Remembering Brad: On the Loss of a Son to AIDS (2 page)

In the process of a losing confrontation with overwhelming forces, the tragic figure achieves impressive stature, a stance that compels admiration. It may be manifest in courage, tenacity, or integrity, in philosophical insight or moral vision. However it is revealed, we know we are in the presence of someone extraordinary. For this reason, in an age when the word “hero” makes us uncomfortable, we nevertheless accept the logically-consistent phrase “tragic hero.” Ultimately, tragedy may not clarify the great enigmas or diminish the uncertainties of life, but it assures us there are some of our kind whose existential response to those terrible dilemmas can be awe-inspiring.

It follows that tragedy cannot occur instantly, in a vacuum. It requires a context of choice and response, an opportunity for human stature to develop in the face of extreme opposition. Life-taking accidents, so often casually misnamed as tragic, mostly lack such context.

I review here these commonplaces concerning tragedy because they seem particularly relevant to events I have recently witnessed. I rehearse them because their humanistic perspective helps me find affirmative dimension in a matter otherwise simply devastating. The matter which provokes these reflections is the death of my oldest son, Brad, on December 5, 1986, from AIDS.

It is not easy to lose a son. Francis Bacon observed that when we marry and have children, we give hostages to fortune. Few people really know this when they set up in the business of parenting. In our time, we expect our children to outlive us. We expect them to realize the potential of a full life. We expect them to go farther, to be happier than we. And so whatever the cause of an early death, no parent finds it easy to reconcile. Among the losses that humans sustain, this surely is one of the most significant. Yet that in itself does not make such loss tragic.

Brad was twenty-eight years old at the time of his death. After high school, he spent two years at university studies (in Pocatello and Salt Lake City), dropped out to move to Los Angeles, and returned after four years to continue work in Logan, Utah, toward a degree. At the end of his second year at Utah State University, he came home to Pocatello for the summer to help us construct a new residence. But the AIDS virus had begun its deadly work, and so it was not carpentry but confrontation with disease that would engage him immediately and for the remaining year and a half of his life.

On the surface these facts do not allow us to call Brad’s experience tragic, for they tell us nothing about the contexts that evoked choice and action, without which the question of tragedy is moot. I want now to write about those contexts. I want now to trace the complex threads of his life, to remember how he responded as that complicated fabric was being woven.

Among the forces that shaped Brad’s life, two stand out prominently. First, he was born to Mormon parents who reared him strictly according to the moral vision of that religion. Second, he was born homosexual. To understand his choices and their outcome, one must understand how these forces came into conflict and ultimately how for him in his standing place they were irreconcilable.

Brad’s Mormon roots on both sides of the family go back well over a century. Up until 1950 virtually all members of the extended family branches lived in Utah and Idaho. All of Brad’s aunts and uncles and their spouses, all of his great-aunts and -uncles and their spouses (save one), and all of his grandparents and great-grandparents were members of the faith. Even today there are no more than a handful of non-Mormons in the extended families.

My wife Sandra and I grew up in orthodox Mormon homes in a southern Idaho town where 85 percent of the population were Mormon. We went to church regularly, participating in a religious community whose outlook and values and political power dominated all aspects of local life. Though we lived in Idaho, just across the state line from Utah, our cultural, commercial, and media connections, directed southward to Salt Lake City, had an unquestionable Mormon slant. After I served a thirty-month proselyting mission as a young man in Denmark during the mid-1950s, Sandra and I were married in the Logan LDS temple.

Under the influence of this religious and local cultural background, we reared four sons, participating regularly as a family in Latter-day Saint wards and stakes where we lived. Eventually three of our sons filled foreign proselyting missions for the church, an indication that Mormon theology and practice were strong forces in their lives.

There was, to be sure, something of a liberal interpretation of Mormon thought and culture in our home. My education in the humanities and work as a university professor made me doctrinally unorthodox in the eyes of some, and Sandra’s evolution as an artist and her moderate feminist persuasions similarly widened her view of our Mormon heritage. But for both of us these developments were gradual and did not conflict, in our eyes at least, with those aspects of Mormon thought we regarded as valuable in our sons’ upbringing.

This was the family ground in which Brad grew up.

As students of American religion know, Mormons are Christians but with several important doctrinal differences from the Christian mainstream. Orthodox Mormons assert that Christ’s original church disappeared after several centuries of apostasy, that the legitimate priesthood of God was withdrawn from the earth as a result, that through the prophet Joseph Smith the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was restored to the earth in 1830 along with indispensable priesthood keys. They consider this the “one true church,” the only repository of the power to perform essential saving ordinances for all humankind. Moreover, Mormons believe that “as man is, God once was; and as God is, man may become.”

I cite these beliefs, albeit superficially, simply to explain the strong insular tendencies of Mormonism and to suggest how powerfully it demands obedience to its doctrines and conformity with its lifestyle; how powerfully it demands commitment to building the kingdom of God; how powerfully it prescribes self-discipline and self-improvement within its parameters.

To grow up a Latter-day Saint is similar in some ways to growing up Catholic or Jew. Like these sister religions, Mormonism loads substantial guilt onto those who acknowledge its authority but do not, for whatever reason, conform to its ideology. Structured communal practices reinforce these pressures. To the extent that one allows it to do so, Mormonism absorbs one’s time and attention, claiming to have answers for virtually all of life’s great questions, and programs for addressing virtually all spiritual and social needs.

To be raised Mormon is to be subjected to a formidable process of indoctrination. Sunday school, Primary, Aaronic Priesthood activity, daily seminary instruction during high school years, a variety of special worship services and youth conferences: all this teaching machinery, insisting on the uniqueness of Mormon identity and its accompanying responsibilities, works on the minds and develops loyalties in young Latter-day Saints. They are taught to regard themselves proudly as “a peculiar people.” It is not surprising then that many of them are characterized by moral earnestness.

