A Grateful Son Recalls a Valuable Lesson His Father Taught Him About Being True to Oneself

StoryCorps, the amazing oral history project that provides recording booths for people to tell their own life stories, has animated “The Saint of Dry Creek“, an incredibly poignant first-person narrative in which a gay man named Patrick Haggerty recalls a valuable lesson that his dairy farmer father in rural Washington state taught to him about being true to himself at all times.

Now I’m gonna tell you something today, and you might not know what to think of it now, but you’re gonna remember when you’re an adult. Don’t sneak. Because if you sneak, like you did today, it means you think you’re doing the wrong thing. And if you run around spending your whole life thinking that you’re doing the wrong thing, then you’llruin your immortal soul.” And out of all the things a father in 1959 could have told his gay son, my father tells me to be proud of myself and not sneak. …he knew where I was headed. And he, he knew that making me feel bad about it in any way was the wrong thing to do. I had the patron saint of dads for sissies, and no, I didn’t know at the time, but I know it now.

Patrick’s story was presented in partnership with the It Gets Better Project.