The company was paying our travel expenses, and tonight we were going to have dinner with Tracey.
Our six wonderful children all seemed so perfect. “I guess we’re pretty lucky.” As I gazed out the window savoring sights I hadn’t seen for 30 years, I thought how lucky we really were. Love, Tracey.” My wife sighed as she collapsed into the plush leather chair. “Tom, look,” Trish said, “these flowers are from Tracey.” She was holding a mixed bouquet sent by our daughter, with a card that read: “Welcome to San Francisco. It had been a long and tiring trip from Michigan. My wife, Trish, and I had just arrived at our room in the Mark Hopkins Hotel for a business conference. It was a sunny afternoon in San Francisco. The pills went down easily, and he lay down on the bed to die. Just take that bottle of prescription pain killers. Then Mark went to the window and gazed at the gray blur of the winter storm. The wind blows too hard for the plows to clear the roads. "All that you need is wine and good company. I try to see through it at my paper and pen. He picked up his pen and wrote: The fog thickens. So Mark sat down at the small table at the end of his bed. Suicide, he had decided, would be less painful to his family than revealing to them who he really was. But he knew he was gay, and he knew being gay was an abomination. The only way to confront this demon was to end it all. And while it frightened him - having considered it for quite a long time - he also knew how he could fix it. So on this Saturday morning Mark realized nothing really mattered anymore. But it wasn’t a problem he could talk about, not to family, not to friends. He didn’t think it was his fault he wondered if God had made him that way. His anguish - realizing that he was attracted to some of the young men around him and the conviction that those feelings would disgust people - fed his terrible feeling of isolation and left him feeling numb. Mark also had thought college would bring people into his life who wanted a good educational experience, people with whom he could be open and find companionship. He may have made a mistake going to school so far north and so far from home, but he had chosen this school in northern Michigan because he loved the natural environment of the north country where he could ski, hike in the woods and enjoy the serenity of this sparsely populated place. It was Saturday morning and the bitter cold bleakness outside matched his mood. Mark gazed out the small window of his dorm room. It was one essay in the magazine’s 25-page exploration of a subject that has evolved since that publication, while revealing and examining important issues that endure to this day. Editor’s Note: This piece was written 17 years ago, by a father learning to accept his son’s homosexuality with honesty and love.