Son of God

As he continued with his imaginary conversation with the eulogists, Gabe thought, "Since you people insist on putting my father on a pedestal, I’d like to tell you about the other time my father was decorated. This incident comes closer to home than the one involving the drug dealer and his family. My father and several police officers arrived at a Greenwich Village brownstone in response to a 911 call. A man had been beating his boyfriend, apparently with no intention of stopping. Before it would have been too late for the victim to do anything, he locked himself inside the bedroom and made the emergency call to the police. Fortunately for the victim, the police arrived in time and the assailant was arrested. For weeks following this incident, my father ranted incessantly about ‘fags.’ Why you people are glorifying such a bigot is totally beyond me."

The reason Gabe emphasized the second incident, as coming "closer to home" is that he was reaching a point in his life where he could no longer repress his true sexual urges. Gabriel Razzetti knew he had and has a sexual preference for his fellow men but he never knew how to accept that truth, let alone integrate it into a functional part of his life. Once his father died, Gabe was finding it increasingly difficult to robotically shut off his feelings.

Subconsciously, Gabe first began to acknowledge his sexuality by admitting his father’s visceral homophobia. Since Gabe didn’t think of himself as "gay," he was very far from seeing a link between his own sexuality and his father’s primal rejection of it. As Gabe continued to angrily react to the plethora of accolades bestowed upon his late father, he thought, "My asshole father’s homophobia – especially the acts of brutality it would spawn – would make anyone believe in the existence of the devil. The devil that you people are deifying often used religion and pseudo-science to express a visceral hatred for men who love men. That bastard often recited that famous passage from Leviticus, chapter 18 verse 22. Perhaps you too are familiar with it. It reads, ‘Man shall not lie with man as with woman. It is an abomination.’"

For every eulogy that Gabe heard, he combatively offered, in the sacred silence of his own imagination, a counter-eulogy. He continued, "although he wasn’t even Jewish, my father used Judaism to further justify his hatred of men who love our fellow men. ‘The Talmud,’ he used to preach, ‘even says that if a faggot has sex with another man, he should be stoned to death. So not only is fag sex against God, but anyone who does it should die a horrible death. Even if you don’t take the Lord’s word for it – and of course you should – science will back up God’s will.’"

As the eulogist spoke, Gabe continued to recall one of his father’s many pontifications about homosexuality. As if he was openly arguing with the eulogist, Gabe thought, "Oh yeah? You think Tony Razzetti was a man of integrity? Let me tell you about another one of his bullshit lectures. ‘Think about it,’ my lunatic father said in one of his psychotic sermons on the mount of bullshit. ‘If men and women – and animals for that matter – had sex with animals of the same sex, then we would all become extinct. So ya see? Faggot sex is even against nature.’ Man of integrity," Gabe sardonically thought? As the eulogist looked kindly upon the Razzetti family, Gabe replied with a diplomatically synthetic smile.

Gabe kept dwelling on his father’s homophobia because he was reaching a point where not only was he unable to repress his sexual urges, he also didn’t want to anymore. His father’s funeral served as the setting whereby he took the first step in preliminarily admitting that he wanted to experience sex with another man. Gabe felt relieved that were he to embark into this unknown territory, his father could not, by virtue of his death, call him a "faggot." Gabe sensed that as far as his father’s influence was concerned, he was free. His wife, on the other hand, was another matter entirely. Gabe began to wonder if he could experiment just once, just to see what man to man sex would be like. Maybe the one experience would satisfy his curiosity and his wife would never have to know.

Whereas Gabe was fairly confident that he could successfully keep his inclination from his wife, he was bothered that if he would have man to man sex, then he would be perceived as "gay." He utterly detested that anyone would use that adjective to describe him. Gabe perceived "gay" not simply as being sexually attracted to members of the same gender. Rather, he thought of gay men as flamboyant, deviant or pathological. If Gabe could have sex with another man and not think of it as "gay" sex, then he would give himself permission to have such an experience. To Gabe, gay men were of three varieties: (1) highly shallow and effeminate, (2) engaging in the molestation of young boys or the worse possibility, (3) psychopathic, as in the personality of Jeffrey Dahmer. Gabe wanted to be able to have sex with a fellow man and still think of himself as a man.