When I was seventeen, I fell in love for about three months with a boy named Eric Heisters. He had piercing eyes and a rough sneer of a mouth, but he also had very small delicately shaped ears and amazingly long slender fingers. A music teacher might have called his "piano hands," but he would have told you that playing music was for fairies.

Mostly he used his fingers for holding cigarettes. He smoked constantly, but when I was in his car, he'd hang his hand outside the window so my blouse didn't smell of it when I came home. One hand out the window with a cigarette between his index and middle fingers and one hand in my blouse, with his palm against my breast. I tried to be the good girl that he wanted me to be. I wasn't stupid; I knew what was getting him off. But I let him, because I wanted it.

The day my father caught us, he dragged me out of the car by my ponytail and told me we were going home.

"No daughter of mine is going to slum around with gutter trash in the back of a car like a cheap whore!" he shouted, his face purple with rage.

"But I love him, Daddy!" I cried, the echo of every bad fairy tale since the time of Shakespeare.

"You don't have a clue what love is," he replied, and he slapped me so hard that he left a purple bruise under my eye and I stayed in my room for a week. I knew I was no Juliet, though, and that Eric would never die for me. He probably wouldn't even remember me soon. So when my father told me that he had enrolled me in a private Catholic girls' school, I went along with it and I never saw Eric again.

When my husband told our son that he couldn't be a homosexual and live under our roof, I think he actually believed that Justin would acquiesce and choose heterosexuality and his own single bed. Even though I cried when my son left home, I was secretly a little bit proud of him. Because when I look at him I know that I've raised him to be the best parts of me, with none of my weaknesses.

I visited Justin at Debbie's and tried to pretend it was normal. I went to PFLAG meetings. A few times I caught Justin staring at that man, at Brian, with this look in his eye that was almost familiar and I thought that maybe someone who could make my son shine that bright couldn't be all bad. I tried to understand.

I can look Brian Kinney in the eye and tell him that he was the reason Justin was attacked, but I know it was my fault. I should have forced my son back under my roof when I had the chance. I should have done it before it was too late.