Mel’s FolksThis was in the early days of gay marriage in New York but even then the community was completely geared up for it. We flew down to meet Mel’s parents and several of her siblings in Florida. She had no issues with her folks, and they had no issues with me. They were of the she-loves-you/you-love-her school and that is all they wanted for Sweet Melissa. I also met branches of her family that lived in New York and they were fine.
My family, though, decidedly was not. I would like to say that with my father’s death everyone reconciled. Far from it. My going changed me from the family’s deviant embarrassment to its deviant embarrassment who could not give a dying man his final wish. That they lied to me to lure me into going with their promises that my father had seen-the-light and
