I Am My Father's Son
ferris
family's reaction, at the bottom of the article is some further info. on
how to help others...
Later, Mike
CHARLOTTE OBSERVER
I Am My Father's Son: Cullen Ferguson's older son didn't turn out the
way he expected. Cullen tried to change him, but changed himself.
Charlotte Observer, August 6, 2000
P. O. Box 2138, Charlotte, NC, 28233
(Fax 704-358-5022 ) (E-MAIL: opi...@charlotte.com ) (
http://www.charlotte.com )
I Am My Father's Son
Cullen Ferguson's older son didn't turn out the way he expected. Cullen
tried to change him, but changed himself.
By ELIZABETH LELAND, Staff Writer
Cullen Ferguson cried himself to sleep the night
his oldest son told him he was gay.
He drank himself to sleep for most of the next
six months. When his alarm rang at 4:45 a.m., he would struggle out
of bed, head
pounding, mouth dry. He anchored the morning and noon newscasts for
WSOC-TV (Channel 9) and managed to look professional no matter how hung
over he felt.
He had to guard his reputation as carefully as he combed his hair.
Inside, he struggled with anger and embarrassment, fear and sadness.
He
wanted to change his son Doug. It hurt just to look at him. He
daydreamed about fleeing from Charlotte, from his wife and three
children.
"I felt helpless," Cullen says. "I felt all
alone." He had waited up that night in March 1990 for his two oldest
children,
Doug and Michelle, to come home from spring break at UNC Chapel Hill.
The family would be together again. Cullen had been looking forward to
that.
Doug hadn't planned to tell his parents his
first night home. He confided in Michelle on the drive down and she
didn't want to be the only one who knew his secret.
Doug sat on his parents' king-size bed and
blurted it out: Mom, Dad ... I'm gay.
The words stung. Five years earlier, a
psychiatrist told them Doug was going through a phase when he said he
might be gay. Cullen had felt reassured then. He put aside suspicions
about Doug's effeminate laugh, his awkward attempts at T-ball and
basketball, the teary nights after classmates chased him down and called
him "fag." Doug would marry, raise children, be the son Cullen dreamed
of. A real man.
Cullen cried, one of the few times Doug ever saw
his father cry. His mother, Gwen, cried, too.
Doug stared back, dry-eyed.
"I'd done my crying," Doug says. "I'd done my
agonizing. I'd done my praying. When I was in high school, I had cried
myself to sleep night after night after night and it usually involved a
lot of praying because really the only person I was honest with the
whole time was God. And the prayer usually went something like this:
'Change me. I don't understand why I'm this way. I'll do anything.'
"By the time I told them, I was feeling very
happy. I finally met other people who were gay. Despite the fact I knew
they were going to have a difficult time, I didn't want to be dragged
down into it."
Cullen and Gwen told Doug they loved him. That
would never change. 'I had lost my son'
The next morning, Cullen set up a lawn chair
next to the hammock. This would be the father-to-son talk they
rarely had while Doug was
growing up. Cullen had left most of the talking to Gwen. She was his
go-between with Michelle and Doug and Bo. Cullen hiked and fished and
camped with his children, but he kept away emotionally the way his
father had with him. Men are supposed to be in control, Cullen learned
early on. They're not supposed to show emotion.
As they sat across from each other, Cullen saw a
lot of himself in Doug -- the set of his jaw, the wrinkles around his
eyes when he smiled. Doug stood 6 feet 6, an inch and a half taller than
Cullen. He was as stubborn and proud as his father. It was just as hard
for him to show emotion. He expressed himself best the way his father
did, not in person, but in writing.
Cullen fired questions at Doug: How do you know
you're gay? Who's this guy you're seeing? Aren't you afraid you'll get
AIDS?
If Doug chose that lifestyle, Cullen said, he'd
never again look at him without feeling sad. Cullen begged Doug to hold
off for a couple of weeks so he could find a sexual reorientation
program.
"We're conditioned as parents to think one of
the worst things that could happen is for our children to come to us and
say they're gay," Cullen says. "Gay people run into such ostracism and
negative reactions. There's so much shame associated with it. Our own
denomination considers it sinful. We're programmed to want to have
heterosexual sons who marry and have children.
"I felt that I had lost my son."
He's just rebelling
At Cullen's insistence, Doug saw a psychiatrist
that summer. She was the only professional Cullen found who thought Doug
could change. After two visits, she predicted he would end up with a
woman, he was so romantic.
Doug didn't go back.
The sight of Doug sunning in a skimpy Speedo
bathing suit in the back yard repulsed Cullen. The smell of Doug's
cologne nauseated him. His son -- the Eagle Scout, the straight-A
student at Olympic High, a member of the church handbell choir -- was
primping in the mirror and partying at gay nightclubs until 3 in the
morning. No telling what else he was doing.
Cullen told Gwen he would always love Doug, but
he didn't like him. He wouldn't have Doug's friends over for dinner.
If they didn't accept his friends, Gwen told
Cullen, they'd drive Doug away. Doug was rebelling, she said. He'd
settle down.
