Mom took me to a doctor and he told me I had ulcers. The next year I began to suffer from excruciating stomach pain that left me unable to eat. Mom took me to a doctor and he told me I had migraines. First there were blinding headaches so intense I’d be curled up on the bathroom floor, hugging the toilet. I hid the secret inside of me but it began to take a toll. The years passed and I never said a word.
To accept the truth was to lose everything I’d ever known and I was afraid of what I would be left with. I needed to believe the lie and continue being the smiling daughter of a godly man. When I was done I logged out of the account, deleted the hacker program and decided to pretend like it had never happened. It took hours, but I read every single email. I was no longer living in a world where some of us were entitled to wag a finger of judgment.
I was sitting in our family room with sunlight streaming through the windows and my childhood artwork decorating the walls, but I felt like a dark part of myself had been exposed. It wasn’t my own deception, but it made my life and my identity feel like a lie. I couldn’t reconcile this information with what I believed to be true about my family. “Gay” was an insult people hurled in the hallways of my middle school - I didn’t realize there were actually men who liked having sex with other men, and I’d never have imagined my father was one of them. Addresses and photos were being exchanged. There were hundreds of emails from men with equally sexual screen names. By the end of the week I’d gathered the passwords for everyone’s email accounts, including several with names like “Porndog” and “Horny69.” Instead, I downloaded a hacker program that secretly logged all encrypted keystrokes on our family computer. Once he finished, I pretended I wanted to get on Instant Messenger. I could hear the telltale sound of the mouse clicking to minimize a screen. Any time I’d walk in while he was on the computer he’d immediately turn to face me. It was the mid-‘90s and the Internet was still something you had to access with dial-up and a shrink-wrapped CD from AOL. That’s why it was strange when he suddenly started paying attention to me. I don’t remember these touching moments, nor do I recall any of the stories about him tossing a football with my brothers in the front yard. I’ve read the books he wrote about my early childhood and wondered who this man was that claimed to have held me on his lap. If we were too loud or demanding, he’d be quick to let us know. “Dad’s had a long day and he’s very tired.” Mom would rush to greet him, tearing off her oven mitts so she could take his briefcase. Most days he would be gone before we woke up and arrive home shortly before dinner. He also served as an elder at our Southern Baptist church while running the PR department of a Fortune 500 company. It was a symptom of feminism and put everyone in jeopardy by enabling women to go back to work.ĭad was equally passionate about promoting family values and lobbied against gay marriage at the state capitol. She had a lot of opinions on how other people should raise their children and had been outraged when our church opened a daycare center. Mom had graduated with a degree in home economics and thought it was cruel when other families allowed their kids to eat dinner in front of the TV. We had the big house in the country, five happy kids, and an American flag flying on the front porch. In the Christian parenting books he authored, we were always the perfect family. This was not the way my father would have written our story. After years of trying, we had finally caught my father soliciting sex from strangers. The camera recorded its own reflection in the dark glass as they waited. They pulled up to him like they were waiting at a stoplight. They sped after him until he stopped just as abruptly as he’d taken off. When he realized it was his two sons in the car, and not the guy who had responded to his personal ad, he hit the gas and his tires screeched as he took off in the opposite direction. Was that something you did when you were meeting a teenager for sex in the alley behind a sporting goods store? They drove closer, unsure of what would happen next.ĭad had sent the time and location for the meet-up, expecting a quickie. I never noticed how dark his windows were tinted, but now it made sense. The video camera focused on Dad’s car in the distance. My brothers started recording as soon as they hit the parking lot.