Going Down

I brought a man home to meet my parents for the first time.

**Beastly’s Note: This post had to be retitled because the original title had the word “f*ggot” in it (asterisk included) and WordPress, along with my social media accounts, did not like that. I proudly identify as a f*ggot, but the new, heavily censored internet does not care about how I and many others identify.**

Last Thanksgiving was the first time I took a boyfriend to the farm to meet my family. The plan came together at the last minute. My boyfriend Jose got his travel dates wrong — his flight to Caracas, his home, was scheduled three days after our school kicked us out of the dorms for winter break. He had nowhere to go.

I said he should come home with me.

As soon as I said it, I knew it would really happen, and it would be the first time I would do this. I had never brought a guy home to meet my parents. When I called my father and told him I was bringing Jose, I presented this idea as a chance for Dad to showcase traditional, red-blooded American Thanksgiving to someone from another country.

"Jose's never experienced an American Thanksgiving," I said — as if all Thanksgivings elsewhere (there were none) were total garbage. "Is this okay?"

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

In truth, Jose had no interest in the holiday, but he did need a place to sleep. We knew he'd have to meet my parents at some point, and this seemed a good time to do it. He knew my history with them. For example, 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 on 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 behavior. My parents would make Jose sleep in the guest room, and I told him this. The night before we drove down would be our last night sleeping together for a few weeks.

The truth is, things have been getting better between me and Dad. I think my absence — the absence of both his children — has softened him as loneliness and a quiet house soften parents. When I graduate from college, I will be radio silence. He knows it, I know it. We don't have a good enough relationship to keep communication going.

The problem is, I have seen my father at his worst too many times — that look of disappointment bordering on disgust. If he stood still, I could mould whatever expression he was making into that horrible face. I'd dim his eyes and redden his skin. I wonder if he still sees the boy I was, the one with skinny legs in an oversized shirt at six or seven, with big eyes and slack wet mouth, grimacing at the camera.

My parents' house has always been beautiful in the fall and I was excited for Jose to see it. We 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. It looked like something out of a storybook.

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

Dad walked out to greet us. "Dad, this is Jose."

"Hey, Jose." Dad shook his hand. Jose had an eyebrow piercing and nose ring, and I saw these for the first time as insurrections.

Dad asked, "How was the drive?"

Jose ignored him. "This place is beautiful! The trees are amazing!" Whenever Jose gets excited, his words barely come together. His English is perfect, but if he speaks too quickly, the words tumble over each other, dip into Spanish, and he has to start again.

Dad took Jose on a tour of the house. Jose loved it, but I was uncomfortable. I was bared, ready for a fight — one that, to my amazement, never happened. It was almost the perfect "take home the boyfriend" story. No tense moments, no slammed doors.

In the house, my mother was warm and bustling and asked loudly if we were hungry. Rebecca, my sister, had been cooking all morning. She stood by the fireplace. "Hey, Jose!" she said, then, "Hey, brother!" This was how she greeted me now: "Hey, brother!"

The cast was here. Other family members arrived, my aunt and cousins. At some point, I pulled Jose aside. "Are you okay?"

"I'm okay. Alex, everyone here is really nice. The only one with an issue is you."

"Me? These people are cruel!"

At that moment, we looked through the window into the kitchen. Dad was handing out slices of pecan pie to everyone.

After we ate, I took Jose on an ATV ride through the woods. Far from the house, we kissed against a tree. I unbuckled his pants and knelt in the dirt. His dick tasted good, the smell of a day on it. It curves to the right. When I suck him off, I have to tilt my head to take it to the back of my throat. We've wanted to do something like this for months, but there were no private outdoor spaces in our college town.

After the blowjob, back at the house, Rebecca asked Jose about his tattoos. He studied illustration at school. He showed my family pictures of his work. I could not tell if they were impressed. He drew the tattoo on his arm — a mason jar filled with flowers. He explained that his sister and mother all had the same tattoo — their family mark of kinship. My sister loved it, but she knew, as I knew, our family would never do something like that. Our parents hated tattoos. More than that, we did not have the necessary stuff among us to make such a publication declaration of love for each other.

