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Ten years ago I flew back east for my Yale Law School 25th year reunion. I got a cheap red-eye flight to Newark, saw some Broadway shows, closed the sing-along piano bar at Marie’s Crisis in Greenwich Village, stayed in an expensive closet in Manhattan for a couple of nights, then took a train to New Haven.
One of the highlights of my law school reunion was when our class gathered in a classroom to share “two minute memoirs.” Jeb Boasberg, one several federal judges in the class of 1990, was timekeeper. (Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh skipped our reunion.)
I was one of the last members of our class to have kids. I shared my experience adopting three kids in my forties, then breaking up with my gay partner. I told my classmates the dirty little secret of divorce: alternating weeks is just about the perfect amount of time parenting. I could give the kids my full attention, then spend the next week recovering, working, running errands, and trying to be slightly fabulous.
I described my varied legal career in Seattle, plus five years in Chicago as a LGBT rights lawyer with the ACLU. I shared that I’d recently moved to the college town on the Canadian border where my parents have lived since 1981. My ex and his new husband had also moved to Bellingham, so we were all living nearby. As I told my Yale Law classmates, I’d found my dream job with the State as general counsel to Washington’s third largest university.
My “dream job” turned out to be a nightmare.
This week I flew back east for my Yale Law School 35th year reunion. Once again I got a cheap red-eye flight to Newark, bought tickets to Broadway shows, closed the sing-along piano bar at Marie’s Crisis in Greenwich Village, and stayed in an expensive Manhattan closet for a couple of nights. I took the train to New Haven on Friday morning.
On Saturday the Class of 1990 will be gathering to share “two minute memoirs.” Jeb Boasberg, now the Chief Judge of the D.C. District Court, will be keeping time once again. Here’s the story I’ll share with my classmates:
Stephanie Foo is a successful public radio producer who grew up in an abusive home. In her memoir What My Bones Know, Foo describes debilitating anxiety symptoms and relationship dysfunctions that sidelined her career. Eventually Foo’s therapist gave her the diagnosis that let her to begin the process of healing: “complex PTSD.”
Soon after I started my job with the State, I began exhibiting strange physical and mental symptoms that eerily paralleled Stephanie Foo’s experience. A few weeks after my law school reunion, I met with my new Bellingham physician, who gave me the same diagnosis as Foo.
As the Department of Veteran’s Affairs recognizes, “Many traumatic events (e.g., car accidents, natural disasters, etc.) are of time-limited duration. However, in some cases people experience chronic trauma that continues or repeats for months or years at a time.” In 1988, Dr. Judith Herman proposed a new diagnosis of “complex PTSD.” Rather than a single traumatic event, complex PTSD is a consequence of ongoing trauma that occurs over an extended period, such as childhood abuse and neglect, domestic violence, and religious trauma. Because these types of experiences tend to involve betrayals by an individual’s most trusted authority figures, the resulting symptoms focus on impaired interpersonal relationships, as well as anxiety symptoms that are similar to ordinary PTSD.
In my case, a toxic workplace triggered debilitating symptoms. But my underlying traumas involved growing up in a Mormon culture that denied the existence of LGBT people.
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Something happened to me since my last law school reunion that was more even more important than my disability diagnosis.
Every gay man needs a hot cop story. Mine starts when my kids took a roadtrip vacation with my ex and his husband during the summer of 2019. My older kids were about to start high school, and my son was starting middle school. We had been amicably co-parenting and alternating kid weeks for several years. But when they got home from their California road trip, my ex and his husband grimly announced that they were getting divorced.
I was already busy coping with my disability and career frustration. My ex didn’t have a clear plan for the future. A few days later we were at the house having a painful discussion about what would happen next. We went out to the backyard to get away from the kids.
The doorbell rang. On the porch were two hot Bellingham cops. My nine-year-old son stood behind them on the front lawn. Apparently his bedroom window was open, and he’d overheard our argument. My son had never heard me raise my voice before. So he called 911, like they taught him to do at school.
My ex and I sheepishly explained the situation to the police officers. The parental conversation resumed more quietly. A few days later my ex moved across the country to start a new life. The kids occasionally visit him. Both my ex’s ex-husband and my parents still live in town, and they provide an essential safety net. But I’ve learned to parent alone.
