1 Chapter 1

To say that I was the black sheep of the family insinuates that I was at least similar to the rest. I was more of the white goat in the sheep flock. My parents, siblings, aunts, uncle, and everyone else at my private school, were Presbyterian. That’s my mom’s side of the family anyway. My dad was born to Irish Catholic parents, and only “converted” to Presbyterianism to please my mom’s family.

I, however, wound up Pagan. I guess the catalyst for my conversion was when I found Brigit, or perhaps she found me; it’s hard to tell with the Gods sometimes. While looking into my Irish heritage, I came across the story of Saint Brigit, who was based on the Celtic Goddess. The more I read about her and the Tuatha Dé Danann, the Gaelic Celtic pantheon, the more I thought they made better sense than anything my Bible-thumping teachers had taught me.

My family had mixed reactions when I told them. Mom simply said, “Don’t worry, Ethan. I know this phase. I was Buddhist when I was your age!” My aunt Dorothy scoffed at me for believing in outdated superstitious nonsense. My dad shrugged it off and told me he didn’t care much what I did, so long as I stuck to his philosophy of “Be good, do well; Be well, do good.” My mom’s brother Jack congratulated me on thinking for myself.

My aunt Marie, however, almost completely flipped her lid. She shouted at me for an hour about how I was “turning my back on God” and “dooming myself to Hell” and “harming my immortal soul.” Mom didn’t want to antagonize her sister and Dad considered Marie too stubborn to argue with, but at least I had Uncle Jack. If I was the white goat, Jack was the grey ram; he didn’t see the world in absolutes, but he was strong in his conviction that everyone had the right to an opinion.

Paganism wasn’t my only problem. After I got my acceptance letter to Reed College, my dad and I were joking around about all the trouble I was sure to get up to there. He said, “I don’t care how much you drink or smoke or do pot, so long as you don’t come back gay.” My heart shattered. My parents were both fairly liberal compared to the rest of the family, but I had been terrified to come out to them. I had planned to tell them right before I went away to college so they could have some distance and time to get used to it. Now I didn’t know what I was going to do.

Eliza, my older sister, found me crying in my room that night. She was the most laid back and open-minded person I knew, even more so than my older brother Ryan, who was far from a bigot, but who still followed in my parents’ traditional footsteps. I ended up breaking down and telling her everything. She was a bit shocked, since I had done my best to seem as “normal” as possible. However, it wasn’t something I could ignore, and while I was relieved I could confide in Eliza, I was also heartbroken over what Dad had said.

After a few weeks, Eliza convinced me to come out to the family. We started small by telling Ryan. He was speechless, so speechless in fact that he didn’t talk to me for days. He came around eventually. “It’s not like you woke up gay,” he said. “You’re still my moron of a baby brother, although I’m starting to wonder if you’re adopted…” He laughed and I punched him lightly for all the worry he had put me through.

Mom and Dad weren’t so easy. Much like with my Paganism, my mom’s first reaction was, “No you’re not.” It took a five-minute back and forth of me insisting I was and her insisting I wasn’t before she finally accepted I was serious. My dad just got up and walked out of the room. Everything was tense and awkward for a while. Neither of them really spoke to me more than they had to up until I graduated high school. By then their pride at my accomplishments and their love for me as a son outweighed their disbelief and minor disappointment.

“I suppose it doesn’t matter who you want to date,” Dad said. “Just remember: Be good, do well; Be well, do good. However, if you get AIDS, you’re on your own.” He had said pretty much the same thing to me shortly after I got The Talk, although then it was, “It doesn’t matter if you sleep with a girl out of wedlock, but if you get her pregnant, you’re on your own.”

That night at my post-graduation party, we told the rest of the family. Uncle Jack clapped me on the back and offered to take me to Provincetown for my 21stbirthday. Aunt Dorothy wrinkled her nose, but didn’t make much of a fuss. Even if she had, it was nothing compared to Aunt Marie’s reaction. Anyone walking by our house would think a hurricane was tearing everything to shreds the way she shrieked at me for being the filthiest sinner she ever knew and yelled at my parents for failing to raise me as a good person. Jack told her to shut her mouth and brought up some stories of her misdeeds from when she was my age. When she only became angrier at him for “embellishing to make her look bad,” he kicked her, her husband, and my cousin—who disliked me as much as his mother did—out of the party. From then on, Jack was the buffer between Marie and me

Sadly, “then on” lasted less than a year before Jack died of a sudden heart failure. I think I cried the hardest of everyone in my family, and what made it worse was I was in the middle of my spring semester when it happened. I was waist-deep in midterm paper research and projects, so I couldn’t go home longer than was necessary to attend the funeral. Once I got back to school, I had no one to comfort me or talk to about Uncle Jack.