“Why Us?”
Once, the family of the Reverend Jimmy Allen was blessed with an unshakable faith in God. Then came AIDS, banishment, and death—and a need to ask the eternal question.
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For Skip, suffering has a different meaning than it has for other members of his family. It has given him a way to connect to them. After Lydia died, Skip decided to talk to Matthew as an equal. “You know Matt, we’ve got something in common,” Skip told his nephew. “I’m HIV positive too.” Immediately Matthew wanted to know how Skip had gotten the disease. Skip told him the truth, that he had gotten the disease through sexual transmission. “Oh,” said Matthew, underwhelmed.
Skip was friends with Lydia before Scott was. Back when they were teenagers at the First Baptist Church in San Antonio, Skip and Lydia sang together in the youth choir and went to the same Sunday school class. His other brothers—Michael and Scott—did not attend church, but Skip was his father’s little Baptist boy. He sang solos in church and was interviewed weekly on one f Jimmy’s television shows for teenagers called Good News.
At sixteen, Skip sat his father down in the parsonage in San Antonio and blurted out the truth. “I’m gay,” Skip told him. Even now Skip remembers the look of horror on his father’s face. “He told me that when God created the world, He created everything for a purpose, and that man and woman were created to live together,” recalled Skip. “Then my dad told me he would always love me but could never bless my life in my choice to be a homosexual.”
Each was so certain in his own view that reconciliation was impossible. For the next ten years, each went his own way. After high school, Skip chose to attend Houston Baptist College, hoping his father would approve. As for Jimmy Allen, he was true to his word; he kept in contact with and continued to love Skip but denied his approval of his son’s sexual orientation. The night that Jimmy was elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention in the Astrodome in 1979, Skip was in downtown Houston at a gay march protesting Anita Bryant’s appearance at a local hotel. Later Jimmy thanked Skip for keeping such a low profile.
After leaving college, Skip had a hard time keeping a job, because he had a drinking problem. At one point he was drinking half a gallon of vodka a day. Ten years ago he started going to a twelve-step personal-recovery program and stopped drinking. The philosophy of self-help has replaced the fundamental Christianity of his youth.
Still, he believes God’s love is enduring. “When I was little, I used to sing a song about being God’s little sunbeam,” said Skip. “That’s what I am. They can kick me out of the church, but I’m still God’s sunbeam. Nothing anyone can do can take that away from me.” Nonetheless, anguish camps in Skip’s heart. Like Job’s, Skip’s worst nightmares have happened in spite of his trying to be so good that he does not disappoint those around him.
No one with the HIV virus is free of guilt or isolation, and Skip has carried equal loads of both. When he first found out his test results were positive in 1987, Skip’s employer canceled his health insurance. Now he depends on the public AIDS clinic at Parkland Hospital, where a routine visit can take eight hours. In 1992 Skip decided to go into business for himself and bought a frame shop in North Dallas.
Sometimes he asks himself whether he is guilty for getting AIDS. “If our family is a chain,” said Skip, “then I’m the kink.” Often he wonders how his father views the question of guilt, but he has never asked him for fear he wouldn’t like the answer.
“What does guilt have to do with it?” asked Jimmy Allen when I asked him the question Skip was too afraid to ask. “AIDS is AIDS. I don’t blame Skip for getting AIDS,” said Jimmy. “He’s my son. I love him. All I know is that we have to walk through this together.”
But even now, after more than twenty years, Jimmy still withholds his approval of Skip’s lifestyle. “I just can’t believe this is the intention of God for Skip’s life,” said Jimmy. “I don’t see it as a condemnation of Skip. There is a love that is higher than mere approval. Skip yearns for my approval and has been hurt because I don’t want him to settle for just that. I want him to get to the love.”
This fall found Matthew Allen a happy little boy. After his father disclosed the family’s story in the New York Times in September, all the fourth-graders at Lakewood Elementary, Matthew’s school, gathered in an assembly to learn about AIDS. “It’s just good not to touch somebody else’s blood,” Scott Allen told his son’s classmates. “Blood is not to be played with.”
The fear that Matthew would become another Ryan White, who fought a two-year battle in the late eighties to attend a public school in Indiana, did not materialize. So far, no parent from Lakewood has asked to withdraw a child from school. If anything, Matthew has been treated as a hero. He is popular and out-going. The members of his Cub Scout troop encouraged him to keep participating. For his tenth birthday, Matthew took fourteen of his buddies out for pizza. “Kids shouldn’t have to keep secrets,” Matthew told me in late September. “It goes against their nature.”
To look at Matthew, you would never guess that he is a gravely ill boy who has already lived four years longer than his doctors expected. He is a beautiful child who has his father’s dark brown hair and his mother’s wide cheekbones. Most days Matthew is a constant flurry of activity. When he isn’t chasing his dog, Radar, through the house, he grabs bananas off the kitchen counter or fixates on a Terminator video game. When asked to describe himself, Matthew didn’t hesitate. “I’ve got my dad’s sense of humor,” he said, laughing, “and my mom’s common sense.”
Still the members of his family have learned that death can be a spontaneous part of any conversation. Once after his mother died, he was flying a kite with his grandmother, Wanda Allen, but the wind was too strong, and the kite got away from them. “Don’t worry,” Matthew told his grandmother after the kite was out of sight. “Mom will catch it for us.”
Near the end of a long fall day, as we were driving near White Rock Lake, Scott noticed that Matthew had a mouthful of bubble gum and was in the process of blowing an enormous bubble. “Don’t pop it on your face,” Scott chided. Too late. Pop! Matthew giggled through a web of pink goo.
“Dad,” said Matthew, “when I die, you better pin a note on my shirt telling whoever is in charge not to give me bubble gum.” Scott laughed and promised that he would do just that.
“Never mind,” said Matthew. “I guess I won’t wear clothes after I die. I’ll be naked, just like when I was born.” This time Scott had no comment. All three of us drove along in silence.
I remembered part of the conversation I had had with Jimmy Allen in Georgia. When I had asked him what he had learned from all the tragedy in his family, he thought for a long time. “What I’ve learned is that each of my three sons love God in their own way and that all three of my sons love me,” Allen said. “Suffering has taken me to a place beyond theology. What I’ve gotten to is love.” What he meant was that he had learned to see the world through Job’s eyes—the good and the bad, the just and the unjust—and live in peace, resting in the unknown.
In the end, Job realizes there is no justice, only wisdom, and wisdom is given by God in suffering. Each member of the Allen family was given his own private answer. Scott is an Eastern mystic. Lydia devoted herself to helping others. Skip lives on day at a time to please himself. Bryan wept. Matthew is a prescient ten-year-old—he sees with the clarity of someone who has lived with death. And Jimmy? Well, Jimmy is certain in his Christianity.
At the end of the book of Job, God told Job that the reason he had suffered was because Job wasn’t present at the creation. “Don’t you think that’s a crummy answer?” I asked Jimmy Allen.
“The important thing to me is not what God said to Job, but what Job said to God,” Allen insisted, reminding me that God appeared to Job and comforted him. Then suddenly he dropped all pretense, and I saw him as an ordinary man, separate from the authority of his vocation. The veil dropped from his watery eyes, and he sobbed. “Like Job, before all this happened, I had only heard of God with my ears,” said Allen. “Now I’ve seen Him face to face.”
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