(Photo: Courtesy of Gerren Keith Gaynor)

I’ll never forget the first time I realized my father’s love for me might be conditional.

(Photo: Courtesy of Gerren Keith Gaynor)

And on the other end, I internalized my father’s rejection of what was technically only a part of me (my sexuality), and yet somehow it felt like he had rejected all of me.

In the two months of being back home from college, my dad and I began to bond on another level, not just as father and son, but as two individual men.

Gerren Keith Gaynor with his father on his graduation day at Morehouse College in 2011.

(Photo: Courtesy of Gerren Keith Gaynor)

In fact, aside from the day he dropped me off on campus, my graduation was the only time I ever saw my father cry.