My statement on Menlo Church and my father; I won't be reading replies to this but I'm grateful to the friends and chosen family who have helped Grace and me through the last few months. pic.twitter.com/elT9I7v9u6
More: this is the story as reported by "Religion News Service" dated February 3. Click here to read the article at Christianity Today, which is based on this story.
(RNS) — John Ortberg, a popular evangelical author and megachurch pastor, betrayed a "bond of trust" by allowing a church volunteer who admitted being attracted to minors to still work with children, according to a statement from the elders at the Bay Area church he leads.
"In July of 2018, a person serving in the Menlo Church community came to John and shared in confidence an unwanted thought pattern of attraction to minors," the church's elder said in a statement. "The person assured, to John’s satisfaction, that the person had not acted on the attraction and sought John’s support. John believed the person and provided prayers and referrals for counseling."
But Ortberg took no steps to bar the person from working with minors, according to the elders. He also did not talk to other staff or church members about the situation.
The church's statement did not name the third party who brought Ortberg's actions to the church's attention. On Sunday (Feb. 2.), Daniel Lavery, Ortberg's estranged son, posted a message on Twitter saying he and his wife had reported the pastor.
Lavery said that a church member had confessed having "obsessive sexual feelings about young children" for years and that they had intentionally sought out "unsupervised" positions where they could volunteer with children — including volunteer opportunities that included overnight travel. He also said that the church member told him "John Ortberg had continually encouraged this person in their unsupervised work with children."
After speaking to the church member, Lavery said he and his wife confronted his parents about the situation. He said that John Ortberg and his wife, Nancy, were aware of the church member's confession. He also wrote that John Ortberg defended his handling of the situation and said that their advice was dismissed — in part because both Lavery and his wife are transgender. Lavery also said that Ortberg did not know if the church member was still traveling overnight with children.
Lavery, who writes the Dear Prudence advice column for Slate.com, said that he suggested that the church member seek treatment and immediately stop volunteering with church. He also said he wrote to Ortberg and urged him to report the situation to the church's elders. When his father did not do that, Lavery said he and his wife reported their concerns to the church board.
Following that conversation, Ortberg went on leave.
Lavery said that he did not know if the church member had ever acted on their attraction to minors.
"I have no firsthand knowledge of any criminal activity, and I have real compassion for anyone trying to treat sexual compulsions with accountability and oversight," he wrote on Twitter. "But the situation they had created was risky, unsafe and unsustainable."
In their statement, Menlo Church leaders say they hired an independent investigator to look into the concerns over Ortberg's handling of the church member.
"Based on that investigation, interviews with supervising staff across Student’s and Children’s ministries, and a review of detailed volunteer records, the Board has not found any misconduct in the Menlo Church community, and the investigation did not reveal any allegations of misconduct," their statement reads. "Nevertheless, the investigation showed John exhibited poor judgment that was inconsistent with his responsibilities as Senior Pastor."
The church's elders say that if any abuse allegations are raised in the future, those allegations will be reported to law enforcement. A church spokesperson said that church member in question was a part-time volunteer in the past and has not volunteered at church events since concerns about them were reported to the board.
The church spokesperson also said the investigator was empowered to search for allegations of misconduct but would not give details, such as whether or not the investigator spoke to parents of children the volunteer had interacted with or with the children themselves.
Such details were confidential, said the spokesperson.
According to the statement, Ortberg agrees that "he did not handle this matter consistent with his responsibilities to Menlo Church and the Board’s expectations of him."
Furthermore, the statement continues, "He deeply apologizes for his action and decisions, and is committed to the safety and integrity of our community and to ensuring that such a situation does not arise again
Church leaders recently adopted a "restoration plan" that would allow Ortberg to return to the pulpit, pending the board's approval, but did not indicate whether Ortberg had been disciplined or reprimanded for his actions.
Their statement also outlined the church's child protection policies, which bar volunteers from being alone with children.
