Anger and hate are very expensive. Trust me, I know. You will sit in your father’s house, the same father who wasn’t there for you, for 20 years, and listen to him say, I just don’t know how to live with a fag.
This is expensive. It’s expensive for your ideal of yourself. You want to think of yourself as more than a set of genitals, that wants genitals of the same type.
You will get angry. You will remember telling your father, you have tunnel vision, and, in the end, dad, this will cost you. Then, twenty or thirty years later, forgive — like flipping a switch. Yet, remembering.
You will listen to your father tell you, 20 years later, he doesn’t remember using that word. That word, that destroys everything you think of as yourself, as just another fag. Not a son.
Twenty years later, you will tell your father, you welcome the chance to have a relationship with him, only now, his acknowledgement of you as his son must now be unequivocal.
Anger and hate are very expensive. Sometimes, so expensive, you will and must at least be willing to sacrifice your only remaining parent on the alter of exigency.
Bloodless bigotry is also expensive.
It will cost you your college degree. It will cost you your self respect. It will cost you everything.
But, don’t be gay. Don’t like people of the same plumbing as you, or it will cost you everything, and your dissatisfaction with that lack of self respect will cost you more.
You will stare into the blue eyes of your father, the eyes that are exactly the same as yours, who, twenty years ago, make it impossible for you to realize your dreams, and understand, it’s not about him.
In the end, it has to cost. In the end, it will cost you fear, self loating, and self disrespect.
And then, it will still cost you more.
It will cost you understanding it wasn’t about him, or them, and nobody can make your choices for you, but you. You will understand, that you have to hold the world up, not just for yourself but for everyone who comes in your place.
In the end, you will have to understand, nothing will change unless you make it hurt. And, this hurting has to come without anger. You will arrive in the place of the bloodless bigotry foisted upon you in the first place. You will have to understand a life without mercy, that costs you everything, because your oppressors, although very diffenly minded, arrived at the very same place in a very different way, the way without cost, without blood, without loss, the way of callousness, the way of not understanding and not willing to live and let live.
Then, twenty years later, you will stare into the blue eyes of those who did unto you and hear them say, “I don’t remember. I would never say that”.
This will cost, it will go on costing. We will pay, and pay, and then pay some more. And, you have to balance. You have to listen to the blue eyes of the person who did this to you, and hear him say I don’t remember, I wouldn’t do this, I’m sorry you feel this. You will have to own your anger.
And then you will have to find discipline. You will have to learn to forgive, yet understand the cost.
In the end, you have to forgive, but you have to master fear. The fear of that same loathing and lack of self respect that have been forced upon you for twenty years. Your inner lion.