SPEAKER_00 0:07

All right, we're getting ready to to do this one. Gotta get my pink and my blue going, right? There we go. Because we're gay, that's why we do pink and blue. And my so welcome. This is um let me see what this is. Um let me see what this is. So um tonight we're gonna do something a little different, but I wanted to, I'm all a little, I'm a little sweaty. You know, I've got me and Arthur, and it's all his fault because Arthur had to go for a walk right before we did this, and so it's all your fault that daddy's all sweaty. Yes, he feels like a little pig. So, at any rate, so we're gonna talk about fathers tonight. As gay men, praise the Lord. I can't wait. And um, I've been thinking about this one for a while today, and I'm just trying to, there we go. I'm gonna step into my, it doesn't have to be a religious moment for anybody, but I'm gonna step into my father role. And my father, you know, I was a high school teacher, and um basically I knew that as a high school teacher, my first role, I always taught the kids that were the most rough around the edges on purpose. Um, I've taught AP English, I've taught, you know, all that. And those are the classes where you go in and everybody's self-motivated, and they all are um they're self-motivated and they're all doing their work, and everything looks real nice and neat. And then when the evaluator comes in, they all look real cute and pretty and they're doing their thing. I taught the kids that had special needs mixed in with um behavior problems, and and then some kids that just English wasn't their best subject, and so essentially um I I wanted the kids that had the most struggles with learning, and I knew that the whole time I was in that high school classroom, that the first role that I played was that of a father. And primarily because many of them were fatherless in so many ways, you know, and fatherless is a broad thing, right? Some were absent, some were working, some were um abusive, some were unkind, you know, you had a broad mix of things with fathers, and some just didn't have a good attachment with their fathers because they were gay, because they were different, and all of that. And so, you know, so essentially it was um I recognize that that's who I was first. Now, and that's contrary to the Georgia public school systems, okay? They they don't recognize that part of me, and that's okay, but that's what kids look to me as, you know, they saw me as father, and that's who I really was to them. And so being a hot old daddy as a gay man makes sense, right? Because I've always been a daddy, so now I'm not a teacher and a um father, I'm a um, I'm a hot daddy, and so even better, you know what I mean? So um, right, all right, Miss Wim is around. So, anyway, so now I'm a hot daddy, which is such a wonderful thing. Um, right, whatever that means. Um, oh my gosh, I got I I took a picture of it because um I I I had to. It it was um this is what happens on TikTok sometimes. I couldn't help it. I had to get this picture. Um, hold on, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna tell you what it said. Um, and hopefully iCloud has updated here and it's in here. We know that. Okay, like go over here. Let's see which one. Oh, here it is, here it is. Ha ha. All right, so this is what happens sometimes on TikTok when you got people that are like from, you know, it doesn't mean that they have to be far away, but they usually are. They're not usually local, you know, it's like somebody on the other side of the world. So here's what it said. And um, I blocked and deleted this nice gentleman, you know, because it's like that's not the role I'm playing. It says, um, hi, handsome daddy. Can I fuck your ass? Please. I'm a great top, but for you, be a bottom. Okay, number one, we're we're getting the grammar wrong here. I've always wanted to teach the kids how to use the F-word prop appropriately. Because here's, I mean, here's what what the heck? Here's where the problem is with that sentence. Hi, handsome daddy. Can I fuck your ass? Please, I'm a great top. Okay, but for you, be a bottom. Well, then you probably should have said you wanted me to fuck your ass. I mean, you don't have this thing set up right. You know what I mean? It's like, so I had to save that. I was like, okay, that's what I get sometimes when you get to the end of these things, and it'd be like, it'd be like, um, go back over here to Grog. Um, it'll be like, you know, you have option to to receive these messages from people. And I'll be like, oh, all right, let's see. You know, it's like, okay, first one, they want me to, they want to be a mail it order bride for me. I'm like, okay, you didn't catch the part where I was gay. Okay, click. Yes, little Arthur. Yes. And he Arthur feels left out because he said that daddy came out, but then he wanted to come out too. Honey, let me just tell you something. Daddy's always known you were gay. It's okay, baby. It's okay. You always like the little boy doggies. It's alright. So daddy's always known. Daddy knew from the beginning. By the way, I just started a book. I'm just giving you like a few announcements here. Um, it's called, and by the way, the name of this podcast is uh Stop Shrinking, Start Rising for Gay Men Who Aren't Rising. And so, and the book that I just started, I titled it after my and I titled it in honor of my brother-in-law. It's called Ador, well, he didn't say adorable. It's called Adorable Abomination. And it's a young adult novel about a gay man who, young gay man who um his first scene is his mother dies, and essentially he walks in right when she's dying. Father is a pastor, so there's gonna be this big conflict between something near and dear to my heart, religion, and being gay. And so we'll have to see how that plays out, but I'm enjoying it. It's my first attempt at fiction, so I'm excited about it. But I called it adorable abomination. So somewhere in this, I'm gonna have to have that adorable abomination come up in there. We'll have to see how I introduced that concept of adorable abomination. So, at any rate, back to my students. Um, you know, so you had a broad variety of kids in the room and various kinds of backgrounds. You know, when it came to family, I could never assume that any kid had the same last name as their, you know, a parent, or that the traditional family structure was what was intact. People were being uh raised by every kind of person, right? I mean, every kind of combination. I didn't mean that sound like judgmental or weird, but every combination. In fact, my son, who my wife and I adopted, is African American, and he was in my 10th grade classroom. He was a perfect example of what I'm talking about. He was raised by drug lords. By the way, he is married today, they're getting ready to have their second baby. Um, they live in, they live near Nashville-ish, and basically