Pete Schabarum's son on coming out to dad

Pete Schabarum was the last white, conservative county Supervisor to hold the seat long occupied by Gloria Molina. In the 1980s, Schabarum led a fight on the board against funding for services to combat the AIDS epidemic in the gay community. It made him a target of anger in gay circles, but around the same time his son was coming out of the closet. Tom Schabarum, now a Seattle novelist, tells ZevWeb his father was never homophobic.

Twenty-two years ago, while walking along the beach with his father in San Diego, he shared a secret.

“I came out to him,” Tom Schabarum recalls. “We talked for many hours. And he was great. He was awesome. He basically said, ‘This is not going to change our relationship,’ but in fact it did. It made it really, really good.”

[skip]

“I think my dad was a politician for noble reasons,” says the younger Schabarum. “Whether he was conservative or liberal doesn’t make any difference—he wanted to do good.”

Dad played 34 games in the NFL for the 49ers. He's now 82 and living near Palm Desert.