As my father he knew how to reconcile his love for God and for his gay son

Article by Timothy White* published on the New York Times website (USA) on February 5, 2025, freely translated by Diego de La Tenda di Gionata. First part

My father is called Bill White **. For decades it was an evangelical shepherd. Before I was born, he wrote a letter to my future wife.

He didn't know something that we both know now: that I am gay. When I got out almost 16 years later, this fact shaken his faith and fractured his Church. But he never separated us. I wanted to understand how. So I read his diaries.

Dear Daughter Our son Timothy is about to be born, if God wants, in less than two months. And while I was praying for him, I started praying for you. So I wanted to write you a letter to deliver you on your wedding day.

Obviously I don't know you. I don't know your name and I don't even know if you've already been born. In fact, I don't even know if it will ever happen that you become our daughter. But I hope so. While we prayed for our son, we also prayed for his future wife.

I pray that you can arrive on this healthy land, and that over the years God touches your heart and attracts you to Christ. Please know deeply, that you are deeply precious and loved by God. Please love Jesus more than our Son loves, even if we already love our Son more than the whole world.

I have prayed several times for your family. God will watch over your family. Please somehow through your family you can grow and have a profound experience of grace, that in the depths of your soul you can feel careful despite your mistakes, embraced despite your weaknesses, loved despite your selfishness.

You are a dear woman, dear to me and Katy. We love you. We can't wait to meet you. We will pray for you over the years. And we will pray that our son is good with you and that you love you deeply, you need you with joy and enjoy you immensely.

With great love and affection and many prayers, Bill

How my father reconciled his God and his gay son

Some of my first memories are from my father who prayed for me at night. Half asleep, seeing him standing on the threshold of my door, I felt a profound sense of comfort in knowing that both my earthly father and the celestial father watched over me; The prayers murmured by my father for me and for what I would become they seemed like a window on my future. One of those prayers, murmured every night and written on a ticket near the door if he forgot it, was for my future wife.

My father was a self -proclaimed "fanatic of Jesus" of the 90s who became an evangelical shepherd in a church that placed himself in the modest band of the "mega". He believed that homosexuality was a serious sin and had no idea what to do when his brother did coming out.

And then I did coming out With him and my mother, Katy. This fact has shocked their lives and the life of our neighborhood church in southern California. My father pushed into a tortuous spiritual, emotional and interpersonal journey to a high risk that has lasted years. Now he is still a shepherd, but he is also the most impressive supporter of the LGBTQ inclusion in the church he has ever met.

But the transformation process that my father had gone through was a mystery for me. What had allowed him to change his mind so radically on something for which he had once had such strong feelings, a process that seems to happen so rarely on less important topics, let alone such a personal one? How had your father and son reconciled without seeming to compromise any of the two relationships?

It is necessary that my father is a prolific diary writer. I remember that every Saturday morning he cut some time to write, adding letters, photos and text messages to integrate his words. I recently had the opportunity to read some diaries that my father shared with me - and that now I share here - to better understand how it passed from where it was where it is now.

What I found in my father's diaries made me understand how difficult it is for people to really change my mind, what it means to confront the limits of their faith, risk their career, their position in the community, even questioning the foundations of all that was believed true.

Chapter one

Coming out

From my father's diary. May 25, 2013. Timothy is 13 years old.

On Wednesday Timothy told me he would like to take another walk to Starbucks. I thought he had something important to share, if it was he who proposed the walk. So Thursday evening, around 8 pm, we went there on foot, chatting along the way. We took our drinks and, while we started going home, he started a conversation that I will remember for the rest of my life.

He said he had noticed that many guys had friends with whom they could be "best friends" and with whom they could joke and do things as males. He said his problem was that he wanted to try to do some things (games and jokes) that he could have done if he had a group of male friends. We considered together the question for a while and we talked about how he needed space to experience such things and that it was normal and healthy for a young man of his age.

We passed our house and continued to walk. It was clear enough that he had anything else to say, but that he wasn't even sure of what. I asked him if he was wondering if he was attracted to groups of males. He replied: "Maybe a little" or something like that. We wandered around a little more and he said: "At a certain point I wondered if I was gay." I told him that at the beginning of the week I had met a man who asked the same thing at the age of Timothy, but then he understood that he was heterosexual and who eventually married, etc.

I don't know if I have ever made a more painful conversation. I was honored by Timothy's trust towards me. I was encouraged by his sincerity and maturity. I was aware of your presence with us, of the fact that I helped me not to react, not to escape and not to press, punish or judge. Father, thanks because you are with us.

Still, I'm sad as I have never been, I think. Somehow the elaboration of dad's death was a different suffering. There is sadness for my sin and my shame. There is sadness for things like September 11th. But this time it is nothing similar.

My heart is devastated. Last night I told Katy that I feel like someone had crushed my sternum and whipping my heart. Sometimes I think it's a real physical pain in the chest, it hurts so. Maybe in twenty years I will look back and I will feel disdain for my feelings of now and surely they would also do it if they knew it, but I will not hide what is happening in my heart, in my soul and my mind.

I believe that, deeply, I hate homosexuality. I hate it more than anything else in the world. I hate her because sometimes it seems to be stronger than you, God. Yes, that's what I said. It seems that this is the case. I am sure there is a lot of good in the homosexual community, but my experience tells me the opposite: I see insulation, brammother, insecurity. Father, you have to save Timothy from all this. You have to save it.

