed my absence—the absence of both his children, now away at university—had softened something in him, as loneliness and a quiet house must soften parents. He knew, perhaps, that when I graduated from college, I would go silent. He knew it, and I knew it. I was already silent: at college, I rarely called home, and when I did, it was only out of obligation, because he was covering a substantial part of my tuition. After I graduated, we both knew that we didn’t have enough of a relationship to keep communication going.

The problem was this: I have seen my father at his worst too many times. I have seen that look of disappointment that borders on disgust. If he stood still, I could mould whatever expression he was making into that face. I could dim his eyes and redden his skin. I wondered if he still saw the boy I once was, the one with skinny legs in an oversized shirt at six or seven years old, with big eyes and a slack, wet mouth, grimacing at the camera.

More than anything, I wanted Jose to see the place where I grew up, the farm that was as much a part of my heart as all the pain that happened on it.

My parents' house was beautiful in the fall, and I was excited for Jose to see it. They built the house when I was in high school in a clearing of hardwood forest on the Ogeechee River. As I drove down the half-mile gravel road through the trees, the house appeared on the hillside, looking, as it does, like something from a storybook.

I parked. Jose squeezed my hand. "We can do this," he said.