Latter-day Saints stress the importance of strong families. There is no place in the highest heaven for singles, members are told. It is taken for granted that young people will eventually marry and found families of their own.

If a Mormon youth has keen moral sensibilities to start with, all of this intense environment and training can accumulate in a pretty heavy load of baggage.

Take a boy like Brad, naturally sensitive, respectful of his parents. Let him grow up in a loving home, which makes him want to reciprocate the love and loyalty he feels there. Let him have a full dose of church instruction from its varied sources, though such teaching occasionally rubs against the grain of his common sense. Give him a peer group of Mormon friends who, during the emotionally vulnerable teen years, are daily subjected to highly orthodox seminary instruction. Let him in that environment develop strong peer group loyalties. Then watch to see what develops for that powerfully conditioned youth when an element of inescapable, shocking nonconformity enters the equation.

Brad was twenty when he told us that he was gay. This announcement caught me by surprise and left me dubious, first of all because his strong-willed temperament and his broad-shouldered physique hardly fit the common stereotype. But there was a second and even more compelling reason for me to deny the validity of his assertion: I accepted the prevailing view of the church that homosexuality is a perverse “choice” of lifestyle, an impulse that can be overcome. With sufficient time to sort out his experience, surely a decent young man like Brad would not ultimately make such a choice. My son a queer? No. I had known him too long, too well to believe he really wanted such an identity. I felt certain that if he were patient he would come to recognize his assumption as fallacious and develop normal heterosexual desire, leading to marriage and a family.

Though I regarded myself at that time as broadminded and tolerant, homosexuality was a phenomenon about which I had powerful biases and little information. I told Brad that he could not have found a posture more difficult for me to accept. His mother was deeply troubled as well. We had not thought it possible that a home like ours could produce a gay son. Had she, she worried, been responsible in some way for his becoming homosexual? For a long time we denied, hoping for change, hoping that some girl, the right girl, would come along and bowl Brad over. Meanwhile, with heavy hearts and confused feelings, we started to study homosexuality, reading, observing, listening to any who we thought could help us sort it all out. It was arduous, slow work, especially since we undertook it in the closet.

But, of course, Brad’s difficulties started long before his twentieth birthday. He had been aware from early years in grade school that his sexual attraction was toward males, and if early on that knowledge was less than fully realized, with his advance into adolescence and a series of unspoken crushes on male athlete friends, he could not ultimately deny the reality of an inclination that was, in the context of his world, unthinkable.

In those late teen years Brad read everything about homosexuality he could get his hands on. He knew, of course, the church’s position, that homosexuality is unnatural and inappropriate (since it does not lead to marriage and family), that homosexual acts are grave sins, that homosexual marriage is a contradiction in terms. He had therefore two culturally acceptable alternatives: live celibately or renounce his mistaken choice and find a way to enter into a faithful heterosexual marriage.

Through his reading Brad became aware of contrary views, namely that homosexual orientation is not chosen, that it likely has a biological basis. This seemed consistent with what he knew of his own feelings. His intellect and his self-respect wanted to accept these assertions. But faced with the church’s moral authority, he was filled with doubt.

Like many young homosexuals, his ego was battered.
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His high school journals reveal poignantly the continuing turmoil he felt as he tried to suppress his feelings and to imitate the social attitudes and dating patterns of his friends. They reveal that he prayed long and fervently that God would help him change, that he promised to do anything necessary to bring about such change.

Only later did we come to understand how difficult his teen years had been, how filled with confusion, conflict, and self-hatred. We did know that frequently he had struggled with nagging bouts of depression which worried us but for which we had no explanation except teenage doldrums. We did not know how deeply alienated he felt from his religion, to which he wanted to be faithful; from his friends, who did not really know him; even from his family, whose expectations for him were not compatible, he was sure, with what he knew he was.

These inner conflicts reached a crisis point when at age nineteen he had to decide whether to serve a two-year proselyting mission. The official position of the Mormon hierarchy is that all young males should accept a mission call. Health permitting, there are ostensibly no really valid excuses for not doing so, and powerful pressures
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institutional, familial, peer
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to help bring this about. It is not easy to say no, but finally that was Brad’s answer. Though he had not, at nineteen, engaged in homosexual relations and thus was presumably worthy in this and other respects, how could he without violating himself represent the church that denied the legitimacy of his deeply-felt identity.

Brad’s first two college years were dominated by tortured internal dialogue. It became explicit in the pages of his journals wherein one can read the blow-by-counterblow of these arguments, his attempts to believe in the theoretical possibility of positive rewards in gay relationships, his simultaneous recognition of the seemingly insupportable cost of such nonconformity. In college, especially after leaving Pocatello, he turned increasingly by inclination and necessity to new friends who helped him see beyond the implicit views of his narrowly-orthodox high school peer group. In those two years he moved a long way, doubtless thrust forward by the cumulative unreleased pressures of his teen years.

When at the end of his sophomore year Brad came out to us, he knew it was a risk. Doubtless he hoped we’d be accepting, or, failing that, perhaps he had faith we would eventually come around. In any case, he had made a courageous decision. He knew there was a truth about himself that he must accept, and that that truth must in some undeniable way shape his life. He needed our support.

I wish we had been able to give it to him immediately, unqualifiedly. We couldn’t. Oh, there was no outward anger, there were no threats of disowning. He knew, I am sure, that we loved him. But we could not say, “Listen to the voice within you, Brad, and follow it. Go with our blessing: find and nourish who you really are.” We couldn’t say it, for we did not trust his inner voice. We were products of the lessons we had learned through life that could not be unlearned overnight. How could we give him license to become something we had been taught to abominate.
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