For the last seven years, my life has centered on being a full-time single father. I’ve been lucky enough to raise a wonderful daughter, son, and child. One of each.
Complex PTSD symptoms can occur when a victim endures betrayal by a trusted institution. I was betrayed by beloved Mormon leaders who refused to acknowledge that gay people exist, even as I shared my generation’s collective trauma from coming out of the closet at the height of the AIDS epidemic.
Fortunately, I’ve made huge progress managing my disability. I’ve even made my peace with the Mormons. A couple of years ago I drove my daughter to college in Arizona and visited Utah for the first time since 2006. I had a wonderful time showing my kids where I’d lived and gone to school, without experiencing nausea or chest pains like the last few visits. My mental desert has finally blossomed like a rose.
Unfortunately, other aspects of my disability have only gotten worse, particularly some of the physical side effects. After my healthcare providers figured out what was causing my debilitating symptoms, I promptly disclosed my PTSD diagnosis to my employers. When I sought a reasonable accommodation, they rejected my request. Instead, the State used my complaint about workplace homophobia as pretext for firing me. Even today, former Attorney General (now Governor) Bob Ferguson and his lieutenants publicly insist that I am faking a disability. As a result, I was effectively blackballed from the Washington legal community – another betrayal that triggered ongoing complex PTSD symptoms.
After my ex moved across the country, I focused on raising three teenagers as a single parent, finished my original legal battle with the State, and worked on my recovery from complex PTSD. A couple of years ago my kids said they were ready for me to find a job. So did my banker. Unsure whether I was fit to practice law again, I started volunteering a couple of times a month at our local low-income legal clinic. Helping ordinary people solve their real life problems restored my faith in the law.
Because I’ve enjoyed a remarkably diverse career, I’m the only one of the volunteer lawyers who’s willing to meet with clients from any of our clinics, regardless of whether the cases involve Employment, Landlord/Tenant, Homeless Youth, Family, Indian law, Guardianship, or General Law matters. Working through clients’ family law problems has been particularly rewarding, and led me to new opportunity.
I’d applied for a lot of different kinds of positions over the last few years. The job search has been tough, particularly because I wanted a role that would let me stay close to my family in Bellingham and my friends in Vancouver. At the beginning of the year I applied for family law positions for the first time. I quickly was invited to interviews, then offered a job with a primarily online firm that covers the entire state of Washington.
Three times during the search process, people told me something like “We never get resumes like yours!” This is true in at least two ways:
First, most people with Yale Law degrees do not spend the decade of their fifties as disabled unemployed gay single fathers – living in poverty, relying on food stamps, and learning to navigate the mental health and legal systems. Today most of my disability symptoms are manageable, and I consider myself healed. But mystrange mix of life experiences makes me a sympathetic and effective counselor for family law clients. I know what it feels like to be overwhelmed by life and trapped in system that is beyond anyone’s control.
Second, I used to be a snob. Family is a low-status, low-pay corner of the profession. One of my small group classmates at Yale, the late Cheryl McCall, went on to be a prominent family law lawyer in Nevada. But I don’t know of anyone else who ended up in our low-class pink-collar ghetto. Somehow family law firms never get resumes from other members of the Yale Law School class of 1990.
Over the years I told a lot of other people besides my Yale Law classmates that the “dirty little secret of divorce” was how alternating weeks felt like just about the perfect amount of parenting time. It turns out I was wrong.
Becoming a father twenty years ago was the best thing that ever happened to me. But becoming a single father thirteen years later gave me the experiences of a lifetime, and left me with the kind of shared memories and relationships with each child that few parents will ever know.
Although many of our symptoms overlap, my complex PTSD differs from Stephanie Foo’s in one very important respect. Like many trauma victims, Foo’s symptoms were rooted in the pattern of abuse she suffered at the hands of her own family. I am a mental illness outlier because I was betrayed by two different kinds of trusted authority figures: first the Mormon priesthood leaders who told me homosexuality was a spiritual disease that could be “cured,” and then by the lawyers and judges who erased my disability and drove me out of the legal profession.
Families are forever.Fortunately, unlike most people who struggle with complex PTSD, I had then and have now the support of the best family in the world. I come from good people. And they taught me to be a great father.
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