um he's a brilliant young man. Um, it's like a child on the way, married to a nurse practitioner. They got a wonderful life. And so, at any rate, at any rate, it didn't start that way. When um he was raised in a drug lord family. When he was eight years old, he had um he witnessed, you know, not directly, but he was in the back of the car when his uncle faced off with another drug lord and was shot and killed. The drug, the the uncle did not go for the weapons that were in the trunk because essentially, if he did that, what that would do was expose my son in the backseat. So he saved his life. And um, he was ritually abused by two uncles. Um, you know, they were trying to make him tough, trying to make him have no emotion. I remember the first time um when my son was in our, you know, in our house, he was just there as a visitor. We invited him to come stay for a week. And my joke is he never left. But um, and that was a good thing. But he first time he ever cried, it was like there was so much shame on his face. I mean, just absolute. I mean, you could see him wanting to crawl under the table. Hey, Cyril, how are you? And um, you know, so he was like so full of shame, and it was painful for him to actually cry. I mean, just awful. And then he had a lot of rage, never towards us. I was never afraid of him or anything like that. But I remember when he would get caught with something, he knew that with my wife and I, you know, were Christians and we were like the religious Christians, you know, not like me, like the one who has deconstructed quite a bit to be a gay Christian, but we were, he knew who we were. And so we had requirements and basic um, you know, things with phones and you know, things like that. Well, he had gotten caught with something and he busted his phone and stomped on it, and then he ran out the door and he promptly punched a tree. And we had a so sidewalk, along the sidewalk in front of our house, and I didn't go over there. That was his space. I sat down over here, and I just said, um, you know, I'm not gonna come over there. I'm here when you want to talk, I'll be sitting right here. And when things settled down and he came over, I basically said something that I said to him many times after that. I said, I don't always know what to say, but I could tell you what's true. See, part of the thing with parents and a lot of the pain that we have growing up, number one, people never apologized, it never seems like they did. That's the painful part of a lot of things. The other part is that they they always had something to say, you know, and so sometimes that was a problem. And I said to him, I don't know what to say. And I said, but I know two things are true. I love you, and I'm not going anywhere. And that became my motto all the way through, you know, through his adoption, through everything. He got recruited to play football at a college, a Christian college up near Chicago. Like things really, really turned around for him. But I mean, he was a brilliant kid. Mom was incarcerated in and out of jail. She was into fraud. Grandma was an alcoholic. So when we when when I first came into our home, he was bopping between a former student of mine and their his girlfriend and their baby, and he was watching their baby and not going to football practice. And my wife and I were like, that ain't gonna work. This kid's future is football, he needs to go to football practice. So we invited him to come for a week. When we got to the end of the, that was in like uh March or May, sorry, when we got ready for school, I said, okay, here's the deal, yo. I'm not gonna go to grandma's house, and I'm not gonna go to this person's house. I'm not gonna be shuffling you around to all these houses. You have to pick a place to be. He said, I just want to be right here. And so I remember um, this is a father-son story, so I can tell this. Um, I remember his special ed um caseworker said something to me, you know. Um Rodney was saying something during lunch about adoption. And and we hadn't we hadn't really talked about it like that. So when it came to lunch that day, I said, here's the thing, we don't have to adopt you because adoption is a big deal, because you're gonna get my name, which now that I'm now that I'm out and the whole world, uh, my whole religious past world is having a real fun time with my name. I'm not so sure my name is all that great, but anyway, I'm an adorable abomination. So, anyway, um, and I said, but we could be your legal guardian, which is totally cool, you know what I mean, and and whatnot, and we can play that out just the way that goes, and you can, you know, because I we weren't gonna force something on him. And when I said something about being adopted and taking on our name, he said, it would be my honor. And we both cried. I said, Okay, well, when would you want that to happen? He said, as soon as we could do it. So we did, we did it as soon as we could do it. I have a picture of him on on we call it the Gotcha Day. We used to celebrate it May 26th every year, and um, he was just lit from ear to ear. I mean, just the smile was so freaking big, it was a crazy. And so, you know, we went into it with our eyes wide open because he was 15 years old when he first came into our house. And so we knew that there were gonna be issues that he was, you know, he'd been used to running the streets. His nickname was Knuckles, he never lost a fight. You know, he was used to being, in his own words, a player, which meant that there were always gonna be issues with girls. And I mean, all kinds of there's a million stories in there, guys, but that's not the purpose of tonight's thing. So, at any rate, I remember at one point feeling so grossly, grossly inadequate because here I am, the you know, super masculine, you know, man, right? I'm not the hyper masculine person. My son is African American and not shy. I'll let you read into that. I felt very white. And I'm not trying to be stereotypical or weird. Let's just say that it was just a reality, okay? He wasn't shy at all. And I said, Oh, oh kiddo, just make sure you don't show your mom that. Like she'll she'll think she's not, she'll think, oh my god, I'll never want to be with my husband again. Not that she wanted to be with him, you know. I mean, I'm not trying to be weird with that either, but I'm being funny, you know, don't show her that. My gosh. So um, but I felt grossly inadequate because I felt like he needed the, you know, basically he needed a black um football dad to kind of pour into him. And I was the white, uncoordinated, overly sensitive, um, not remotely the hyper masculine version of anything. And um I just felt like I didn't have what it took. And I felt like at one point I had this little insight, and I it might have been somebody that said it to me. And they said, Scott, you don't he doesn't need a football