An Unimaginable Life

On Pride, Faith, and the Distance Still to Cover

I am sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee with my husband Steven, on an early summer morning in Fresno. Our daughters are somewhere in the house getting ready for school, one of them calling down the hall to ask what is for breakfast. The ordinary chaos of an ordinary morning.

An unimaginable life.

Every June, as Pride Month arrives, I find myself measuring the distance between this table and the boy I once was — closeted, afraid, certain that the life he was living could not possibly be the life he was meant to live.

For most of my adulthood, I have approached this month with a quiet, accumulating gratitude. Gratitude for the men and women who marched and got beaten and sometimes killed for the right to walk through a city in their own skin. Mourning for the friends my generation lost in the AIDS years. Gratitude for those who survived them, and for the men and women who have since walked into lives the dead never got to live. Gratitude, also, that I have been allowed, against every expectation I once held for myself, to build a beautiful life inside the world their courage made possible.

Pride, properly understood, is less a celebration than a reckoning with distance: a counting of how much ground has been crossed, how much it cost, and how much, against all odds, was made possible.

This year, the counting has been harder.

The country is in a different mood. Things I once thought settled have come unsettled. The work of inclusion, once spoken of as the direction of history itself, has begun to feel contested again — quietly in some places, openly in others. Friends who once spoke easily about who they are have grown more careful with their language. Institutions that staked their public identity on commitments to fairness have, almost overnight, gone silent. Something has shifted, and the change has a familiar weight.

*****

This past March, the Supreme Court sided with a challenge to Colorado’s ban on what its practitioners still call reparative therapy: the practice of attempting to change a person’s sexual orientation through prayer, counseling, and psychological pressure. The decision did not legalize the practice outright. It opened a door that had been quietly closing for years.

Every major medical association in the United States has rejected the practice as harmful, ineffective, and in many cases catastrophic. The American Psychiatric Association has called it dangerous, especially to the young. None of that was enough.

When I read the decision, something moved in me that I had not felt in a long time: not surprise but recognition. I knew it because I had once been there.

*****

Growing up Latino in rural New Mexico, I inherited not just my culture but my faith: Roman Catholicism. The faith was everywhere around me — my grandmother praying the rosary in the dark quiet of the farm, the saints on the shelves, the crucifixes hanging on the wall in most rooms, the sign of the cross I was taught to make before I understood what it meant. My Uncle Buddy, who stood in as my father after my own abandoned us when I was two, instilled it in me as deeply as anyone, seeing to it that I made my first communion and never missed Mass on Sundays.

But my faith was never derived from formality or ceremony alone. It came to me as need. The need for God’s protection from the poverty my mother fought as she struggled to provide for her children alone. And, more urgently, the desperate need to keep her safe and alive. For much of my childhood, I watched her live under the shadow of a lifelong illness that more than once nearly took her. The fear that the person who meant most to me could be taken in an instant became the central fact of my inner life.

I learned to pray by watching my mother pray, by watching her unguarded vulnerability before the God she worshipped. We turned to Him regularly, and I believed with a conviction I cannot overstate that God could not, and would not, fail us. That faith carried me through the morning in a UCLA hospital room when I believed I was saying goodbye to her for the last time before a life-saving surgery. It steadied me through every season for which I had no other foundation.

But the same faith had another face. The God whose grace I could not live without was also the God before whom my emerging self could not stand. What I was beginning to understand about myself was, in the language of the church and the culture around me, an abomination — though as a boy I would not have used that word, or parsed the verses. What I had was something more elemental: a felt knowledge that what I was, if I ever let it be true, would set me on the wrong side of the only judgment that mattered. It did not need to be said.

So I carried two things at once. My faith, which was sustenance. And the fear that the faith itself would one day require me to choose between God and myself — and that I already knew, with the dread of a child who could not bear to be alone, what I would choose. I would choose Him. There was no version of my life in which I could imagine surviving the loss.

That, without quite knowing it, was the bargain I made as a child: God’s love in exchange for myself.

*****

Puberty stripped away the last ambiguity. The feelings I had carried as a child grew, by adolescence, into something I could no longer pretend not to recognize, and the conflict that had been a shadow beneath my faith became its central crisis.