Cullen and Gwen had rarely argued in 23 years of
marriage. Now they were shouting.
When Cullen got home from work about 1 p.m., he
would mix his first gin and tonic. He drank six or seven a day. He kept
a gin bottle in the basement and used it to refill the bottle in the
liquor cabinet so Gwen wouldn't notice.
"It was eating me apart," he says. "It wasn't
something I could talk to anybody about. She was accepting it and I
wasn't. I felt Doug was evidence of my failure as a father. I couldn't
reject him, but I didn't have to accept him."
On their 23rd anniversary, Cullen startled Gwen
by confiding that he felt like running away.
'Just something that is'
A couple of days later, he came to Gwen in
tears. He needed help, he told her. He had been drinking way too
much, and that
was making their problems worse. He was going that night to Alcoholics
Anonymous.
Cullen went to AA nearly every night for two
years. A change came over him within a few weeks. He took the group's
prayer to heart: "God grant me serenity to accept those things I cannot
change, courage to change the things I can and wisdom to know the
difference."
"I came to the pretty quick realization that
this was not something that was going to change and it was not something
that should be changed," Cullen says. "It was just something that is.
Considering all the ostracism, who would choose to be gay? It's who Doug
is. He's the same son I always had."
Cullen wrote Doug, then visited him in Chapel
Hill.
"It was like receiving a letter from a stranger," Doug says.
"It was so
different from our last serious conversation -- that conversation about
him never being able to look at me without being sad. He told me how
proud he was of me, how he regretted a lot of things he said. It was
such a shock."
Doug needs to talk
Cullen was interviewed by his own TV station in
January 1992 after Doug wrote a column for the UNC student newspaper
about being gay. Cullen and Gwen joined the board of Time Out Youth, a
support group for gay and lesbian young people. They joined Parents,
Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, and served on the Gay/Lesbian
Task Force of the Clergy Association of Charlotte-Mecklenburg. They
marched in the 1994 Gay Pride Parade in Charlotte.
"I thought ... this is my son and I'm not
ashamed of him," Cullen says. "It was exhilarating. This was our coming
out as a family."
The family had mended.
But Doug was confronting a crisis. He didn't
know how to tell his parents. He asked the Rev. Steve Caddell of South
Mecklenburg Presbyterian Church to tell them. Caddell spoke with Cullen
and Gwen after choir practice one Wednesday night in January 1995. When
they went home, he told them, Doug would be there. Doug needed to tell
them something, but didn't know how.
Doug wants you to know he is HIV positive.
"We had become very close and that made it almost insufferable," Doug
says. "How could I possibly add this to their plate after how great they
had been? I felt extremely, extremely guilty."
That night, they cried together.
"I've grown to understand why some of this
happens, why so many gay young men throw all caution to the wind,"
Cullen says. "They don't have the kind of maturing, dating experiences
that heterosexual kids do in high school. It's all repressed until they
go away and can be true to themselves. Then it's too much all at once.
"Had society had a healthier attitude toward gay
people, he might have dated and had counseling in high school and maybe
he wouldn't be HIV positive today."
'I am my father's son'
In September, father and son will bike in the
275-mile Boston to New York AIDS Ride, helping raise money for health
care for AIDS patients. Those three days will be the longest they've
spent one-on-one since Doug's junior high Boy Scout camping trips.
Afterward, they hope to publish a book about their experiences.
Cullen, 57, trains for the ride on weekends in
Charlotte and Black Mountain, biking as many as 100 miles in a day.
Doug, 29, bikes about seven miles to and from
work in Chicago. He's a lawyer there with the U.S. Department of Health
and Human Services and shares a home with his partner, Chip Howard. He
takes a protease inhibitor and other drugs to fight the HIV virus.
Cullen says: "This whole experience has opened
my eyes to an awful lot of prejudices I grew up with, to a lot of
negative stereotyping. I've had the luxury, I guess you could say, of
having had no choice but to come face to face with what I thought. I
think Doug has sensed that I've grown a lot and changed and opened up,
and he can now trust me to have unconditional love. I hope this AIDS
ride will bring us even closer."
Doug says: "We still have a lot of mending to
do. And a lot of it I attribute to me after I told them I was gay, I
threw up a wall and I was not willing to let that wall down. I rebelled
so much against who I had tried desperately to be as a child. I think I
lost myself for a while. I certainly lost my connection with my family,
deliberately so. Now I'm trying to get that back.
"Dad is reaching out, and it's going to take
some time to get used to it. He's reaching out for a hug like he didn't
do before. He says things he
didn't say before, like how proud he is of his children. While we were
growing up, my father was very, very uncomfortable with intimacy with
his kids. His father was even more distant from him. And I've struggled
with the same intimacy issues. I am my father's son."
• Reach Elizabeth Leland at (704)
358-5074 or eleland@charlotteobse rver.com .
Want to help? To contribute to the AIDS bike
ride, mail your contribution to: Boston to New York AIDS Ride 6, P.O.
Box 380083, Boston, MA 02241-0883. Specify on your check that it's for
Rider No. 195, Cullen Ferguson, or Rider No. 89, Doug Ferguson.