The Lie: A Memoir of Two Marriages, Catfishing & Coming Out

by William Dameron

“The Truth is rarely pure and never simple.” —Oscar Wilde

What we put out into the universe comes back to us, but who can predict the amount of time it takes to make its return, or what form it will assume?

when our supposed truths are unmasked for lies, What do we do with all of that pain and lost hope?

(I can’t remember what the argument was about. If I told you it was about A, Katherine would tell you it was about B, but the truth is, such arguments are always about C and what lies beneath.)

Becoming a man required you to pay for it through hard work.

When one daughter conforms to the norms of society’s sense of beauty, and the other shirks them, you constantly find yourself struggling to simply accept compliments from strangers without dividing them in half and distributing them equally. Both of my daughters are pretty, I wanted to reply even in Olivia’s absence.

While women could give each other a peck on the cheek or a hug, this was forbidden between American men (or those Italian men who had been Americanized). Making fun of each other was the safest way to show our affection, and we picked on each other ruthlessly.

shame made gay love feel more pornographic than actual porn.

If you were to slice the house in half and present it as a diorama, you would see a skinny middle-aged man in the basement, legs shaking as he lifted a barbell. On the first floor, a woman lay silently on a sofa by the flickering light of a TV, and above her, one daughter sat huddled at her desk, sketching in a notebook, and the other in her bedroom, talking on the phone, each of us clinging to our form of escape.

Was it possible to be an unhappy father and still raise a happy child, or did shame make my love poison? After my father left my

Pedophile and homosexual were words used interchangeably in my youth in North Carolina; in certain places, they still are.

Sometimes, I thought Katherine might stumble and fall backward into the black hole of her missing genetic history. The search for her mother became all-consuming as if when she was found, the puzzle would be complete.

I wanted to be as free as Katherine had become, but letting go of those inhibitions would release the secret I had kept in for so many years.

She went slack-jawed as if my words had slapped her. And they did. I threw a punch filled with my self-hatred directly at her.

The torture would continue for months. It was calculated and surgical, like the removal and irradiation of a gay tumor. Conversation therapy doesn’t always occur at a facility. Often, it takes place at the dining-room table.

But I know, the hardest things to prepare for are sometimes the things that we already know.

Without sadness, happiness cannot exist.

It was like conversion therapy but in reverse. After a lifetime of straight conditioning, we needed to work out what it meant to be authentic.

We were all forging new relationships with one another, each of us in a new position. It was a precarious arrangement, stacked up like a house of cards. I was not confident the foundation was sound enough to hold another card.