Will homosexuality take over him, will he remove him from you? Or could he repress her long enough to marry and have children, and then abandon everything to "find" his "true self" in the gay community?

And, if Timothy's orientation continues on the way of homosexuality, how will the Christian community react? Will the hatred, betrayal and insult of your people suffer? I can imagine few things that can remove a person from faith like your Church.

It is extraordinary for me that my father has perceived as so relevant these moments in May 2013 - and it is surprising for me that I asked myself aloud if I were gay, as far as he reports. For what I remember, I was so repressed that I started to understand my sexuality only more than a year and a half later. It was at the end of 2014, lying in my bed in the dark and reciting what I remembered of the prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane, when he asked God to give him another option compared to the crucifixion - "Father, please, remove this chalice from me » - That I finally admitted the truth to myself. I felt scared, alone and confused on how my life and faith would have been after the coming out.

I can warn my father's fears in this initial phase: that I would have lived a life full of suffering and refusal, that I could have moved away forever from the Church. Now it is clear to me that these fears derived in part from a limited mental horizon; He could not imagine the joy and beauty that I could have experienced in the gay community. He simply had never attended enough gay people. But some of his fears came from a deeper belief, beyond simple stereotypes or worries. He feared that something within me could be, according to his words, stronger than God. That this would undermine the fundamental moral rules within him, based on the Gospel, on which he had built his life and his career for decades. And, in some ways, he was not wrong.

From my father's diary. March 14, 2015: Timothy is 15 years old.

Last Sunday Timothy asked to go to Starbucks with me and Katy because he wanted to tell us something. I expected it. I asked Katy if it was ready for what we would have heard.

Timothy took a frappuccino to tiramisu, we were sitting in silence for a minute and then said: «You will probably ask yourself why I made you come here today. Lately I thought about it a lot and I prayed. I have been thinking about it for a long time, now I feel safe and I wanted you you would know it first. I understand that I am gay, I'm sure. Feel free to ask me all the questions you want ». I told him I loved him and he said he had never doubted it. Then we talked to forty -five minutes of how he is, what he is thinking about, how he has come to his conclusions and how he thinks he will come out with the family, with friends and the world.

It was one of the most beautiful conversations I had in my life. Father, thank you for this. Thanks for Timothy's courage in talking to us. We were incredibly honored that he chose to talk to us before with his friends.

I was surprised by how little Timothy was worried. A couple of times he told us to be confident that things will be fine and even being enthusiastic. Incredible, that's not exactly what I expected. He was enthusiastic to show the world that you can be believers and homosexuals. He clearly said that he wants his identity to God to come first of all, which is music for my ears.

Reflecting on that conversation, I warned within me, truly for the first time, the hope that you are orchestrating all these things together for the good and that it actually wants to grow your kingdom through Timothy - he certainly thinks it; And I feel a lot of serenity, trusting that you are at work. I think I also try a certain concern, a little anxiety, because Timothy will face the judgment and the ridicule, both from the right and from the left, and which will suffer many pressures to conform to one side or the other.

And I feel really worried about myself. I know he is selfish and I don't want all this concerns me - in fact, I have not even mentioned this in the conversation with him, because he deserved that he was only talking about him. But the tension in me will increase in an enormous way. When Timothy will come out, everyone wants a piece of me. They will want to take me on their side; They will want to use Timothy and use me. They will seek, perhaps unconsciously but no less pressing, to divide our small church. Father, will you help me?

There have been many difficult moments in my process of coming out. I am grateful that telling my parents was not one of these. Although I knew that there would be significant repercussions for our family and our parish community once those words aloud, I knew, despite everything that my father's immediate answer would be "I love you".

But that conversation of 2015 was not the first time my father had to face the experience of coming out of a loved one.

At the beginning of the 90s, my uncle declared himself gay to my father and the rest of the family. My father said to my uncle that he loved him, but he could not reconcile his faith with the sexual orientation of his brother and their worlds were so different that for years they avoided talking about the topic.

I don't know how much the fact that my uncle has done coming out Before me he influenced what happened after mine coming out. But I believe that for my father he meant that, even if he had deliberately avoided thinking about the relationship between his faith and homosexuality, unconsciously had broken over those he would later perceive as the contradictions of the doctrine of the Church already long before have to do with me. This also meant that he had someone to turn to for advice.

From my father's diary. May 27, 2015

My brother called last night to talk to me. It was one of the most beautiful conversations I have had with him for years. He said that when he reattached the phone after talking to Timothy he cried, because he was so happy to be no longer the only gay person in the family, that the homosexual movement had made so many steps forward to allow someone as Timothy to do Coming Out without problems and because it meant a new season of intimacy with me. It was so happy that Timothy hadn't called him to support, but only to share the news. He was shocked by how much Timothy seems to be doing well in this situation. I shared some of my fears about how far -right or far -left people would try to direct the Timothy path, and he was clearly agreed on the fact that such a turning point would be harmful. He also told me that his partner, when he heard Timothy's news, said: "The fact that Timothy is gay is probably the only thing that could decrease your brother's faith in God and simultaneously increase yours". A insightful man.

*Timothy White works in the field of political communication. While he was at college, he was president of a student organization for Christians LGBTQ+. Attend theCity Church by Long Beachin California.

** Bill White has been a shepherd for twenty-five years and co-bearer of the City Church Long Beach for 12 years. Has co-founded and directs the organizationSmall church big table, which helps religious leaders who are thinking about LGBTQ+questions.

Original text: How My Dad Reconciled His God and his gay are