The Intolerance of Family: When Your Atheism Turns People Gay?
May 10, 2016
by Alix Jules
“I’m gay,” he said. I smiled and replied with an, “I know.” Yet, I could tell the burden wasn’t lifted. It wouldn’t affect anything in our relationship, but I wasn’t the tear in his eye. He still had to tell his mother. Upon that realization, his apparent fear consumed us both. Her brand of Christian faith would not accept this, and somehow my atheism was going to be at fault.
My cousin’s son Jay was only 13 when he came out to me two summers ago. When a child confides in you such a secret, it conveys an immense amount of trust. I was apprehensively honored. In such a revelation, it opens the child to scrutiny, hurt, insult, and attack. It is when they are both their strongest and their most vulnerable. I wanted to thank him for trusting me, yet, I knew that this would destroy the few remaining relationships I still had with my very religious family. There was no way I wouldn’t bare some of the blame. I was already the immoral atheist on the outskirts, God’s perversion, a lost soul. They sent me what they believed was a good, shy but awkward, Christian boy from Queens, then after a few weeks with me, suddenly he’s gay? Its amazing how your lack of belief becomes the convenient source of all the world’s ills. I’d been inserted into a new dynamic of family intolerance.
His mother and I grew as siblings in an old school Brooklyn tenement, where a shout at the bottom of the stairs would assemble several three-foot Power Rangers. We’re family, so sending our children to vacation with each other seemed innocuous enough. My atheism was a problem for most of my family, but my younger generation seemed less bothered by it. “Send the boy to Alix’s house for the summer, he’ll straighten him right up.” I didn’t realize how literal they were being.
See, I’m one of the more successful men in our brood. I’m also the “manly man.” I’m sometimes an over-opinionated blowhard that conflates grandiosity and volume with manhood. And to my extended family, my mere presence as a Black man in my children’s lives is a sign of good fatherhood, because it challenges the narrative that plays itself out on society’s stage. The expectation that I’d rub off on him, must’ve made sense to them. I digress.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/thegraffitiwall/2016/05/the-intolerance-of-family-when-your-atheism-turns-people-gay/