dad. And I actually said this to him. I said, I used to think this is what you needed. And he said, But what you just needed was somebody to love you, and I could do that. And my son's the one that coined the phrase, you know, Dad, sometimes your first response is kind of messy. We could push each other's buttons, and I would say something, he would say something, and I would say something. And then one day I asked him, I said, I want you to tell me something that I do that really hurts you. He said, When you walk away, I said, What do you mean? Sometimes when we'd be pushing each other's buttons, I'd be like, whatever, you know, fuck it, like whatever. And I'd walk away. And I was like, okay, I won't walk away again. You know, and I think we we exchanged things that way. I remember he had never asked anybody to forgive him. And one day he really, really hurt my feelings. And his mom, because see, in his family, the protocol for um, you know, relational restoration was we blow up and walk away, and we find our way back in, you know, whenever it's safe-ish. And his mom said to him, You need to ask him to forgive you. You need to ask him to forgive you because you really hurt him. He came in, I had gone to bed early. He jumps on the bed, typical Ronald Rodney style, you know, slams down on the bed, you know, 230 pounds of football player. I I almost levitated, you know, when he did that, and puts his arms around me and said, I am I'm sorry, dad. I love you. And then, of course, we both cried, you know, that's how that goes. And that was the first time he learned what forgiveness was, and that you could do something different than blow up and walk away. And so, my point in part of this story is, you know, when most of us didn't have, a lot of us didn't have good models for dads. I've talked about my own biological father who did baby shaking syndrome, sexual abuse, and physical abuse. Um, not a good man. My stepdad adopted me when I was 10 years old. And he he wasn't necessarily like an overly emotionally present man, but he was somebody who demonstrated in his actions that he was for us and for me. And I remember when I was at Indiana University, I was coming out of the closet. I mean, you know, not just the closet, I was coming out as gay too. Right? And um, and it put me into a tailspin emotionally. I got really depressed because even then, at 18, 19, 20 years old, I wanted a lover. I wanted, I wanted like a like an intimate relationship. And I even at that age, I wasn't the hookup guy. Like I could do it, but it wasn't like my thing. I wanted a boyfriend. And I remember I got really depressed, and I was on amipamine and ametryptaline, these old school tricyclic and antidepressants and whatnot. And I decided to have a few drinks and swallow the whole bottle. Well, a friend of mine down the hall, I wasn't very good at friends. He's like, What did you do? I said, I took this. He said, Oh, it won't bother that shouldn't hurt you. And he took a half of another bottle. I said, That was really stupid. Because now you need to go get your stomach pumped. Because I was, I was, I was taking mine because I was doing it was a form of suicide. And not that I really wanted to die, but I didn't want to live either. You know, that in between place. So um so we call poison control, and I described a friend to me. I said, My friend has taken about this many of these pills. He's drinking this, and it's Is is he gonna be all right? And they said, Well, your friend has about maybe 30 to 40 minutes, and his breathing is going to shut down completely. Do you need an ambulance? And I said, Yes, I'll meet you downstairs. So the friend became me. We both went and got our stomachs pumped that night. My dad, you know, when I talk about my dad, I mean the one who adopted me. So it's very interesting. When my biological, I mean when my dad, the one who adopted me, passed away, the natural grandkids weren't there. Imagine that. Me and my older my older daughters, right? They were not present. It was my mom, my adopted son, and me, the adopted son. We were present when my dad passed away almost three years ago. So it's just crazy how that works. And so, um, at any rate, my dad flew out the next day. I mean, a ticket for the next day is like, you know, that's when back then you paid a thousand dollars for that ticket, and he came to be with me. And I remember telling him then that I thought I was gay or that I had an attraction to men. And he didn't know what to say to me. You know, he I mean, he did the best, he wasn't unaffirming, but he said, Well, just don't determine anything yet, just see what happens, and maybe there'll be a woman that comes into your picture that you actually love and fall in love with, you know, whatever. And you know, he didn't say don't be gay, but he was like, he didn't know what to say. And so, at any rate, it was the things like that that he did that were so powerfully affirming for me, you know. And at towards the end of his life, he would say things to me like, um, I had a stepbrother that was his son that he brought into the marriage, and my mom brought me into the marriage. My stepbrother was there from like fourth to seventh grade, and then he went to go live with his mother, and he was in drugs the rest of his life. Well, I did his as the pastor in the family, I did all the funerals. My stepbrother died at 56 years old. I did his funeral. But my dad, like a day before my stepbrother died, he said. Now, I mean, this is a side thing. I'm always the guy that's gonna tell you that religion doesn't like you as a gay man, but Jesus doesn't have a problem. And there's a program called The Chosen. My parents found faith in Jesus watching that show. Okay, they were not believers. I didn't grow up in this Christian household thing, and so my father at the you know, before my brother died, he said, he asked me because he felt guilty because my brother was in drugs and stayed in drugs forever, you know, and never came around the family. And he's like, Did I do right by him? And I said, Dad, you're a good dad. And you did everything. I mean, he was there every every Monday night when he was in a drug program and they had to drive three hours to get there every Monday night. I mean, he did everything he could, and he was just trying to, he was had tears in his eyes, and he was like, I just want to know that I did everything I could. And he said, I prayed for him today. I said, You did. He said, Because he knew that he was tormented. My brother was the kind of guy that like would get in a motorcycle accident, break all of his bones, but never go to the follow-up appointments and never get the pins out. And he was like HIV positive, hep C bipolar. And so when he would go in the hospital because he had a bone infection, he would have to be on these like very strong antibiotics. He was never a good patient. In