Roughly 20 years ago when my son was in his mid-20s and young men all over the country were coming out about being gay, my son came to me and said "Sit down Dad, I have something to tell you"
I obediently sat down and wondered if my son was going to tell me that he was gay. I actually had never noticed the issue one way or the other. I certainly had not bothered to learn that he was or wasn’t gay. I had been in the human sexuality field for more than a decade before that point and would not have cared about gay or not gay.
What he told me was a shock. There were many groups for parents who learned that their children were gay but there were no parents groups for people in my situation.
My son told me that he was ‘a romantic’.
My readers must know that I particularly abhor the romantic idea. It is anti-commerce, anti-rational.
To me the romantic era is defined as the period of time from the founding of America through the era of Goethe until the American Civil War.
It is represented by the imagery of objects emerging from a foggy background. The metaphor of this romantic subtlety can only be fully understood by women who are living on a pedestal and who are very sensitive to this precious emergence. That is ‘romantic’ to me.
That is abhorrent to me. I do not believe that the world around us consists of a platonic real world behind it. There is a real world that is incomprehensible and imperceptible to us who have limited comprehension and perceptive mechanisms. But one is not a reflection of the other, it is a sub-section of the other. Certainly, I do not believe artists or faint women have any greater access to the real world. Commerce does.
I was shocked to hear what my son said, but because he is my son and I love him, I accepted this tragic news.