Ortberg did not reply to a request for comment. However, after RNS emailed the pastor, a church staffer sent RNS the statement from the elders.
A former teaching pastor at Willow Creek, Ortberg and his wife, Nancy, made headlines in 2018 when they raised questions about the conduct of megachurch pastor Bill Hybels. Ortberg is a popular speaker and author of books like "Soul Keeping," "The Life You've Always Wanted," and "If You Want to Walk on Water, You've Got to Get Out of the Boat." He also hosts the "What Were You Thinking?" podcast.
Lavery said in his Twitter comments that the church's response was puzzling — as Ortberg apologized, yet the church found no misconduct.
"As a non-churchgoer, I have no position on what an appropriate ecclesiastical response might be, and I am not aware of the full scope of the investigation," he wrote. "This has been personally devastating, and broken the trust that once existed between me and the Ortberg family. I have no further public statements to make at this time."
This story has been updated to clarify that the church volunteer no longer works with children and no misconduct was found. Update: After reading some comments at a Reddit subthread, I think the so-called church member who confided in Danny, and who had previously confided in John, is almost certainly John's son/Danny's brother. When I first read Danny's statement I wondered why a random member of John's church would confide in Danny, a self-proclaimed non-churchgoer. Plus there's this: "... they had shared it with John and Nancy Ortberg in July, 2018." How would a meeting like that have even happened? At a large megachurch like Menlo, it's literally impossible for a random member of the congregation to have this kind of meeting with the Senior Pastor and his wife. I believe an accurate version of that sentence would be "they had shared it with our parents in July, 2018." I also wondered about John's quoted statement that pedophilia is the same as homosexuality. (Prior to his transition, Mallory Ortberg was out as a lesbian.) It all didn't quite add up. But if the person involved is John's son and Danny's brother (or possibly another close family member, such as a cousin,) it makes a lot more sense. It makes sense that he would confide in Danny, and it's plausible that John would not want to report his son to the church, instead offering prayer and oversight. Presumably he would be strongly inclined to believe his son's assurances that he hadn't acted on his obsession. I can also imagine that when John said that pedophilia is like homosexuality, if that is what he actually said (it's possible that Danny is paraphrasing,) maybe what John was trying to say is "you and your brother both struggle with your sexuality in a way that is against bible teachings. I was trying to be as supportive of your brother as I've always been of you." The part about keeping it secret also sounds sounds like protective fatherly concern for his son rather than objective professionalism regarding a member of his church. (Note that I'm not condoning John Ortberg's action in any way. I'm just trying to understand it.)
To be clear, this is speculation on my part and may be completely inaccurate about who the person who confided in Danny is. The whole thing is unfathomable and heartbreaking. Full disclosure: I attended Willow Creek in the 90s when John Ortberg was the main teaching pastor there. I have had enormous admiration and respect for him for over 25 years, which is why I'm so dismayed by this. How could John possibly have thought it was okay for someone, regardless of who it is, to continue volunteering, unsupervised, with children after having admitted a sexual attraction to children? It's mind-boggling. And one more thing. John Ortberg has an Instagram account. He hasn't posted anything since November 18, and that post wasn't about anything personal. As I scrolled through his pictures, I saw this:
... from September, 2015 and decided to post it here. I'm not sure why, exactly. A reminder that this used to be a happy family? A reminder that things aren't always the way they seem with families? Four and a half years after this picture was taken, this family has been ripped apart, possibly forever. It makes me sad. Added: For no particular reason, this is Danny and Grace on their wedding day:
I can't stop posting interesting things about these 2. Grace's newsletter is behind a paywall but some of the articles are free to read, and I've been reading. Here she describes the beginning of her relationship with Danny, including another indication of how close Grace felt to Danny's family:
