Compelling story...Has this been posted elsewhere?
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...ather_and_son_1
Excerpts
By LISA LEFF, Associated Press Writer
SAN FRANCISCO - When David Knight married his boyfriend of 10 years, his parents were not 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 ...
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.
"He believes in something I don't," David Knight says, 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."
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," David Knight recalled.
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."
"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.
The son could not be talked out of going through with the marriage. 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."
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. Joseph Lazzaro later 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.'"