The signs had been there long before I had any way of reading them. The boyhood friendships that mattered most to me were the ones in which I felt something I would not have called desire: a tenderness, an attachment, an unaccountable closeness with another boy that did not match the language of how boys were supposed to feel about each other. It came more and more often. I sensed it at the time without knowing what I was noticing. Only much later would I understand that what felt like the depth of friendship was also the first stirring of who I was.

I had been raised to believe that what I was experiencing was a moral disorder, that God’s love was real but His judgment was also real, and, above all, that my faith was the thing that would hold me through everything. Now my faith was the very instrument that told me I could not be what I was. The contradiction was not abstract. It lived in my body, and I had nowhere to put it.

So I did what a frightened young man with a deep religious imagination does. I prayed. I read scripture obsessively, searching for any verse that might release me from the bargain, and found instead the ones that confirmed it. I read Paul’s account of the thorn in his flesh and decided my desires must be the thorn — placed in me to keep me weak and humble and forever in need of God’s grace. I read about Jacob wrestling the angel through the night, until the angel touched him in the socket of his hip and broke him into surrender, and I decided my struggle was the same, and that the breaking would have to come before grace could find me.

But the praying was only half of it. The other half was the life I built on top of the silence. For the better part of a decade, I lived a version of myself I could show to everyone. I dated my girlfriend through high school and college, telling myself, with real effort, that this was the path I was meant to walk. But my true feelings were never far from the surface. I didn’t want to act on them, but they were always there.

At Harvard there was a house down on the Charles — Adams House, rumored to be where the artists and the gay students lived — and on weekend nights I would find myself wandering toward it, hoping to stumble into a party, some gathering of people like me. I never found them. Only the wind coming cold off the river, and a loneliness as deep as any I have ever known.

After college, while working in Washington, D.C., I dated other women. I poured everything else into work, because work was the one place the question could not follow me. I happened to rent the basement apartment of a professor’s house in Dupont Circle, the heart of gay life in the city. Above me and all around me were men and women living openly, without apology. They lived the very life I could not let myself imagine as mine. I would pass them on the street and feel something rise in me that I could meet only with fear.

I did not see freedom in them. I saw the edge of a cliff.

What I could not see was that I had been building, year by year, the kind of architecture that is destined to collapse — a structure of prayer and performance and work, raised over a foundation I had never been willing to look at.

In the fall of 1995, I started law school at Stanford, and the architecture began to give way. The depression came first, the way storms approach. Then the panic attacks. Then a darkness I had no map for.

*****

The collapse came in the summer after my first year. I had taken a job at a firm in Fresno, where my mother and family were then living, telling myself that a season at home might steady me.

I lasted three days.

On a Thursday afternoon, in the middle of an ordinary assignment, the panic that had been moving through me for years found a foothold and rose. I drove myself home at five or ten miles an hour, both hands locked on the wheel, certain only that I could not crash the car and could not yet face whatever was waiting for me at home. I stripped off my clothes and left them where they fell. I climbed into bed and did not get out again for almost three weeks.

I had been, for most of my life, the strong one — the rock in my mother’s house, the boy who carried what could not be carried. Now the curtains stayed drawn. I slept in an antique bed my mother had bought years before at an estate sale, part of a bedroom set she loved for its elegance. She brought food in and, hours later, took it away again. I do not remember what we said in those weeks, only that her voice had grown careful in a way it had not been before, the way you handle something you are afraid might break.

I had no language for what I was feeling. For the first and only time in my life, I thought about whether I wanted to keep living.

One afternoon my mother came in and sat at the foot of my bed. She put her hand on mine. She told me she had been racking her brain trying to imagine what could be so wrong that I would not tell her. She tried to joke — what was it, had I killed somebody? — and then her voice softened, and she said the words I would remember for the rest of my life.

Mijo, there is nothing you could ever say to me that would make me stop loving you. There is nothing you could ever do. There is nothing you could tell me about who you are or who you love that would change how I feel about you.

I knew, in the instant she said it, that she had already understood — had figured out, in whatever way mothers figure such things out, what had been hidden behind all the years of my striving. The words were not a guess. They were a key, and she had brought it herself, knowing where the lock was.