Our first meeting (fireworks); the early flirtations where we would text each other for hours until we fell asleep with our phones in our hands; our first fight, when we realized that it was possible to experience anger, rejection, fear, and resentment without raising our voices or speaking unkindly; my first, rejected proposal in 2016; the first time he made me a mixtape; the first time we cried together, or slept in the same bed, or kissed, or told one another that we were in love (me many weeks before him, because he “thought it was obvious, didn’t need saying”). The birth of his beautiful sister’s beautiful son, when we prayed together with absolute urgency and sincerity, and with very little sense of what it meant for either of us. The day he proposed to me, in the street outside some rando’s house a couple of miles out of the Mariposa entrance to Yosemite, and we spent the remainder of the day in a surreal, tiny, luxury spa resort an hour north of Fresno, where the decor was themed around elderflowers and everyone intuitively got our pronouns right. Or even, the way we related before we met, or at least the way I related to him - finding his website, and feeling as though I knew how to read it. The Gaston piece, the Brontë stuff, the easy-borne hyperliteracy. These aren’t days, exactly, or they’re not for me (they probably are more so for him). But they’re important, and singular. (She's pondering the idea that her upcoming wedding day should be the happiest day of her life.) Trying to distill it down: Danny's original explanation, posted on 11/28:
Two weeks ago I learned something I could not live with – asked what had been done about it – learned that nothing had been done, nor would ever – was chided for suggesting it was, in fact, morally necessary to take action immediately – estrangement from my family of origin, which had the day before been the furthest thing from my mind, became a matter of the keenest urgency.
Nov 19, from Grace:
the moment when one's partner demonstrates true moral courage
Nov 20, from Danny: taking a break from the column to deal with a family crisis
December 21: The wedding is tomorrow, this is what Grace posted on Instagam today:
“sorry if i seemed a little distracted when you were fucking me earlier...i was meditating on how to approach the next battle with transmisogyny...so i drifted...” @graceelavery, dreamily, just now
Danny and Grace got married yesterday. It was... different. For a little history, this is an Instagram with an e-mail from Joseph to Mallory before their first meeting (and prior to their transitions, obviously):
Timing: From an article at The Cut, in March, 2018 when Danny's second book is coming out. He had just announced his transition, apparently he started talking about it to family in summer and fall of 2017:
So when did you decide to take action?
One turning point was in July and August, when I started talking with my close friends and my sister about it. That was scary. And then another turning point came when I started talking to the rest of my family in November, and started to access different aspects of medical transition and going to a clinic in the Bay Area. And then again, in the last couple weeks, when I decided to talk about it before the book comes out.
Why did you decide that? It was clear to me that no, I’m not the most settled or the most confident person in the world. But I’ve spent enough time thinking and talking about this, and at this point it’s only about delay. And once my family knew what was going on and they were like, “We’re here for you. We support you. We love you,” then it felt like “Okay, sure.”
Me, writing on Dec 11, 2019: How did Danny go from the support he talks about above to completely severing ties with the Ortbergs? What could have happened? Based on the info below referencing "two weeks ago," I think the incident, whatever it was, happened around November 14-18.
November 16: I'm just seeing this tweet on Dec 14. It sure looks like a response to whatever the bad thing was.
taking a brief break from the column/on here for about two weeks (leaving you in @Nicole_Cliffe’s doughty hands) so Grace and I can deal with a family crisis. love you all, talk soon
I want to assure people, too, that we’re both safe, that we’re grateful for the choices that we’ve been able to make, and that the crisis point has passed. And I’m prouder than ever of Danny - a person of more profound honor and courage, one could not imagine.
November 26. I assume she's talking about John, and that she and Danny had been living in a house or apartment owned by John and Nancy. The grandson would be Laura's baby. Apparently the conflict, whatever it was, is what generated the very short-notice move to New York.
just learned that my shitty transphobic slumlord former landlord is CLOSED FOREVER fuck you you evil piece of garbage, sure your grandson was kind of cute but that’s no excuse for repeatedly misgendering my roommate
a very odd question on the heels of a very disorienting two weeks -- do any of you know of anyone who'd be willing to act as a guarantor to Grace and me for an NYC apartment? Our usual contacts are all out-of-state or otherwise unavailable.
