Frank Schaefer never expected to speak for gay rights. His son’s gay wedding changed everything.

To Frank Schaefer, it wasn’t three of his four children being gay that bothered him so much, it was that they looked gay. So sometimes he’d offer pointers.

“Swing your arms when you walk,” Schaefer’s son Kevin, then 16, recalls his father telling him one fall day a few years ago.

..

Kevin recalls being humiliated but not angry. He understood that his father was struggling with his own feelings. Debbie just brushed her father off. He wasn’t really criticizing, she told herself — he was just making an observation.

This painful scene between a parent and a gay child is perhaps not so unusual — until you widen the frame.

The next year, Frank Schaefer, a United Methodist pastor in rural Pennsylvania, was in Boston again on a family trip. This time, he was there to officiate at the wedding of his gay son Tim — in violation of his denomination’s doctrine, which prohibits same-sex marriage.

more

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/pastor-frank-schaefer-never-expected-to-speak-for-gay-rights-his-sons-gay-wedding-changed-everything/2014/05/30/2a99bcac-b9de-11e3-a397-6debf9e66e65_story.html