I broke open. I cried as I had not cried since I was a small child. She cried with me. And I told her, finally, in language I had never used aloud, what I had been carrying.

I want to be honest about what I told her, because it matters for what follows. I did not tell her I was gay and free. I told her I was struggling — that I had these feelings, that I did not want them, that I was determined to defeat them, that I needed her to pray for me.

The bargain I had made as a child was still intact. What had broken was not the bargain. What had broken was the silence.

She told me she loved me. She told me God loved me. She held me and told me everything would be all right.

*****

I returned to law school determined to live up to what I had told her. I was going to defeat this thing and find my way back to the version of myself God could love without reservation. The breakthrough in Fresno had given me a witness, but it had not changed what I believed I was. What I needed now, I believed, was the right intervention.

It came as a recommendation from one of my closest friends at law school, a young man of deep Christian faith who knew about my struggle and wanted, in his earnestness, to help. He gave me a book on reparative therapy, the form of conversion practice that wears a pseudo-scientific rather than a purely religious frame. Its central claim was that homosexuality was not an orientation but a developmental wound: a boy’s failure to bond with his father in a critical early window. Reading it, I felt seen in a way scripture never quite managed.

My father had left when I was two. I had grown up mostly surrounded by women. The book told me my desires were not who I was but the symptom of an injury that the right kind of male attention could, in time, repair. The framework was wrong; I understand now that it was part of an industry of harm. But to a young man trying desperately to make sense of himself, it offered something no one else was offering. It offered a story in which I had a future.

As my second year of school came to an end, I prepared to depart Palo Alto for a summer associate position in Los Angeles. My friend told me about a ministry there led by a pastor at a prominent church who had built a program for men like me. The pastor had once lived a gay life, renounced it, reconciled with his wife, raised children, and now counseled other men into the same path. My friend gave me the name and number, and he told me he would be praying for me.

When I arrived in LA, I began calling. The pastor did not answer. I left messages. I emailed. I tried again. Weeks went by, and I could not understand his silence. Here I was, at the end of my rope, reaching for the man who had built his ministry for people like me. Why would he not pick up? Finally he did. He sounded surprised that I had been so persistent. He agreed to meet me at a diner near the church, one evening after work.

I could not tell you the name of that diner, or describe it now if I tried. It was generic and forgettable, one of a hundred interchangeable rooms. I was not taking it in. Every part of me was bent toward the conversation I had waited months to have.

I told the pastor my story — what I had been carrying, what I had been trying, what I needed from him. The relief of finally speaking it aloud to someone who understood the framework was almost physical.

He let me finish. He sat for a long while before he spoke. When he did, his voice had a quietness I had not expected — the quietness of a man who had rehearsed what he was about to say many times in the days before. His hands rested on the table, fingers laced together, his coffee cooling untouched in front of him.

Then he looked across the table at me.

I cannot help you, Michael.

His eyes filled as he told me that he had been certain, for years, that he could. He had lived what he was teaching — left a gay life, reconciled with his wife, raised children, built an ex-gay ministry on the conviction that a man could change with God’s help. But the certainty had not held. The life he had constructed was coming apart. He was leaving his wife. He had come to understand, with a clarity that had cost him everything, that he had not changed. He had only learned to hide more skillfully. And so, he believed, had the men he had counseled.

He had come to think his ministry had done far more damage than good. He was sorry he had ever started it. He said the last words almost in a whisper, looking down at his hands. Then he looked back at me. He said he was telling me this because he wanted to spare me the pain he could already see beginning in my face. He told me to leave. To stop trying to defeat what could not be defeated. To find the courage, in time, to live as I was.

I do not remember exactly what I said. I remember the kindness in his voice. I remember the traffic outside the window, which had not changed. I remember thinking that the man I had pursued for weeks as my last hope was telling me, gently, that there was no last hope.

When we stood to leave, he hugged me. He wished me well. He blessed me, in the way pastors do. Then he was gone.

I drove back to my apartment in a state I do not know how to describe. The story I had used to understand my life for as long as I had been conscious had just been taken apart by the man I had counted on to repair it. What I knew was that the lifeline I had reached for had not merely refused me. It had told me, gently, that it had never been a lifeline at all.