Today, as you likely know, is Thanksgiving in the States. It’s also my 33rd birthday, and the first birthday I have celebrated since becoming estranged from my family of origin. I cannot quite settle on an appropriate term for what these people are to me right now. ‘Biological family’ seems to imply a historical lack of closeness, which isn’t true in my case. ‘Family of origin’ is perhaps the most accurate, but strikes me as clunky and oddly evasive. I could refer to them simply by their names, of course, but there’s something about attempting to eliminate relational language completely that strikes me as wishful thinking: Look at how much I already don’t care about them. Our only connections are haphazard, arbitrary, and genetic. Lucky me, I’m already self-actualized.
In my other job I often find myself in the position of giving advice to other people on the verge of becoming estranged from their own family. While I don’t offer that suggestion lightly, I do think I’ve approached it from a sort-of mathematically perspective – If they do X thing Y times a year and show Z remorse, you should start considering cutting them out of your life, at least until such time they demonstrate an interest in real, good-faith change. The assumption there is that the family of origin has always shown their hand, that you have time to see the estrangement coming and do your level best to avoid it or at least batten down the hatches in advance. I on the other hand, was caught completely off guard. Two weeks ago I learned something I could not live with – asked what had been done about it – learned that nothing had been done, nor would ever – was chided for suggesting it was, in fact, morally necessary to take action immediately – estrangement from my family of origin, which had the day before been the furthest thing from my mind, became a matter of the keenest urgency.
In the last week, I have been able to hastily rewrite the portions of my book concerning my family of origin, and have taken Grace’s last name – feeling, I think quite naturally, a little tired of how many times I have changed my name in the last two years. I have made choices I know I can live with, choices that prioritize loving accountability over secrecy, and encouraged my family of origin to do the same. I am spending my birthday-Thanksgiving with people I love and trust and know myself to be safe with, which I’m enormously grateful for. Now that I’m in a position to slow down and catch my breath, sift through what’s been done and what remains to be done, and assemble my priorities, I find myself with a number of things I cannot so easily estrange from myself—formerly happy memories which now cause me great pain, an impossible desire to remove all mannerisms and habits and turns of phrase that remind me of my origins, a sense of disequilibrium as I reassess the foundation of my existence. Also grief. Also anger. Also a desire to go back in time and do—something. To take new knowledge out of the present and into the past, and so redeem it. Also the flat realization that transition, the act by which I set such great hopes for future models of relating, is of no help to me in this present moment.
And this is the end:
The thing I had not realized about my own family estrangement until it came was that it was not an act of punishment or anger I could either decide to take or not. It was a moral and emotional reality that I could choose to accept or deny, but the estrangement exists with or without my consent. Many people, many queer people I love and admire, do not spend the holidays with their families of origin; I draw great strength from that and know there is great joy and goodness ahead for me. The loss is real, the wound is deep but not mortal, and I am not alone; today will be a good birthday, and unlike any I have ever had before.
I'm sad-but-grateful for @graceelavery's longstanding relationship to family estrangement as I start to grapple with mine for the first time. https://t.co/Gzpzybew04
It’s been such a remarkably strange month. I spent the first half of it choking with rage about very small things, and then the second half faced with a very big thing, which could have caused rage but in fact stimulated other affective responses: a capacity to remake plans, rebuild worlds, hold it together. And horror, which is not rage. Horror, I felt on the night of the 2016 election, and then two weeks ago. The sense that this moment was already the worst, and yet worse moments were certain to come. And indeed there have been horrors, and shames, continually since November 2016. And something was worked through, too. Early in the month, I was writing about how rage, my own and other people’s, tends to scare me - to return me to the infantile scene of maternal rage which cast me as peacekeeper and scapegoat. Well, by the end of the month, I had found myself able to hold another person’s rage - Danny’s rage - without terror. Danny’s rage, which has not been uncomplicated or unmixed, has felt realer and more necessary to me than rage ever had; accordingly, I would write differently today the three essays on rage that I published a couple of weeks ago.