fact, the way he died was he had gotten an infection. He came home to his partner and he had a party, and something interacted with his antibiotics, and it blew him up, like you know, what do they call that? Anaphylactic, where you can't breathe, and he died. But the day before that, it was interesting. My dad said, I asked Jesus to take Lance out of his misery. The next day he was gone. I'm not gonna draw any correlations there, I'm not drawing lines there, that's not my goal. But my point was that my dad was got so soft in his later years that he really just wanted to know. In other words, he acknowledged that he didn't do it all right. Most of us with fathers, even with mothers, we don't have the parent that has the kind of humility sometimes to say. And so I learned very early that as a parent, I didn't have to do it all right. I remember when my daughter, my oldest daughter, was like two years old. And we were potty training, and I was frustrated out of my gourd with her. Like I was like, shit. And I took her and I plopped her down on the bed. Now, that was not abusive. I just plopped, okay. But I felt bad because I knew that my anger was a little bit too much. And I looked at her and I said, Sarah Honey, I said, Daddy didn't mean to be angry when he did that. Like, hey, will you forgive me? And she said, Yes, daddy. This is back when she liked me. And she threw her arms around my neck, right? And I learned something then that was a very powerful lesson for me. That you don't have to get it right, you have to make forgiveness your favorite sport. And most of what hurts us as adults with kids, as adults, is when a parent could not own what they did. Okay. Whether it was, you know, I divorced my first wife. Um, my joke about that is she had four kids and I had three, and that's why we got divorced. But I fully anticipated that my daughters would come to me at some time and we stayed involved, we fought for custody, we did all that stuff. But they would legitimately come to me at some point and feel abandoned. Remember, everything is about perception, it's not about what it was intended. And that's a key when it comes to giving grace to someone who's hurt you. It's not about what was intended, it's about what you perceived, okay? Like the example I like to use. If you have two boys growing up in a family, and one is the football player, right? And the other is the creative, the violin player. Dad is a Georgia Bulldogs fan. Dad affirms the one son, goes to every game, is always there, you know, whatever, but doesn't go to his other son's recitals, doesn't understand what to do with this other son. They they they grow up. This one grows up with a huge deficit and that father love thing, like there's a gaping hole there. And part of what and he becomes, as a sensitive young man that he is, he becomes gay and he chooses to live in a gay life because that's who he is, that's his orientation, right? So this one when they get together for the little Christmas meals, right? With that's the meal where we all get together, and you know, like I'm gonna tell you how how Christmas dinners go in dysfunctional families, okay. In dysfunctional families, everybody gets together that never sees each other, okay? And so I would have, you know, an aunt that's sliding down, she's sliding down the cabinets in the kitchen because she's on coiudes. I'd have an uncle in the garage lifting all the wakes because he's on coke, and then but I haven't seen that, but we're all gonna get together, have nice big turkey dinner, you know? And that's the one where your mama prefaces by we get together and lie about how well things are going exactly right. And that's the one where your mama sits you down and says, Now look, and Sally is not, she's off the wagon, so we ain't gonna say nothing about her drinking.

unknown 30:45

Shh.

SPEAKER_00 30:46

Okay, and Bobby Joe, he just got out of prison again. We're not gonna say nothing about the prison, right? And so mama has to give you all the clarifiers about who is is what what because we only get together during that time, right? Right, right, until we get loosened up enough to be honest, and then it all hits the fan. Right, we're not allowed to oh right, because then at dinner it's like the the kid that's five says, Well, what was it like in prison, Bobby? Did you get fucked in the ass? And everybody turns white, and mama like just swallowed her tongue, and dad just shit, literally, like dribbling down his legs. Um and then Bobby Joe's over there, like, um, no, sweetie, I fucked them in the ass. So let's just get the story straight, right? I never got fucked. But yeah, you know, so it's like that's what happens. Like, you're right, the shit hits the fan, especially when you have a dysfunctional family who loves to drink. I was 12 years old. Okay, I'm gonna just give you a little picture. When I was 12, I would go stay with my grandmother and grandfather. And grandpa would give me vodka and orange juice because I was old enough to have a drink. And then grandpa and I, we would go to the country store and we would have a beer and cigarettes because I was old enough to have a drink. So I was there a week before my parents got there. By the time my parents got there, I was fucking trashed. And so I'm running beers out to my uncle, you know, and like making sure everybody has their beer, you know. So when there's alcohol or drugs involved, it changes absolutely everything, right? Like I said, I have one person sliding down the cabinets because she's on quaaludes, he's on coke, he's lifting all the weights out there, and this one over here is drunk and just like waving his Miami Dolphins thing. And I'm like, and I'm laughing at him, and and my mom is looking at me saying, Scotty, don't do it, don't encourage him, don't do it. But I'm like, he he's kind of funny, you know. Like, he's I mean, he's like waving his go dolphins, got the one that that little spongy thing with the finger on it, he's shaking it, you know, and it's like and so the whole thing is like a total shit show. I mean, literally a shit show. So that's what it's like when you have family dinners. So I don't even know why I got into family dinners, but I'm gonna figure that out in a minute. Okay, so in a dysfunctional family, all the rules are caddy wampus. Okay, there's unwritten rules, there's regular rules, there's rules that I don't know are rules until we find out that they're a rule, until I break it. You know, such and such an aunt they call her motor mouth, but you're not allowed to say that. Okay, okay, we won't say that. So kids are in this little precarious situation where they have to figure out what all the rules are, and sometimes the kids don't get it right. And so, oh, I was talking about intentions when you have that boy that played football, and that boy that's how we got on Christmas dinner, they're