As a journalist, his job is to report about the truth.
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I stammered as I spoke to his grave. It took a half hour before I could utter a complete sentence as I continued pulling weeds and rearranging the flowers I brought him. “Daddy, I gotta tell you something. I wanted to tell you this for a long time.” In Asian culture, we have been taught not to shame the family. Being gay, I thought, would have brought embarrassment and ridicule.
Coming out seemed so easy for other people, especially today's young. I sometimes wondered how different things would have been had I came out sooner. Perhaps I would have planted roots in a community instead of jumping from job to job, hopscotching from one city to the next.As a journalist, my job is to report the truth. Yet I had been lying all these years, purposely hiding the truth to protect myself. It was an ethical lapse that tortured me.
During one of my melancholy days, I took a drive through Glacier National Park in Montana to help lift my mood. I stared down sheer cliffs as my Subaru lurched up the cliff-hugging Going-to-the-Sun Road. I could feel my car drifting closer to the edge. I felt no inclination to steer back on course. My heart pumped. My nerves jittered to my fingertips. My knees bounced with nervousness. Looks of concern came over my friends’ faces as I tried to tell them. I could not use the word gay, and they wondered why I was in such distress.“That’s a relief,” one friend said. “I thought you were going tell us you had cancer.”
Many months later, I would tell a younger nephew. I recalled how after a football game — he was the star quarterback — he quizzed me about my love life, or the lack thereof. He noted he never saw me introduce any women to the family, that he didn’t know me to have been dating. He wanted to know why.When I told her my secret just months ago, she shrugged. “I kind of figured,” she said.I didn’t know what to expect when I started to share my secret with one of them. I was practiced and calm.
My father loved reading the newspaper, watching the evening news and following politics. How proud he would have been to know that I stood just feet from a U.S. president or that I covered Congress.
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