Posted on 04/05/2004 10:30:22 PM PDT by calcowgirl
SAN FRANCISCO – When David Knight married his boyfriend of 10 years, his parents weren't among the mothers and fathers proudly snapping photos and sipping champagne at San Francisco's City Hall. His mother is long gone, dead of cancer when he was 17. And his father, well his father ...
Knight chooses his words with care.
These are precarious times for the gay son of state Sen. William J. "Pete" Knight, the arch-conservative architect of California's Defense of Marriage Act. Does he heed his head or his heart? He doesn't want to hurt his family, but saying nothing exacts its own price.
"He believes in something I don't," David Knight says finally, his voice tight with checked emotion as he talks about the patriarch he idolized in his youth. "I'm sorry about that and I feel sad that we can't discuss it ... I don't agree with him, but I think he's a good man."
Whether same-sex couples should be allowed to marry moved from a hypothetical question to a presidential campaign topic after Massachusetts' highest court and San Francisco's mayor forced the issue, prompting conservatives to call for rewriting the U.S. Constitution and dividing state legislatures across the land.
For the Knights, it's the ultimate wedge issue.
The elder Knight, a 75-year-old Republican who will be termed out of office this year, is California's most outspoken opponent of marriage for gay and lesbian couples. Since spearheading the 2000 ballot initiative that reinforced California's "one man, one woman" marriage laws, he has used the courts to keep state agencies from granting spousal rights to same-sex couples. More recently, his nonprofit group has been at the center of the legal challenges to San Francisco's same-sex wedding spree.
The younger, a 42-year-old custom furniture maker in Baltimore, flew to the city with his longtime partner and got married just two days before the California Supreme Court shut down the same-sex weddings on March 11. The court is considering whether city officials had the authority to contravene state law by sanctioning almost 4,000 gay and lesbian marriages.
Sen. Knight wouldn't talk about his son's legally uncertain marriage to Joseph Lazzaro, an architectural designer. But during an interview with The Associated Press, he insisted his drive to keep gays from marrying doesn't make him anti-gay.
"We've had homosexuals since time immemorial," he said, "and nobody cared as long as they did their work and they didn't flaunt their sexuality and didn't try to push it on you and say, 'You have to accept me.' But now they are going to say they want to be classified as normal, and I can't accept the fact that two men, married, is normal."
They have navigated this uncomfortable terrain before, father and son. It has made real communication between them impossible. The senator, who represents a heavily Republican Southern California district, took his 14-word California Defense of Marriage Act to voters after twice failing to get a similar bill through the Democrat-controlled Legislature.
Years earlier, David Knight had told his father he was in a committed relationship with another man.
David Knight was the only one of the retired Air Force colonel's three sons to follow their father, a record-setting test pilot, into a career as a military pilot. He graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy and flew jets in the first Persian Gulf War.
"My father was certainly proud of me. He spoke at my pilot training graduation. He was proud of me," David Knight haltingly recalled.
After he came out, David Knight said everything they shared was severed by their disagreement over what his father considers an unacceptable "lifestyle."
"As far as the rejection, it's hurt every day since, and that's just a reality," David Knight said. "I don't think he's proud of me anymore, but I will say I could call my father at any time and he would not hang up on me."
The younger Knight doesn't think his father's crusade has anything to do with his own sexual orientation. Reserved and apolitical, he lives openly but not overtly as a gay man.
David Knight nevertheless felt compelled to lend his voice to the heated campaign over "the Knight initiative," as Proposition 22 became known. His opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times in 1999, "My Father is Wrong on Gays," characterized his estranged father's position as "a blind, uncaring, uninformed, knee-jerk reaction to a subject about which he knows nothing and wants to know nothing."
David returned to his quiet life in Baltimore with the spark he had lit "still smoldering," but didn't publicly counter his father's politics again until San Francisco launched its historic experiment.
With the senator calling the parade of unprecedented nuptials "a sideshow," his son found himself torn between familial loyalty and his responsibility as a gay man to make another statement.
"The worst image David could muster for himself was that he would be the poster child, and it has taken a long time for him to understand that you can do that without selling your guts," said Lazzaro, 39, the more naturally extroverted of the pair. "For David, there is this real feeling of purpose overshadowing honor, this dead honor that isn't giving anything back, and that's the wrestling match."
The day before they got married, Knight and Lazzaro told Knight's older brother, who worried that this act of defiance would end any hope of a renewed relationship with their aging dad.
But the son wasn't dissuaded. The memory of his father reaching out to shake his hand at family events, while refusing to greet or even look at Lazzaro, still angered him.
"We're a classic conservative family – keep it in the closet. If you don't talk about it, it's not a problem," he said. "I know I have my father's love and I honestly feel that, but I want his acknowledgment. I want him to recognize me and Joe."
As the gay offspring of a conservative politician, David Knight belongs to a small, but visible group that also includes the lesbian daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney, the lesbian stepdaughter of U.S. Rep. Mary Bono, R-Calif., and the gay son of Christian activist Phyllis Schlafly. All are undoubtedly dealing, in the privacy of their family lives as well as the pointed glare of public debate, with the fact that gay marriage is no longer just an abstract idea.
Knight and his new husband have a reality check of sorts in Lazzaro's parents. Although it took time for them to accept them as a couple, his mother gave them matching rose boutonnieres to wear on their wedding day. When they returned to Baltimore, Joseph Lazzaro called his father, a retired auto worker, not knowing what to expect.
"He said, 'Congratulations, I'm very proud of you,'" Lazzaro recalled. "I told him about how it went with David's dad, and my dad said, 'I feel sorry for David's dad because he is just missing out on so much and there is going to be a hollow place in his life.'"
David Knight already knows that hollow place. In making his situation a public parable for other misunderstood gay children, he has found a measure of peace.
"It's OK not to follow exactly what you've grown up to know. It's OK to be yourself," he said. "I'm not saying you are not going to pay some consequences for that. I certainly have. But I can tell you that my decisions have given me far greater pleasure than the loss I feel, and I think it's important that younger people know that."
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Well, you got to seperate the men from the boys somehow :^)
afterall, the son says all along that his dad is a good guy and would never hang up on him....
its the son who brutalized his dad in the media......
I agree with the dad: ...homosexuality has always been with us.....its just now, we have to believe that it is a good thing (not!)
cherry: how about the son putting his love for his dad above his own politics?
I have to go with cherry on this one. Pete Knight is a politician... that's his occupation. I'm glad he's sticking with the principles upon which he was elected. IMO, the son showed no respect for the father by writing a hit piece for the Times... what kind of love and respect for his father does that demonstrate? The son sounds like a self-centered, self-absorbed brat that will accept nothing less than his father embracing the full homosexual lifestyle, something to which the son knows he is opposed. Where is the tolerance and acknowledgement by the son? Oooops, I forgot... it's a one way street in the homosexual argument. And based on the quote below, the father HAS put his love above politics when it comes to family matters... and above his own principles... but that still isn't enough for this son. Very selfish, IMO.
"I know I have my father's love and I honestly feel that, but I want his acknowledgment. I want him to recognize me and Joe."
I agree. David's dad was robbed of the potential of grandchildren and the knowledge that his line will continue. Instead he's forced to watch his son sink into futile and hate-filled perversion
This 'son' betrayed his father and all that is good. I'm amazed that his dad even invites him to family events. I wouldn't.
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