talking, and he's saying, you know, dad always loved you. He didn't like me at all. Are you kidding? Yeah, he went to every one of your games. And this kid grew up knowing that dad loved him. This one grew up thinking dad didn't want nothing to do with him. And this one remembers. Do you remember? You don't remember, do you? He actually was at your recital. He sat in the back. I remember because he missed my game to go to your recital. He did. But see, dad was not intending to unaffirm this son. The dad was at a loss. Dad had his own issues because of his father. It's a generational thing, okay? And because of that, he didn't know how to affirm and love and bless this one son. And so this son grows up feeling like dad didn't have any regard, and the other son says, You didn't see the book that he always kept under the nightstand, like in the part where you could slide something underneath it. It was like a photo book, and you never saw that, did you? What book? Every one of the newspaper articles that came out about you, every one of the awards that you won playing your violin, like at the county fair, at this and this and this, he saved every single award. He saved all the stuff for me in football too, but he had both of our stuff in there, both of them. He saved everything. And so, again, intention versus perception. Perception is reality when it comes to healing. Okay. It's not about what really happened or what the intention was. Now, I'm not saying there isn't like outright abuse. My biological sexually abusing me at two years old. There's nothing about intention or perception about that. That is what it is. It's hardcore what it is. But I'm saying it's these subtle gray areas that we as gay men and a lot of men, we grow up in these vacuums of affirmation. And we don't always fully know the whole story. Movies are made of this stuff, right? The movies are the ones. One of the best ones was it was like I can only imagine it had Dennis Quaid in it. And it was this father who like beat the shit out of this kid. And then later in life, the father gets cancer. And they have this reconciliation because, see, the way that we get healed is we have to come out of living out of in it, living in reaction to what happened. And the son, who was became you know professional and good in his own right, came out of, he had to come out of this place of living in reaction to this father who had turned his life around. Okay. And something happened at the end. There's always this redemption part of a story like that, right? And then you learn that that man's father was like this. Perception is everything. Five-year-old perception is what's wrong with me that daddy doesn't love me when he walks out. 18, 20, 30-year-old perspective was daddy was a horned dog chasing a skirt. It's the perception of the five-year-old, though, that got carried in the heart. This thing of daddy not loving me. Then when it comes to like our faith, we go over here to the religious camp, and God is hellfire and brimstone. He wants to burn every every one of us at the, you know, burn us all. It compounds our shame. Religious shame is so much more powerful and damaging and hurtful than even just normal shame in families. Religious shame is compounded. Why? Because in religious shame, God is the author of the doing of the abuse. I remember one time my middle daughter came, you know, my daughters came, all three of them, to be with my wife and I for our weekend. And my middle daughter started crying. And I'm like, what's wrong, baby? My shoes hurt my feet. I said, well, they're they're too small. And mommy said she had to pray about getting me shoes. I'm thinking, you gotta be out of your fucking mind. Like, you gotta be out of your fucking mind. And I said, Let me tell you something, sweetheart. Daddy doesn't have to pray about whether you get shoes. See, that's religious abuse, right? Religious abuse comes with the God stamp on it. And that God stamp then distorts our picture of God, which is why the church, you know, definitely doesn't like us, right? But then we get these two things mixed up. We assume that God doesn't like us either. Furthest from the truth, furthest from the truth. It's the church and their religious horseshit system of getting it right and everything that they do with their judgments that become the painful, hurtful thing that happened in people like our life. So I went out that day, my wife and I, with my daughter, and we got three pairs of shoes that pay less. I didn't have a ton of money because I was paying a lot of child support and I was had the kids during the most expensive time. I didn't care. Three pairs of shoes that pay less. And I said, honey, you're gonna take two of these home. Okay, and we're gonna keep one here. But you're gonna take two of these pairs home so you have shoes that fit your feet. And that that was the biggest object lesson for religious abuse that I'd ever seen. I remember my youngest daughter one time going through a divorce, and I remember saying, Sweetie, do you ever feel like you hear God's voice? The only voice I ever hear in my head is my mother's. Ouch. Religious abuse. When the parent who is the Christian who looks good at church but is not good at home, hypocrisy, right? When that parent punishes and puts God's name on it, then who's punishing? God. When that parent, when daddy doesn't win the custody battle or the the thing at court, who's got God on their side? They're the parent. You see what I'm saying? So you grow up with this distortion that but the parent and God are inseparable. Like they're like this, and they can do no wrong. So when you marry this thing of a parent to God, and they use the word the God in the Bible to do what they do to keep you in line. I taught Bible lit in a public school. I saw this one all the time. Where these kids were epistle whipped with the Bible to make them behave. It was behavior management. I literally sat in a service, a youth service, my wife and I, where the youth pastor ended the service for the youth. He said, All right, boys and girls, don't go home and play with your joysticks, boys, and don't play with your lily pads, girls. Did the man just stand up and from a youth group, kids that are 13, 14, who are playing with their joysticks and their lily pads like crazy, and tell them not to masturbate for real? Are you out of your fucking mind? We sat there, like our faces were like, you've got to be kidding. You're trying to regulate whether a kid goes home and masturbates in the bathroom by what you do in youth group? Are you for real? Religious abuse. Religious abuse. And it's this mixed message hypocrisy that becomes one of the most painful things for kids who grow up in religious families. It's it's it's it's very hypocritical. It's a mixed message, okay? So I want to preface what I want to do next by saying that I