I mentioned this news yesterday to the subscribers, but to the wider list: over the last few days, hundreds of new people have subscribed to this newsletter, by far the biggest jump that The Stage Mirror has undergone since it launched in February, in fact almost as big as the launch was. I take this as a signal of how many people look to online communities to help process and heal the various consequences of familial estrangement. So, hi, everyone. I’m not usually this sad. But I’m not just sad now, either - I’m nervous, excited, horrified, bound by love and desire, concerned about money, optimistic about relationships, grateful for love and queers, at times gripped by profound grief and terror. A full accountancy of what has been lost and gained over the last couple of weeks will take years. So, I guess my newsletter is going to turn into something even more process-y than it has been. Sorry. And, not sorry.
the lead characters in this excellent movie are named Danny and Grace, and frankly we should have seen the last couple of weeks coming pic.twitter.com/D5X4iFEEpa
Four years to the day since we met, two years since I told him he was the love of my life, and today I got to say “we closed the deal” AND buy an extremely dope wedding dress so, yes, some things get better xoxo pic.twitter.com/4B5PS7psfK
meeting a friend to do name change paperwork at a coffee shop that suddenly started playing t.A.T.u’s “200km/h in the Wrong Lane” as if to say “It’s not too late, kid...”
December 4 This newsletter article is behind the paywall so I can't see it, but the fact that he's talking about being motherless makes me sad
I could sort of appreciate that moment, which could either be interpreted as “Remember the ambient sweaty almost-lesbianism that perfumed the early aughts like Bath & Body Works spray? Come back!,” or “You never really pulled that off, even then.” https://t.co/c8jEjfTFVL
It has been a challenging and exhausting couple of weeks for the two of us, which has of course been felt in this newsletter. So I’m happy to announce two things. The first, not directly newsletter-related, though certain to have implications, is that Danny and I are going to move to New York in a couple of weeks’ time. I’m still teaching at UC Berkeley, but starting from next semester I will start commuting from New York to California on a weekly basis. Danny will be in New York while I’m gallivanting. The two of us just signed a deal to rent a very lovely apartment on the top floor of a brownstone in Brooklyn. So I’ll see you on the east coast more often, god wot.
December 5
omfg I have waited a million fucking years to have this card replaced. I can leave the country again. Fuck fascism, fuck the state, freedom of movement NOW pic.twitter.com/NefDkogQxk
This is the article Grace links to, in it's entirety:
A few weeks ago, before anything went down with Danny’s family, I told him that I planned to publish a study of his character on my newsletter, at some point before the wedding. He said he would do the same, and then, benzo’d out on a flight to Honolulu, wrote a gorgeous and mostly pornographic description of my body, which he passed to me to read just as we were landing. “Pornographic” is an imprecise term, in fact: it was sexy, and it had been written in that breathless syntax that wafts the magic of free indirect discourse over prose, that times the rhythms of subordinate clauses as though timing the movements of the body, and that lingers a little, but not too much, over each of the physical elements it names. Later on that day, Danny didn’t remember having written this purple prose, and was pleased and a little self-scandalized to retrieve it from his phone. What the note had imparted to me was primarily the pleasurable feeling that my body was known, and loved, or at least eroticized, even in the regions where I did not love or know it. But that’s not an uncomplicated feeling: one feels dispossessed by it, and a little indignant, as though not only should my body be entirely my own, but my feelings and representations of it should be respected and prevail in all circumstances. Yet of course the truth is that someone who has spent so much time needling, fucking, caressing, and looking at my body knows it far better than I do - who sees it always from a strangely lofty angle. I can’t imagine what it would be to look up to my body, for example, and you have described that experience so beautifully.