*****

The ensuing months did not resolve into clarity. I returned to school, finished my degree, joined the firm where I had clerked, and began to practice law. To anyone watching, I looked like a young man on a rising trajectory — Stanford Law, a top firm, a bright future.

Inside, I was still compartmentalizing. I dated women. I had clandestine encounters with men that filled me with a shame I could barely carry, then sent me back to Mass the following Sunday determined, again, to be cured. The pastor’s words had shaken what I believed, but I could not yet bring myself to abandon the bargain. I had spent too many years inside it to know how to live without it.

At the time I had a beautiful apartment in Marina del Rey, on Bora Bora Way, directly facing the dock and the boats. The view was gorgeous, especially in the early morning or at dusk when the sun was setting. I have always felt calmest near water. On a still night you could hear the soft, irregular knock of the boats’ rigging against their masts, a faint ringing that carried across the water in the dark. I lived beside that sound and barely heard it.

I was not really living anywhere in those years. I was waiting, though I could not have told you for what.

I was twenty-nine when the darkness came back. It had been creeping in for months, slower this time and more familiar — the same weight, the same constriction in the chest, the same horizon narrowing toward the same place. Then, on the morning of my thirtieth birthday in 1999, something inside me let go.

It was an early spring morning, and the light was beginning to come through the slats in the blinds, falling across the foot of the bed in narrow pale stripes. I lay listening to the bells on the sailboats I had stopped hearing months before. That morning I heard them again — a sound that would become, in retrospect, the sound of my old life ending.

I stared at the ceiling, with tears in my eyes. And I spoke to God the way I had spoken to Him as a child. I told Him I could not do it anymore. That I had tried, in every way I knew, for as long as I had been alive, and I could not. That if He had made me as I was, as scripture said, then He knew what I had carried and what I had asked of myself. I told Him I was done. He could love me or He could leave me. But I would not be a stranger to myself for one more day.

I have not felt His leaving.

What I was given instead, in the years since, is the thing I had been certain I could never have: a life, a love, a family, a rewarding career, and a place in the world. The day I stopped trying to be someone else was the day my real life began.

Soon after, in the tentative early months of my new self, I met Steven. He was an elementary school teacher, two years older, in the middle of his own first steps out of the closet, raised in a faith that mattered to him too. The evening we first sat across from each other at a busy restaurant in Los Angeles, what I felt was not the lightning bolt of star-crossed romance. It was something quieter and more solid: the recognition that here, finally, was a person I could build something true with.

That was twenty-seven years ago.

Across those years, the unimaginable became domestic and routine: school forms, mortgages, aging parents, hospital rooms, funerals, Sunday mornings, bedtime prayers, lunch bags. Steven held the Bible beside me when I was sworn in as Assistant Secretary of Commerce, in an auditorium full of friends at the Hoover Building in Washington. Later we came home to California, and to the harder and holier work of raising two daughters.

Our faith has survived, though it is no longer the faith I was raised in. I am no longer Catholic, nor the fervently religious boy I was, and the God I believe in now is not the God of judgment I was taught to fear. The face I have come to know since is a more loving and inclusive one, closer, I think, to the Jesus of the Gospels than to the God of my childhood. We attend an open and affirming United Church of Christ here in Fresno, where our girls serve as acolytes and have known from their earliest moments that God’s love for our family is not contested.

That is the faith I have tried to give them.

The life that was unimaginable to the boy in Las Cruces, and to the desperate young man in the diner, became, slowly and through a grace I did not know was coming, my ordinary life.

*****

This is the life the Supreme Court decision threatens.

I am not naive enough to believe my own family stands beyond the reach of what is gathering. The Court that has reopened the door to conversion therapy is the same Court that could, before long, revisit Obergefell — the decision that secured the constitutional ground beneath families like mine. Rights I had come to think were settled feel threatened again.

But the threat does not stop at marriage. Conversion therapy is not a euphemism for an old debate. It is a practice that has cost lives. Young people subjected to it attempt suicide at more than twice the rate of their peers. The research has documented it for decades. They are taught that what they are is broken, that their healing depends on becoming someone they cannot become. And when the healing does not arrive, what arrives instead is the certainty that they are beyond saving.

