To the Editor;
When I was about five years old, my father would take me hiking into the forest behind our house. In those days the woods felt endless. Ferns crowded the path, moss climbed the trunks of trees, and sunlight broke through the canopy in pale, shifting columns. This was where we were closest – my father and I – bound by a shared love of the forest. He taught me the names of trees, showed me animal tracks, paused often to admire what he called nature’s handiwork.
At a particularly beautiful clearing, he stopped. We stood quietly, listening. I remember nodding along as he spoke about how perfect it all was – the order of things, the balance. I understood that much. The forest made sense to me. It was alive and generous and complete.
Then, still standing there, he told me that in nature men were meant to be with women and women with men. Anything else, he said, was an abomination. Nature didn’t allow it. God didn’t allow it either.
God was new to me then – an invisible ruler introduced without warning, hovering somewhere beyond the trees. I tried to imagine Him while looking at the forest, but the two didn’t quite line up. The forest was right in front of me. God was not.
Later, deeper into the woods we both loved, my father explained what he believed should be done about “the gay issue.” His voice was calm, practical. He said the best solution would be to put all the gays on an island, let them infect each other with AIDS, and allow the rest of us to remain uncontaminated.
I don’t remember responding. I don’t remember asking questions. What I remember is the forest – still, indifferent, alive. Birds calling. Leaves shifting in the breeze. Life continuing everywhere around us as if nothing had been said.
Even then, something didn’t fit. The forest I knew made room for everything: decay feeding growth, fallen trees nurturing saplings, countless lives intertwined without permission or purity. Whatever God my father was describing felt smaller than the place we stood in, more brittle, more afraid.
Much later, I would understand that our disagreement wasn’t really about sexuality. It was about authority, about fear, about who gets to claim nature – and God – as evidence for cruelty. Standing in that forest as a child, I couldn’t name it yet, but I sensed the fracture clearly.
We loved the same woods.
We did not love the same world.
Jesse J. Green
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