Danny, I loved reading The Toast. I found myself endlessly thwarted by it, constantly wanting more from it than I could get. I wanted to rouse those disconsolate ladies in art history into passionate engagement, and I wanted to slip off with them into a dream where we could know each other. There was so much dreaminess in them, women who wreathed themselves in dreams, “sort of like a Brigadoon thing.” When we met, the main point you wanted to communicate was “I’m Rochester,” and “I’m the men in the art history posts,” as though you expected me to find those trivial disclosures surprising. I couldn’t understand how you, or anyone, would think different - I didn’t know how your Rochesterness would rebuild your body, or what it all “meant,” but of course nobody could be these arch, glamorous, psychotically disconnected sylphs whom swains would try, and always fail, to bend into submission. That was not, as Terry Castle might say, a position for a person. I knew you had made this insistence - “I’m Rochester” - many times at people you deemed similar to me, and in fact while I think our interview went well, and I flatter myself that I surprised you, I was a little disappointed that I didn’t succeed in knocking you off your perch entirely, as I had planned. At least, not until I took you out for a drink after the event, me smacking down beer like they were running out and you matching me with hot chocolates, when I told you what was happening to my body, which was becoming utterly abject, and you seemed for the first time, shocked by me, rather than merely impressed.
The words you spoke to me on our - was it our second or third? - date may as well be the motto of our life together. They concerned the horrific cycling of late-stage addiction, that had made much of my life into a Soderberg studio flick and my body into an uninhabitable terror, to which you could respond, “perhaps you will have to go to prison. And I would come and visit you in prison and I would still love you.” It took me two years to unscramble everything, and even then, another two months, almost, before I was finally convinced that, whatever answer could be found for this problem, it was incompatible with ever taking another drink or railing up another line. But those words immediately, and irreversibly, changed my heart - a speech of love from someone who had only just met me, but who already knew me better than anyone else, and for whom love was not reducible to glory or even safety. A love that is larger than disgrace. That was your first gift for me; now it is ours.
Sex is at the heart of your story, as it is at the heart of mine - nothing explains more of you than your relation to your sexuality. Some of which belongs behind closed doors, but one part of which can be spoken because it is my story too: decades spent wishing for a relationship to homosexuality that could make sense, that could tie the whole complex of doubt, desire, and disidentification into a tight, functional knot. In gay relationships you could be your own Rochester, but then those relationships risked becoming retroactively heterosexualized, with you placing yourself outside the bonds you were forging. Straight relationships were, obviously, terrible, as they uniformly are: men could only assimilate your love, so full of manly ardor, as though it were merely a vigorous species of feminine extra-ness, the avoidance of which was the major objective of the whole project of straight love. For those of us (me) who love femme extraness, who need it and cannot live without it, that very redirection could look like contempt. (When we used to fight, as friends, it was often because I felt you wanted me to be less feminine in my attachments, or to play straight with a different set of avowals. The Toast, like many transmasculine egg endeavors, didn’t always know what to do with the fact of effeminate cis boys.)
Still, the news that there was sex, and perhaps even a sexuality, for you, came as an enormous surprise. And you discovered fucking, demonically, well into the period of our friendship, and we would meet, and sit in your car, and I would steam as you told me about fucking some guy at the top of a hill, or for hours in your house, or the look on his face as he knelt in front of you. And I listened, femme diva of furious desire, even less equipped to endure these disclosures than you were when I had tossed them in your direction at any point over the previous couple of years. I really was happy for you, but I wanted your desire back, I wanted you to think about how I looked at you when I knelt down for you, which would have been rarer and more precious. I wanted you to whisk me away to fuck me at the top of various hills in the East Bay. Which, eventually, you decided was in your interests as well.
