“I came out to my parents in the 1970s, while home from college. That same night, my father ...”
His Dad was b.s.ing him.
My guess is daddy made the story up to make his son feel better by approaching the problem from a sympathetic perspective. Probably hoping his son had made a one time mistake and would “get over it”.
Truth can be odder than fiction, though. Like I just said about the plague in Europe. Because nobody seems to have any confidence in controlling it, superstition abounds. If they had known about penicillin, it would have been viewed like we view fighting fires. None of this cloud of B.S. Same here.