wanted to actually speak some things over my gay men tonight, and words of affirmation from a father. Okay. It sounds weird, but it might sound a little too Christian y, it might sound a lot of things, but here's what I want you to do with it because here's the thing in adolescent. We're listening for Father's voice. He's what help us helps us in our conscience formation. He helps us separate our identity from mom, letting us know that we're something different. And that's that word of a father, and particularly during adolescence, that really secures our identity. Okay. My violin boy did not have a very secured identity. My football boy felt very affirmed. And his violin boy felt very disconnected from the race of people called men. Okay. He didn't feel like he belonged to the gender race of men. I'm calling it a race, not a race. But and so everybody needs to hear these, like every daughter needs to know that she's the apple of her daddy's eye. We need to hear these words. Many of us grew up in a vacuum where we didn't hear them. So what I want you to do when I do this next part is I'm um I'm gonna say something. All right, here's what I want you to do with it. I want you, it's gonna be in the form of a prayer, but you could take it as a metaphor. I don't care what you do with it. The point that I want you to get from this is I want you to hear me as a dad release a blessing over you as a son, okay? And if you could tune out for a minute the world and just hear the words and let the words sink in. I'm not trying to replace the father, I'm not trying to do any weird reparative therapy, nothing like that. I just want to speak something that's positive over you and tell you who you are. This is what I did with students all day long. My students came in the door believing that they were shit. I had I had a kid that I would get up, let him get up every day and do a monologue on conspiracy theories. And he would punctuate his sentences with in shit. And I would write a big old sentence on the board, put all the commas in, and I'd say, that's a comma, by the way, in shit's not a comma. And I would be teasing him. And after class, I looked him in the face and I said, Are you going to college? Not because college is the end-all be-all, only because for this one reason. He said, No, I'm just gonna go live in the wilderness. I'm gonna get me a camper and live off grid. That's it, it's all I'm made for. Really? Nothing wrong with that. However, you're brilliant. You're like a Bill Gates. You have a mind that thinks in ways that's like you're you're very high IQ, young man, and you're brilliant, and you think in ways that people don't think. Like these are the think tank people. And if you were in a college, they would scoop you up and pull you in to think tanks, and they would like they would help bring out all of this in you. And he got a tear in his eye. He said, Nobody's ever told me that. I was like, Oh, it's true. This is what I did every day. I told them who they were, not who they believed who they were. Example, I would have a lot of my special needs kids. What do you want to do? Because I was a senior teacher. I'm gonna go into welding. Okay, great. You'll make more money than I do. Perfect job. Love that. But you have a 3.8 GPA, so let's just I just want to ask a question. What was the dream? Well, I always wanted to be um, I don't know, a lawyer. Mama said I could argue my way out of a paper box, I could out of a box. And I said, okay, you're not gonna go to school. Why? Because Mama, everybody just tells me I'm just a welder. Nothing wrong with welding. Perfectly, you're gonna make more money than I do welding. Not a problem. I don't have a problem with that. But here was a kid that had a 3.8 GPA, was brilliant, had a learning disability, but the disability wasn't in every subject. It was only in certain places. Like, does that make sense? Most kids that have a disability in high school, they don't they don't have accommodations in every class for that disability because it primarily affects them in processing disorders, or you know, primarily with math, or primarily with reading, whatever. So I'd be looking at these kids and saying, they because of trauma, there was no dream. What does trauma do? It destroys the dream and it destroys innocence. So no longer do we dare to dream about anything. Because we don't expect there to be a dream, because in my house, I was getting the shit beat out of me, and that's not really a dream. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. I'm still on adrenaline rush from all the trauma that I've had. I'm restless as hell, like a cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Every time I hear a sound go off, I jump out of my skin. And so where's the dream? I'm not a clinician, I'm a former pastor. And so, at any rate, so I just want to speak some words of affirmation over you. Okay, and I just want them to sink in because here's what I'm hoping. Take it as a metaphor. I don't care how you take it. Well, here's what I'm hoping. If gay men were about becoming and being fully actualized as men, I believe that for many of us, the dream is still there. And that the divine, God, Buddha, I don't care who you call them, that the divine that's inside of you, that there is something about the dream that still needs to come forth inside of you. I believe that for many of us, because of trauma, even the trauma of being gay, growing up in a heterosexual culture, that because of the trauma that we experienced and the rejection, abandonment, all of that stuff, violence at times, that the innocence in the dream got beat out of us. And we became things, maybe only partially so, of what we could have become. And so I don't care how old you are, whether you're 20, 30, or 110 like me. I look fucking good for 110, though, you gotta admit. And so, see, for 110, look at that. That's what you call a hot daddy there. No wrinkles. 110 years old has had a birthday. Yep, 110. Pretty fucking good. My thing is, I don't care how old you are, there are things that are part of the blueprint. I'm gonna use heaven as a metaphor for your life that are still to be realized. And my hope in this is simply that maybe something gets sparked because something came into your heart, your spirit, your mind that wasn't there before. If that's all we do in this next part, I'm good. Okay. Oh, here we go. All right, we need to block that guy about the butt plugs. Okay, I don't know what it is about butt plugs. Um, it's a thing. Um, all right. All right, so I'm gonna start my my part, and I just want you to listen if you can. If you're in a spot where you can relax, I thank you, Matthew. I don't look a day over 97. That's right. Those haters that think I'm 115, fuck them. All right, all right, so I'm gonna start with this. It's a prayer, but weed out, spit out the bones, and take the part.