Whatever will have been the story of the being who will have been called Danny Lavery, and who was once called Mallory Ortberg, strange as it is to remember, it will certainly entail a reckoning with the events of the last few weeks. These events have left us dependent on the hospitality of our wonderful friends in the run-up to our wedding; they have left you without blood family, and to some degree without a name. You changed your name, legally, to “Daniel M. Lavery,” without stipulating a name behind the initial beyond snarling, later, “the ‘m’ is for “motherless.”” You have also manifested your goth side on your right arm, which now bears a pentagram along with the word “desdichado,” and now there’s a whole stone thing going on that I’m not going to discuss in detail. It goes without saying that this is you at your best: utterly right, utterly committed to doing justice though the heavens fall, and profoundly aware of the enormous losses necessitated by the primary commitment to justice. What I love most about you has not shifted since I told my bridal shower a couple of months ago, the Christian half of which has since decided not to attend our wedding: the communism of your soul, your intuitive sense of justice. I pledge my life to it, in fact. I suppose that is one thing that might be meant by a wedding taking place the day after the Solstice.
A couple of months before it all went down, we had a fight about hell. It was a big fight, sparked by my asking you, essentially, how you were able to tolerate saying the Nicene Creed, which I thought entails statements that you don’t believe. And some statements that seem both philosophically extremely difficult to untangle, and oddly technical — “eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father” — like, not trying to be funny or nothing, but that sounds like Heidegger. I also grew up saying the Creed (the Catholic version) and so I once understood it well enough to feel okay saying it, but now that I try to be very careful about meaning what I say, I couldn’t be sure that I know how to determine what I thought of it. You gave me a jokey answer, telling me it is just one of those things that gently lapsed evangelicals retain with a sense of fondness, much like John Bunyan. I didn’t accept that then - you are far too serious about matters of faith to reduce a creed to empty liturgy - and pushed it, too far, until we got to the real point: you are afraid of going to hell. And part of that fear is also a fear of losing the idea of heaven that you would feel obliged to abandon if you followed through on your own insights and intuitions about the faith of your father, or fathers. I held you while you cried out those two twin fears, of going to hell and of losing the fantasy of heaven, and the fight was over. We fell asleep, or I went to a catwalk show, or something - I forget which. I am so, so proud of you, and proud to be yours.
December 10
I’m debuting here what I am wearing instead of a bridal veil next weekend but U GOTTA WAIT FOR THE REST 👰 🕶 pic.twitter.com/QsogdMbp2D
December 11 Same with this one. I haven't read the article but it hurts me that he's talking about John Ortberg
How To Transition Without Turning Into Your Father
after naively entering your thirties in the mistaken belief that you were just one of those rare queer adults without father issues https://t.co/se1k39VOFU
I would have said hell would freeze over before one of John's children said publicly and seriously that "my dad sucks."
estrangement is so weird!!! i just unsubscribed from getting emails from the film festival in LA my dad and I used to go to every year?? does my family just get to keep movies in this breakup
Grace is pretty "out there" Obviously this wasn't the partner John and Nancy dreamed of for Mallory. Plus, she sure doesn't look like a professor of Literature. I wonder what her professional colleagues think about all this:
A post shared by Grace Lavery (@grace.lavery.pangolin) on
December 14: I looked at some comments about this situation on Reddit and this, written 12 days ago, caught my eye:
Grace is getting a lot of flack for her role in this situation, and honestly it would be best if she didn’t acknowledge it. I can understand that she didn’t want to ignore supportive comments, and she did make it clear that this is Danny’s story to share in detail, if and when he decides to do so. However, that message can be communicated in two sentences, and Grace tends to go on and on. This creates the impression she’s reveling in the attention, even if she’s not. Also, I hope she doesn’t chuck a tenured position at Berkeley over her husband’s family spat. That would be unnecessary and stupid, and I’d worry more for Grace than Danny in that case.
As for Danny, I do question his judgment in making a personal situation public in such a vague way. He has always been close to his family. To declare a permanent estrangement seems rash, and it’s suspicious when public dramatics emerge around someone with a book to promote. This thread alone contains hundreds of speculative responses. Danny’s not a newbie on the internet. He knows what he’s doing, and what he’s doing is meant to increase engagement from strangers on social media.
