Was Your Dad In The Closet Too?
"What You Talkin Bout Willis?"
I was just a child when everything I understood about manhood, family, and stability fell apart. My father left our mother after she discovered he was engaged in sexual relationships with men. In a time when such revelations weren’t paraded on prime-time television or celebrated in parades, our world imploded quietly, and painfully. I was born in 1959, and by the time I was four years old, our father destroyed our family.
My mother, now gone from this life, raised seven children alone. There were no GoFundMe campaigns, no government handouts worth mentioning, and certainly no village to help raise us. She bore the weight of betrayal, heartbreak, and responsibility with a strength I didn’t understand as a child. I do now. As a Black family, our mother raised us through the racial tensions of the nation. We settled in Rochester, NY just before the hell of the race riots. No dad to protect us through the chaos that engulfed the city. We were just kids trying to survive in the wreckage of adult choices we never consented to.
Society talks a lot these days about “living your truth.” But what about the collateral damage left behind by that truth? Our abandonment was not the result of race, but sex. In our case, it wasn’t just a divorce. It was a soul-level fracture. As children, while the streets were in chaos, we were thrust into chaos as well. Emotionally, financially, and spiritually, we were left scrambling to rebuild something, anything, resembling security. Of course, I had no understanding of this at the time, and neither did my siblings.
There was confusion, there was shame. There was the silent question nobody wanted to ask out loud: “What kind of man walks away from his family like that?”
No amount of social acceptance, rainbow flags, or philosophical tolerance can erase the fact that our father’s choices left a trail of brokenness behind. And we lived in it every single day.
What we lived through wasn’t rare, even if no one talked about it. The statistics on fatherlessness in America are damning-
Children raised without fathers are 4x more likely to live in poverty.
They’re more likely to struggle academically, battle emotional disorders, and engage in early sexual behavior.
By the 2020s, over 25% of U.S. children lived in single-parent homes, 80% of which are led by mothers.
But what the statistics don’t always capture is the emotional disorientation when the reason for the father’s absence is not death or even dysfunction in the traditional sense, but a double life, a secret identity that crashes through the front door unannounced.
Sociologist Amity Pierce Buxton once called it “The other side of the closet.”
She wrote of families, wives and children, left behind by men who lived as heterosexuals publicly but carried a separate identity privately. The results, divorce. betrayal, confusion, and trauma.
Our mother did not have books like this to read, nor did she have the time.
Nevertheless, we lived it, we experienced her anger, the hurt, and rejection that her marriage to our father came to represent.
I don’t write this out of hate, nor do I write to shame the dead. My father made choices, our mother made sacrifices. We, his children, were left to wrestle with the aftermath. Some of us rose. Some of us struggled. All of us lived in the scars that covered our family.
What I write now is a testimony, not an indictment. A testimony that says:
There is a cost when men abandon their families.
There is a cost when deception replaces integrity.
There is a cost when “identity” becomes more sacred than responsibility.
We paid that price.
One of my brothers spent 37 years in prison.
Another died in prison facing 170+ years.
Pancreatic cancer gave him his freedom from the sentence he was serving.
We all faced trauma that shaped the choices we made growing up. Our father produced five of the seven kids. He never acknowledged responsibility for any of us.
It took years for me to forgive him. I did, many years after his death.
I have no problem sharing publicly because stories like ours are being erased in real time.
Try sharing this in a classroom or college forum today and you’ll be branded intolerant or insensitive. But no one was sensitive to my mother when she stood alone to raise seven children. No one handed her a trophy or paraded her strength across the evening news
Our mother made the following statement to me. “Because you are my children, I had to do it!”
Quietly. Faithfully. Fiercely (I have no idea how our mother did what she did)
I will never be a fan of LGBT+. I have reasons that stretch well beyond my own personal story. However, I will leave the hatred, and the bigotry for someone else. It’s not in me to abuse anyone for the choices they make. I am sharing about some of the consequences that happened to our family.
The statistics I have presented?
Our family endured all of them.
To every mother doing it alone because of this sort of betrayal, your story matters, even when no one’s clapping. I know of a couple of fathers who have had to deal with this sort of issue as well.
We don’t need to demonize people to hold them accountable.
But we also can’t ignore the damage that sexual choices have on the children produced through them.
And to every child raised in the shadow of someone else’s secrets, like we were, you are not invisible, and your pain is not invalid.
Truth may be uncomfortable, but it’s always worth telling.
Now that we have normalized this behavior as a society, I am curious to see what the consequences are over the next one hundred years.
I carry this story not as a grudge.
I did not know, growing up, that our story was not unique. Our father died in 1996. He was HIV positive with cancerous tumors in his upper chest area. I did not attend his funeral. In my mind, I had no reason to be there.