Missing the Big Picture by Donovan, Luke (great book club books txt) 📕

To prepare for the presentation, I decided to play a game that I had learned from the improv show Whose Line Is It Anyway? I was going to start with the letter A and give a risk factor about HIV/AIDS. I was a little nervous as the director called me out of the waiting room for the presentation. There were six people in the room, and they had to pretend to be adolescents. Out of the six people, only one was male and he was also African American. At six-foot-four and over two hundred pounds, he had a classic football player physique. There was also a young Caucasian woman, three Caucasian women in their forties, and a young African American woman. I explained the rules of the game and started with the letter A. “One risk factor for HIV/AIDS is anal sex.” The man looked at me with a disgusted expression and yelled, “That’s gay!” I replied that anal sex was also common among heterosexual couples, and I moved on to the rest of the alphabet, asking the group to provide me with words for each letter.

The answer they gave me for B was “butt fucking,” C was “cunt,” D was “dick,” E was “ecstasy,” F was “fucking,” and G was “gangbanging.” Finally, they cut me off. It was the most enjoyable interview I’ve ever had. I left convinced that I would be offered the position. A week later, I called back and was informed that I wasn’t offered the job. The director told me that the prevention staff liked me, but she couldn’t go into specifics about why I wasn’t given the position.

A couple of days after that, I was offered a job at Albany County Child Protective Services as a caseworker. I knew that preventing child abuse was important. With me working two jobs and still living with my mom, money was my main motivating factor. It was twelve thousand dollars a year more than my full-time job, so I said yes and started a few weeks later.

I was sad about leaving the workshop. I had been there nine months and was just starting to feel comfortable. I did have mixed feelings about taking the new job, but it was a county government job and most people would love the opportunity to work in government—especially in the capital of New York. There are always rumors that government workers don’t do anything, but government jobs offer job security, great benefits, and fair pay.

I began at Child Protective Services on a Friday in February 2007. The first thing they had me do was read case files for clients with whom I’d be working. I was supposed to get a caseload of seventeen families. The first family I read about was separated after twenty-five pounds of feces were removed from the home.

Just like any new staffer, I was introduced to the other employees in my unit. Another caseworker in my unit was engaged to a woman I worked closely with during my internship at the Sanchez group home—the one from which I’d gotten fired. I knew that he probably knew that I was terminated, and I was paranoid that he would tell somebody.

Later in the day, I actually shadowed another caseworker named Trevor. He had a case in which a single mother was letting her boyfriend, who abused her daughter, into her home—after there was already an order of protection forbidding the boyfriend from coming anywhere near the house. “You basically have to be like a politician,” Trevor warned me as we drove to her house. The woman greeted us both and was initially pleasant. Then Trevor directed the eight-year-old to go to her bedroom. It was heart wrenching to see a woman choosing a boyfriend—whom she’d only recently met—over the safety of her daughter. Finally, the woman yelled at us, “You took my son away from me! You’re not going to take my daughter from me!” and slammed the door.

At the end of my second day of work, I had enough. I decided to call back my program director at the workshop and ask for my job back. I just couldn’t work in that field again. I ended up going back to my job at the workshop.

I also worked very hard at trying to accept my sexuality and to meet somebody I could be in a relationship with. I spent a lot of time online trying to meet people, but none of them went anywhere. Most of the men were just looking for hookups. I found out about a gay men’s support group that met weekly at the Capital District Gay and Lesbian Community Center (now Pride Center).

I was very nervous walking into the gay and lesbian center. After years of trying to deny my identity, I finally realized that I was a gay man who absolutely hated being gay. As I looked around the room, I noticed that most of the people in the room were older and were quite friendly with one another. The group started with each member going around and giving a brief report of his last week and recounting anything significant that happened. One man had been married for over thirty years and was struggling with how his adult children couldn’t accept him dating men after the death of his wife. His daughter-in-law had forbidden him from seeing his granddaughter. In fact, the same man met another man in the therapy group whose ex-wife was the granddaughter’s schoolteacher. The little girl was able to get a Christmas gift from her grandfather thanks to the connection that was formed in the group.

As I listened to the other men, I noticed that the man beside me looked very familiar. He said his name was Shawn, and I thought he looked like a former Christian brother who taught Spanish and religion when I was at Saint John’s. I thought that was funny, since most of my life I didn’t act on my gay thoughts because I didn’t