During the trying summer of 1994 my brother and I shed a lot of tears (and even blood) trying to come to terms with something that was bigger than ourselves. Having a gay brother to me was like living in a house that had a large elephant in the family room. It felt threatening and dangerous. Every time relatives came by to visit that summer I couldn’t help thinking that they were really stopping by to marvel at the phenomenon of their newly gay grandson or nephew. It was as if they had never seen a gay person up close before and now they finally had the chance.

It was humiliating for me to have a gay brother. My friends started to tease me and for a while I went along with it. Then they said things that went against my brotherly instincts. “You should arrange to have him think he’s meeting another gay guy, and then we’ll all ambush him and kick the crap out of him,” they said. Wait a minute? Ambush my own brother and watch him get beat to a bloody pulp? Even though I thought I hated fags at the time, I could never do that!

Things began to seem more normal after that. My brother was the same brother he had always been except that he was gay. It was like Kafka’s character Joesph K. in THE TRIAL. He was the same person as ever except that he carried a new distinction, a new way to identify himself and think of himself. I started to drift away from my old pack of friends and they miraculously left me alone for the most part.

The battlefront shifted from my social circle to the home. For nearly a month I just sat around the house watching MTV and I was forced to be with my brother more than I wanted to be. I couldn’t ignore his new gayness, and being a tease growing up, I felt I now had a new weapon to tease him with. I started to let the insults fly and he let my words roll off his back for a while. But then he unleashed his older sibling furry and we started to clash. He chased me down the hallway once and sat atop my chest and punched me in the face three times. Tears were streaming from his eyes. “Why do say these things to me! Don’t you know I love you.” I was crying and bleeding. It was the first time I realized that my brother was not going to change. He was a new person and I couldn’t just fling the usual old insults at him like I used to.

We fought like this for weeks. One time I took some of his most cherished books and lit them on fire. Another time I tried to kick him in the groin and he chased me outside with a knife screaming like a mad man. I was so scared that I walked around all day in hundred degree heat because I was too scared to go home and face him. He desperately wanted to leave and fly back East but he couldn’t afford a plane ticket. My parents never witnessed the worst fights we had so they calmly tried to reconcile things in the evening with non-effective counseling.

Then we got a call that our oldest brother had died. He was living in Boston at the time, and during a trip to the Catskills one weekend he shot himself. Everyone who knew him said he was acting normal and happy and nobody could have suspected that he would go to his hotel and end everything. My family was confused. I had a gay brother to deal with, a dead brother to deal with. It was all too much. We shed tears of mourning now. I forgot about my brother’s gayness and cried harder than I ever had with him in my life.

Two weeks after my brother’s memorial service some of my old friends threw a rock through my gay brother’s window. I remember running outside with a baseball bat prepared to defend my brother to the death. If he hadn’t stopped me there’s no telling what I would have done.

Any way, this is how my brother and I came together before almost being torn apart forever. We are as close as the siblings in this week’s Modern Love column and only death could ever separate us again. In fact, we may be closer than the author and his younger sibling because my brother and I experienced transforming challenges and hardships. The road to our current relationship is potholed by bloody battles and losses. Ours is a story of survival, rebirth and resurrection. I truly know now that gayness is not a disease, it is not a genetic flaw that can be cured or, as many believe, a deviant and perverted lifestyle. People do not embrace gayness out of fear, loneliness or misguided lusts. Being gay is as natural as being black, Asian or Jewish.

And I know there will be more battles ahead.

Yet I do wonder: Why did the Times like this story? Was it the writing? In which case what are the standards the Times is using nowadays? Or was it the strangely unexplored/unrecognized dysfunction which seems to permeate the piece? This kind of reading feels voyeuristic, rather than insightful, as if one is eavesdropping on the private, incomplete musings of a therapy session, rather than communing with a carefully considered tale of personal evolution. As such, it’s slightly embarrassing, rather than redemptive. Did the editor understand this? If not, why? If so, was this his stab at the publishing equivalent of Reality TV — to cynically mock both author and readership in the guise of “personal interest?”

I’m glad you let go of the Modern Love project. Calling attention to the calcified heterosexism of modern-day institutions (e.g., The Times) has its place, but you can’t get water from a stone. At least there’s Frank Rich, whose contributions, if not from the gay voice per se, are more progressive than anything that will come out of Modern Love — a column which clearly has never been about presenting a balanced, let alone sophisticated, perspective on 21st-century relationships.

Here is another laughable excerpt I’m surprised you didn’t list in your post: “…although I’m all for gay marriage, its spreading legality worries me a little. After all, if gay couples nationwide can marry, then what will happen to the rights and benefits of significant brothers like us, Mr. and Mr. Jeffrey and Lawrence Forbes-Forbes?”