The next morning, I drove Jose four hours to the airport so he could catch his flight to Venezuela. He checked his bag, we kissed, and then he was gone. The world normalised. I was alone.

I had done something big — I had brought a man home for a holiday. It felt like a big step in a gay man's life — and it happened without a fight. No thrown luggage. No thrown cans of bug spray. I called it a success. My family was changing. Maybe even maturing. We were coming into something else, something that felt like a step in the direction of forgiveness — if only I could forgive.

On the way to the airport, Jose said I was too harsh with my parents — that I was unwilling to move on from the past. This was true. I was unwilling. I was holding on to things I did not know how to let go of. I did not tell him I believed I would always hold on to these things. These were things that defined me in fundamental ways: Without my anger, what would I be? I was a young man who came of age by way of loathing and rebellion. I knew nothing else.

Parents make mistakes. All parents do. But is a continued, sustained moral condemnation — years of fighting and forced prayers, forced counselling with the pastor, Bible readings before bed — a mistake? More importantly, can all that fervency, that damnation, just switch off? I knew my parents still had their beliefs, hidden behind a thin veil of good behaviour. I did not think their faith had changed or their beliefs had softened, and it was their beliefs, truly, I hated, not them as people. They believed they could love the sinner (me) while hating my sin (a beautiful part of my life — Jose, all my loves). Similarly, I had to love them, the believers, while hating everything they stood for.

Driving back, I found myself ruminating on all this, unsure where to go with it or what degree of peace with them I was willing to make. I drove home through Augusta and made the mistake of stopping at a shopping mall to eat at the food court. I forgot that it was Black Friday, the biggest shopping day in the U.S., and I was immediately trapped in a line of cars snaked around the building. There were few places to park. I realized it would take a long time to get out so I just decided to park and go in.

The mall was wrecked — piles of strewn clothes and screaming kids. In the food court, I watched the crowd. Most were families with small children, but scattered throughout were teenagers on break from school. A girl pointed: "Mommy, I wanna see Santa!"

"You shut your fucking mouth!" the woman said — her mother, presumably — from in a store. "Don't you fucking ask me that again!"

Somewhere overhead, Jose was flying through the air on his way to a country I had never been to. He knew the political unrest in Venezuela was getting worse. His parents told him this was likely his last trip home. His family was trying to move to Panama, where it was safer. His sister had already left the country.

What is it like to go home for the last time?

I realised then: I had an easy life. The only violence I knew was of American cops killing Black people and mass shootings — our American violence, which seemed cheaper and more embarrassing than the true-blooded political unrest happening elsewhere. Jose's stories from home were of kidnappings and car bombs. When I heard these stories, I realised I had no idea what was like to live in a place of unrest. I had been sheltered — by whiteness, by my family's wealth, and by the trappings of conservative, upper-class stability. Protest. Despot. What do these words really mean?

When I was little, I loved Black Friday. I loved Christmas, carolling, and all the stuff that comes this time of year. But now I can't think of anything more garishly American than Christmas, a time of unbridled consumerism. As a child, I always had a flicker of scepticism about Santa but loved the rest of it. And even then, I wanted Santa to be real — wanted it so badly, in fact, that many nights I prayed for Santa to be real. In time, I learned my prayers about Santa were offered to someone just as fictitious as a jolly man in a red sleigh.

My parents prayed. I knew this because, before every meal, Dad told everyone to bow their heads for the blessing, which he recited. When my parents pray, they believe someone hears them. As I grew up — as their beliefs turned on me — I realized there was a chasm between believing in something and wanting to believe in it. I could do one but not the other. In the end, I believed almost nothing, no one, but I wanted to believe in everything. But that's not faith.

I wanted to be someone who could speak of faith as something real and supernatural, something that really moves mountains and makes blind men see. But all I found was this: a family, a country, divided.

As I left the shopping mall, I would have given anything to have a magic sleigh. I would have followed Jose south and left behind this American nightmare. I would drop down to his rooftop in Caracas, meet his father and mother, and be removed from any desire to know my parents, absolved of any need to forgive them.

Love, Beastly

Please tip me or support my work on Patreon. Patrons receive special perks.