unknown 53:08

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 53:10

I stand tonight as one who has received mercy and now chooses to give it. I'm gonna I release over you a father's blessing and a father's blessing over every man that is under, that hears these words that I'm speaking. And I'm gonna speak as a father would speak to a son. So that's how I'm gonna speak first person, okay? So here we go. So I'm just gonna stand in the gap here for a moment and speak as a dad speaks over a kid. I bless every man in your boyhood. I declare over you that you were wanted, you were not a mistake, you carried in you the very image of God in whom you were created from the very first moment. This is going to become particularly relevant as gay men. The parts of you that felt different, tender, or out of place were not deficits. You weren't made wrong. They were the early shape of the man you were becoming. I cancel every word of rejection, shame, or silence that was spoken over you as a boy. Where a father's voice was missing or wounding, I now speak a father's voice and blessing. And I just say, you are a pleasing son. I bless the adolescent and the young man. I declare that your strength that you carry is good. Your desire for connection is good, even with the same sex. Your questions about identity, belonging, and manhood are not rebellion. They are invitations. I break every agreement with the lie that you must perform, that you must be stoic, that you must harden yourself, that you must hide in order to be loved, that you have to be less than who you are in order to be loved. I release in you the courage to be seen. That you that I release the freedom to stand upright in who you are without apology. You are who you are, and you don't need to apologize to anybody. You are not behind, you are not late. You are not behind in this whole thing. And coming out and coming into who you are and finding out who you are, and you're not late. I bless the man in the who is in the middle of your life. I declare over you that you carry a weight inside of you, and it's a holy weight, metaphorically. Your capacity to protect, to provide, to create, and to love is not diminished because of your story. I bless you with the grace to bless your own story, no matter how painful your story was, but to be able to bless your story. I speak fruitfulness over your hands, clarity over your mind, and a steadiness over your emotions. Where loneliness has settled in, even that dread aloneness from separation, separation from love, separation from the blessing. I speak belonging, you actually belong. Where performance has exhausted you because you're performing to get love, to get approval. I speak rest over you and acceptance. You don't have to perform. There's something wrong with you, that you as a gay man are inherently built wrong and made wrong. Where religion has come against you and said things to you about who you were as an abomination and not pleasing to God, I break the power of that lie over you. Religion doesn't like you, but Jesus never had a problem with you. I promise you that. You are not incomplete, you are not disqualified, you are a son who is becoming a father in spirit to others. You don't have to have children, guys, to be a father and to carry the mantle of a father. Many of you carry something in you that mentors, that blesses, that is a leader, that is that that loves kids, that loves people around you. That's all part of that father thing. I bless the older man, not me. Your years are not fading. I'd say that they are deepening. The wisdom you carry is actually needed. The tenderness that has survived inside of you is actually powerful. I break the spirit of invisibility. I didn't know that I was gonna get something from my own thing. I always said I'm gonna live it raw right in front of you. I'm not coming as somebody who's arrived, I'm coming as somebody who's walking hand in hand with you. But this one got me. I break the spirit of invisibility and age-based rejection. I speak over you. See, you can even be a broken father and still bless people. Honor that you have continued purpose, and that some of the best years, I'm gonna declare a biblical metaphor of you, the latter years of your house will be greater than your former, and that you have a purpose to fulfill in the earth, and that you are not done yet, that you have genitive strength, you still have sons to bless, metaphorically, even if they're not your blood. Your life is not finished, it is ripening, and the best of your fathering heart is still yet to be released. You carry something as a gay man that other gay men need to feel and experience, they need to feel the love that you give and the acceptance that you give. Every man needs to feel that. We need to feel it from each other, guys. And now I speak to the deeper wound, the wound the father spoke over Jesus. And I say to you, he said, remember, metaphor, this is my beloved son, whom I'm well pleased. I want to say the same thing to you. That you are, every man that hears this, you're beloved, you're well pleased, I'm well pleased with you. We're not, you don't have to perform, you don't have to be healed completely in order to be a whole man who has something to give. You don't have to get it all right. I release over you that spirit of adoption that is able to apprehend the love of a father. I release over you the healing of the wounds in your heart that happened because of your own fathers. I release over you and speak over you the blessing of the true masculine strength that is both fierce and gentle. I release over you the ability to give and receive affection without fear, without being stoic, without being emotionally disconnected, without being emotionally unavailable. I release over you as a gay man the courage to live openly, to love rightly, and to walk in light. I release over you that you have a destiny, you have a promised future, and that the favor of the universe is on your life. Where there has been an orphan thinking, I bless you with sonship thinking. You're not an orphan. Where there has been isolation, I bless you and impart belonging to you, that you belong. You are part of a greater whole. You are not alone. Where there has been silence from fathers, I impart and release to you the loud, clear voice of a father. And then the rest of this that was parts that I was improvising on. But I want to talk about our bodies for a minute. I want to bless your body. Okay. You are fearfully and wonderfully made. I break off of us as sons. Every lie that the gay community has told us that we're too old, that our bodies aren't perfect. I bless you with the grace of self-acceptance, that you would be able to fully accept yourself and be at home in your own skin. That you would be okay with the parts of your body that you have been alienated from. You would be okay with how you're built and put together, your size, your build, your musculature, your face, everything. That there is something about you that carries the majesty of the one that created you, and that it is beautiful, and you were put together really well. The way you think is good, the way your mind works is good, your sensitivities are good. There's nothing defective or wrong with you in the way that you're wired, your neurodivergence is beautiful. Your ADHD is part of a gift that is inside of you. The way that you think is part of a gift, the way that you dream, the way that you interpret, the way that you intuit, they're all good. They're all good. I bless you with the grace to release yourself from self-contempt. Metaphorically, that's my prayer. That you would be able to release yourself. I break off of all of us the hyper sexualized, hyper masculine lie that our culture has told us. I bless you and the way your body is put together. I'm To go for the thing that we all are thinking about. I bless your genitals. I know that sounds crazy, but I'm just gonna say this. The way you were made is made well. You are the right size, you are the right everything, that the way you were put