As for Nicole: it’s weird to be so thirsty for attention on Twitter that you blast your thoughts all day long and co-opt a friend’s complicated family situation as your own. Such behavior points to an addiction. She’s smart and funny enough to make an impact without being a constant presence, but is too insecure to take a step back.
Another interesting comment from Reddit:
I sometimes wondered if Daniel's unfolding relationship with Grace was too good to be true. I don't mean to lay blame on either one of them, I just mean that nothing could be as divinely perfect as they both seemed to portray it as being. It was just such a nonstop fairytale of dressup selfies and pillow/postcoital selfies and a general sense of mutual worship. I dismissed the thought because for me at least, it's rare to see a trans couple having such a ball in public and seeming so genuinely in love—I wanted to buy in and I did. But the relentless idyll seemed strange. It seems like Danny's first truly serious relationship (at least serious enough to get as far as marriage, where it seems Grace may have been married before)...and definitely one of Danny's most powerful infatuations. I wondered if the bubble would ever burst.
-These latest tweets, Insta posts and newsletters have felt so performative, so COY. Both Danny and Grace are accomplished wordsmiths, and something about all of this feels very...smithed. Marbled with bullshit and semicolons and evasions and obfuscations. Like they're each dancing wildly around what happened and phrasing it as seductively and strangely as possible and trying to command attention and curiosity while at the same time yielding nothing real. Laura's relatively brief share above actually feels like the "real"-er report of what happened in terms of communicating pain; both Danny and Grace's writing on this has felt so wanky and self-absorbed, like they're more interested in the words they can spin out of this anguish and the confusion they can sow than in actually confronting it. The sense of moral triumph and arrival really stuck out to me. (The question remains: if things are so difficult right now, why the hell share at all?) A boy once rejected me via an email that was as circuitous and vague as one of these posts. My mother (more on her below) told me flatly that he was full of shit and not to be trusted.
There was also a long discussion on Reddit of how wretchedly awful and expensive it will be for Grace to commute cross-country. There's agreement that such a short-notice move, with such life-changing inconvenience for Grace, appears to be an ill-advised scorched-earth reaction to whatever caused the estrangement.
This is from Grace's newsletter, dated August 18. Given how much vitriol she and Danny have been throwing at John and Nancy since mid-November, I was surprised to read how good things were before. She says she "adores" Nancy: My future mother-in-law N., whom I adore, was initially quite skeptical when Danny and I told her that we were dating. She had good reason: about three months earlier, I had introduced her to someone else I had been dating, and - without for a moment wishing to speak ill of a relationship that, quite obviously, was not going to work out - the person to whom I introduced her did not, really, have very much in common. I explained myself to N. by saying that I have a thing for ballerinas - which is maybe true, but also sounds absolutely gak-inducing now I recall it. Anyway, when Danny’s mom heard we were dating, she really couldn’t shake the thought that Danny and me would split up soon, because I was into ballerinas; and that, when we did, it would hurt him. Then one day - it took her about two weeks - she had realization, which I’ve always pictured with a light bulb going off (N. is among that subcategory of women who visibly illuminate when they have an idea): “ah, Grace is the ballerina.”
... I was being welcomed (“showered”?) by N.’s church group, a group of women with whom I have (or so I feared) little in common, not being a Christian myself, and having lived, in plenty of senses, a fairly dissolute and unrepentant life. But N.’s faith, which she shares with her son and (I have now learned) with her church group — the women who organized the event, L. and M., are saints whom I loved with my whole heart — means above all a fluency in the language of emotion, and a capacity to tolerate ambivalence and complexity. Both of these remarkable dimensions of my future mother-in-law’s faith were in use yesterday.
... I loved catching Danny up on the day’s adventures, when we finally reconvened for a family dinner at his parents’ house. By this time, his family became more tangled up in kids and catching up with each other, which was just as well because I was very tired, and glad to cede some of the spotlight to the buzzy toddlers. (Click here to read the entire post.)
