Jon O. Erikson

Events from October to November of 2006 fueled the creation of Wholly Union. My 2006 birthday was on election day. Socio-political shenanigans surrounding homosexuality, religion, and marriage constituted a six-year insult with which I hoped the majority sympathized. The Foley and Haggard scandals exhumed delightful, timely hypocrisies. My twenty-six year anniversary with my life partner was October 21. The first anniversary of my father's car accident was October 11, which led to his passage November 16, 2005. That was also the death of a predator.

My father sexually abused me for twelve years during my formative years. The incest was maddeningly covert and randily overt. He did everything a man could do to another male. "My father abused me," was his earlier excuse, a multigenerational cycle of incest. I have broken the silence of that cycle for over two decades now.

Perhaps ironically, my father's profession was psychiatrist. His attention to reality was disengaged and his dialogue often cryptic. I inherited his brilliant mind, which disturbingly includes a photographic memory challenged by a nurtured talent to compartmentalize memories. The Psychiatrist gave his teenage son a book about sex rather than having a father-son chat. One paragraph therein implied that homosexuality was "wrong." I started feeling guilty about what I enjoyed and hating that my father tainted that natural pleasure. I needed a father's love, not sex.

My parents' religion was Lutheran. The family always attended church. All five children endured confirmation. My father was a church "community leader" and sang in the choir. Church was optional after confirmation, so I stopped going. I detested the hypocrisy when my father used church to take me on his "errand" afterwards.

I inherited my father's gifts for music and singing and discovered theatre as a temporary escape into being "someone else." At 21, I played Jesus in a community theatre production of Jesus Christ Superstar. Interestingly, the role drove the final kibosh on Christianity for me. The "innocent victim" philosophy became untenable, crystallized by trying to deprogram distraught young children after every performance. A vehicle to channel abuse and psychic torment for me (through falsetto screaming!), people commented how my crucifixion portrayal seemed "realistic." Then, every man and woman in the cast obviously wanted to have sex with Jesus. That's a powerful corollary: sex and religion. People climax while gasping their religion's blasphemies. My father did.

A decade later, identifying the impacts of incest from healthy adult behavior patterns while scar-tissuing my self-esteem commenced in earnest. My attempts to receive honest ownership of his abuse were soon thwarted by my father's late in life reborn Christianity. "God will forgive me" responses provided him additional escapes. That led me to let go of ever getting what I needed from him. I mourned his loss fifteen years prior to his death. Only when his spirit contacted me at the moment of his passage did I get a truer sense of my father.

That is how Wholly Union includes my process of healing.