together is fully adequate and fully okay. And I don't care what the lies of pornography, the lies of gay culture, I don't care what the lies have been. I bless you as a father with the ability to recognize that you are fearfully and wonderfully made, that your body carries a majesty in it, that every erection has majesty of the Creator in it. It's a majestic part of our bodies as men. There's something beautiful about that part of our body that can respond in that way and can be part of loving another man, using all of the parts of our body that we can use our mouth, our hands, our genitals. We can bless another man with our bodies, and our bodies are perfectly made. And I also say, I bless you with the partner if you want that partner that will affirm just that with you. What we need is somebody that fully loves, accepts, and is vulnerable and receives our vulnerability. In the context of that kind of union, and I bless us all if you want it with that kind of union, that you will find the man who is perfectly crafted for you, that blesses you with their body, that blesses you with their vulnerability, that blesses you with the acceptance of your body that says to you, you are fearfully and wonderfully made, and you're everything I've ever wanted in a man. We all need to hear that, guys. This is a cutthroat community at times, hypersexualized, hyper everything. But we all need to know that no matter how we're made, we're made well. And I just break off of us everything that comes into our psyche to damage it that tells us that we're not enough. It's all a lie. You are enough. You are enough, you are enough, and you have everything you need to be a pleasing partner to another man and to experience love, intimacy, vulnerability in all of its forms. So I'll wrap it with that. I just wanted to, I've been, I do this with my students. I wanted to, as a father, just be somebody who could speak some words over you that bless who you are in every stage of your life, and tell you that you are beautiful and you're well put together, and everything about you is right, that you as a gay man are okay and you're right, that you'll be at home in your own body and you'll feel comfortable and unself-conscious as a man. It's a gift to feel that. And that you'll be blessed with the ability to accept yourself and to love yourself rightly, so that you can love others with the same love that you love yourself, that you'll be able to give away everything you've received. So that's my metaphoric, however, you want to receive it, prayer for all of us. We need to be gracious with ourselves and gracious, gracious with each other. We all carry the same wounds. So stop trying to tear each other apart, stop being critical of each other make room in your heart to love someone who isn't the hyper-idealized version of what you've been sold a bill of good up goods of in gay culture and in porn. Let's just be honest. Break free from that. It's not real. It's illusory. Break free from the compulsive need to make sure that I'm beautiful all the time. I'm not saying we don't take care of ourselves, we don't exercise, we don't get into anti-aging products, you know. Every boy loves his jar of stuff we put on our face at night. Now, come on. What I'm saying is let's let go of our obsession with it. Better yet, let's let go of our the lie that we can't be loved unless we are perfectly sculpted humans. Not true. I I'm there, that's a lie that I've believed. You know, you saw me get choked up when I was reading that one part about the age thing and how that really got me, like the age discrimination and the age stuff. It's like it really got me because it's a real pain in my own heart. But it's like I have to let go of the same way you do. You know, for gay men, after 20, we're all old. No, we're not. We are capable of loving and functioning and love and our bodies functioning well into our upper years. Trust me. It's all about context, it's always about context. If the context is hookup culture, then maybe not. If the context is loving relationship and actually being loved by another person, absolutely. Let's model something different for a generation that we don't have to rip each other to shreds. We can actually be gracious with one another and demonstrate what love looks like because it needs to look like something. And we all want it, we all desperately want to be loved and fully loved and accepted and vulnerable with another man. So let's do that with each other, let's be gracious with each other. We have that as a gift. The way that you were wired as a kid growing up that made you different. And he was also brilliant. He put things together. Like all the families of the world that were running things, and he could tie it to all these historical events, and he could tie things together. Like it was like, it was like amazing. I was like, where shit. You transcend race, son. You don't fit like you feel like you fit in either world is because you're made for both. It means you have power and influence among all people. You can speak into a lot of different arenas because of the way that you're made. And I know you have never felt like you you're you're you're at home in any one world, you know, but your difference is not a curse, it's a blessing, and it's really good. He told me later that was the most significant thing I ever told him. Was that his difference was what made him good. I struggled for years with my sensitivity, and feeling like I was too sensitive, cry over this. I thought I was emotionally more wired like a woman on the inside than a man many times. And I shamed myself a lot over that. I really did. I hated the way I was wired. But the thing that we just did, and the thing that I've been able to do for years with my students, and telling them who they really are, that's part of the way that I'm wired. Don't shut down your gift just because people can't receive it. The gift is good. Their inability to receive your gift is not about you, it's about them. And my gift isn't for everybody. My sensitivity and my ability to speak into people's lives and to speak into their heart is not a cup of tea for everybody to have a drink of, and it's okay. It's okay, but I'm not going to shut the what who I am down because somebody doesn't like it or can't handle it, or it's too much for them. Don't shut yours down either. Your difference is what makes you look, nobody can do in the earth what you were created to do. Nobody. You are a unique expression of the divine in the earth, and nobody carries the same cacophony of light and beauty that's inside of you. No one else carries it. Your unique expression is needed in the earth. No one is going to dream and live and be the way you are, and bring the ideas and bring the things to the planet that you bring or bring the things to people and relationships that you bring to your workplace that you bring. Nobody else can take that place. So don't underestimate what you carry. You carry gifts, and you carry artillery, heavenly artillery, to be honest. And you were made with a purpose, and that purpose is a beautiful purpose, and it's meant to be lived out on this planet and beyond. So do not despise who you are, because who you are is the thing that all the rest of us need. So I'll leave you with that. You are fearfully and wonderfully made, and the unique expression that you bring to the planet is one that is needed. We have need of you. So be you. If you want to know what honors God the most, and this is the thing that I've been learning, I put everything on his shoulders for years. And all he ever wanted me to do was live authentically from who I was. When you are being who you are authentically, you are honoring the divine in you and on the planet to its fullest extent. The only thing that God has ever wanted from any of us is to be who you are. As a gay man on this planet, with everything you carry and all the gifts you bring, and things that make you unique, that only you can release and bless on the planet that are yours to do. No one can do your job. All right.