The pastor in the diner knew this. It is why he stopped. The Court has now made it easier for the practice to find its way back to the desperate young men and women who will be told, again, that they can be repaired.

It is them I think about most. The men and women sitting at kitchen tables across this country right now, reading the same news and feeling the same recognition rising in them that I felt — the frame they once thought they had escaped. I especially think about the boys and girls whose names I will never know, sitting on bedroom floors tonight, gay and afraid and Catholic or evangelical or just unlucky in the family they were born into, who will be told by someone they trust that there is a fix for them.

There is no fix.

There is only damage.

*****

The Court’s decision is not arriving on its own. It arrives in the middle of a broader retreat I have watched from a vantage point I did not anticipate occupying — that of a corporate director and chair of a national association of LGBTQ+ corporate directors.

There is a way to measure the retreat. Five years ago, roughly half the companies in the S&P 500 made some mention of their LGBTQ employees and customers in their public filings — the official ledgers by which corporations describe themselves to the world. Today it is barely one in ten.

No announcement accompanied the change. The people themselves did not go anywhere; they are still in the cubicles and the conference rooms, in the corner offices and the boardrooms, doing the work they have always done.

What disappeared was the willingness to count them. The most dangerous form of regression is not always open hostility. Sometimes it is quiet omission.

This is the air a generation of younger LGBTQ professionals is now learning to breathe. I have felt it most acutely in the phone calls. The men who call me are accomplished senior executives — the kind of leaders companies were proudly listing as exemplars of diverse leadership not long ago. They call ostensibly about board readiness. The real question always arrives more slowly.

Should they take the LGBTQ+ affiliations off their LinkedIn profile? Should they remove the resource group they helped found from their résumé? Should they decline a speaking invitation that would publicly identify them? Just for now. Just while things settle.

Each of those calls has gutted me and stayed with me for days. I know what these men are asking, because I once asked a version of the same question. They are asking whether the part of themselves they finally claimed — sometimes after the long, expensive labor of years like the ones I have just described — is now a liability they should learn to hide again. They are asking whether it has become dangerous to be seen at all. They are calling someone they hope will tell them the truth.

I cannot tell them what they wish I could. I cannot tell them the storm is passing, or that an out gay director will not be quietly passed over for an opportunity for which she is in every other way ideal. What I can tell them — what I do tell them — is that the question beneath their question is whether they should walk willingly back into the same closet that once nearly killed them. And I have never met a person who voluntarily left that closet and was not glad to have done so.

*****

The pastor in the diner stays with me.

When he chose against every interest he had and told me the truth about what he had been teaching, he gave me a model I have spent the years since trying to live up to. He had spent a career inside a doctrine that cost him his marriage and the integrity of his ministry, and at the end he found the courage to say to one nervous young man across a vinyl booth: I cannot help you, and I will not, because what I have been doing is wrong.

That moment changed my life. The clarity of his honesty did more for me than all the years of striving that preceded it.

If anything is owed in a moment like this one, it is that kind of clarity: to say plainly that the practice the Court has helped restore is harmful; that the men and women being asked to disappear from their own résumés are being asked to do something corrosive; and that the silence in boardrooms and statehouses and university offices is not neutrality: it is permission.

The cost of saying so is real. The cost of not saying it is greater. That is what I am taking stock of this Pride Month. Not only the distance traveled. Also the distance still to cover.

*****

At the kitchen table, another morning is ending. Steven is gathering keys and lunch bags. The girls are negotiating something that will not survive the drive to school. There are no sailboats in Fresno, no ringing bells

in the dark; the morning here has its own sound, and after all these years I have learned to hear it.

My children do not yet know what price was paid for the ordinariness of the lives they live inside, or that there are people at work in this country trying to make lives like ours unimaginable again.

Someday I will tell them — about the diner, and the bargain, and the boy I was, and my mother, the grandmother they never knew, who once sat at the foot of the antique bed that now sits in our guest room and brought the key to a lock she had already found.

The unimaginable life, it turns out, is not finished being built.