That's interesting. I hope someone does write about this. I really liked the fact that the guy may not be gay. That would be really interesting and non-cliche. As for the reson, he moved here... I don't have much idea. Perhaps the mother went to jail or bankrupt and cannot rear her son...

Seriously, there are a number of reasons for the kid to have left home. Mum's a druggie and couldn't care less. Mum's new boyfriend is abusive, at least to the kid. Sickness/injury that makes the mother incapacitated (assumes no other close relations -- or the courts order that the kid goes to the parent as the closest living relation), or the mother dies/is dying. Mum ends up in prison.

 

Have a look at Dom's Desert Dropping which has a similar basis. In that case the Mum dies, and she never told either the son or the father about each other (Dad moved away before the mum learnt she was pregnant). Dom handles the situation and explanation extremely well.

It could also be something that the kid did. A story I'm working on has a character that ran away from home to his college-aged half-brother, not because his mother or father were abusive or anything, but because he has a fervent hope that the local police won't pursue him across state lines. I haven't yet decided what his specific crime was (but I'm thinking some sort of possession charge), other than it has to be significant enough that Daddy won't be able or might not be willing to throw money at it until it goes away, yet unremarkable enough to not get a nationwide manhunt on his tail. As the brothers despise one another, and have a long history of despising one another, it's been quite fun to write so far. I guess I should also specify that the character is 16, and his brother is 20.

In your case, the kid might have been banned from the county by court order. It happens, albeit not often in cases of people so young. In which case, his mother might have specifically sought out gay-father, despite her own misgivings and possible homophobia, as the only person who might be willing to take on her little hooligan. I guess this is a variation of "Desert Dropping," with the bonus that no one is particularly innocent (Mom, Dad, and Son all made some screw-ups to create the situation), which should up the surly factor all around by a couple orders of magnitude.

I would like to see your take on the swishy kind of guy: mostly people write them as Icons and not as -- well, your guys. I have an especial interest in this. My circle of friends in high school (or rather, one fo the two circles I most ran in) included a bunch of these guys. It was almost a fad for a guy to at least try that persona on. I must admit this is 1967-1970, San Francisco, and one of the things we did for fun was to go down to the midnight movie at the Palace theater in Chinatown and watch the Cockettes do their drag thing (people somewhat younger than me would know one of those guys, Sylvester, as a disco singer: but man, could he sing the blues). One of the boys in my school became lovers with one of the Cockettes, a nice young man who dressed in motorcycle leathers and sang "Melancholy Baby" and loaned me a quarter when I came up short at the St. Vincent de Paul to buy the deep skillet I have to this day (my point, and I do have one, is that I had an onion on my belt . . .) No, the real point is that having known these guys, I almost never recognize them in their depictions in books and movies. They're either presented as these cartoons or as a bunch of iconic contradictions. They'd be much better off written the way you write guys -- sort of Joe Swish, I guess.Now, if the kid shows up on the doorstep at the age of 14, and has been out of dad's life for ten years, I'm thinking: Dad didn't throw away the kid. Dad was thrown away, maybe not by mom, but by mom and/or someone else in the family. I've just witnessed in my own circle a young couple who've uncoupled though remaining good friends, simply put, because he's gay and she's not a man. He wanted to give it a run in the first place, not just because he loves her dearly, but also because he wanted to be a father. (he's a sweetie and the only thing wrong with him is that he's young)Well -- what if? What if Dad had been a young man like that, only they gave it a longer run, got married, had a baby, and then -- well, maybe it wasn't his gayness that got him thrown out of his child's life. Maybe it was hers. Or something else. And what if there wasn't anybody throwing anybody away, but it was just really hard to keep the contact -- school, emigration, prison, enlistment, career things made it really hard, and it was only supposed to be temporary -- and suddenly it's ten years later and all Dad's been doing for the last few years is child support money and an annual letter.And what if Gabe's right and the reason the kid shows up is that he's somehow blown it back home, and he's built up this romantic idea about his dad from the annual letters, and he's thought that dad was some kind of paradigm of perfection, and that's such a delicate construct that it blows over real fast in the face of warty reality, and having Uncle Joe Swish on the premises is not immediately helpful. And if he's fourteen, he's really delicate about his own sexuality and it may be a problem to him to have a father who is clearly different in this way, because he really can't know these things about himself right now -- But it's your story.

There's definitely all sorts of things you can do with this setup. I figured the kid got shoved aside as mom's got a new boyfriend and is angry at what he's seen as a decade of abandonment, mom's not all that nice a person, Dad's got guilt issues, and his partner's pissed at having to deal with it all. Hilarity doesn't ensue, as such, but there's an awful lot of conflict, and it a way it'd resonate in a different way than an all-gay cast would -- unfortunately shit-headed behaviour towards one's kids is depressingly universal, or at least cuts across all the boundaries I've ever seen.

It definitely has the potential to be a powerful book. Just wish I had the time to do it. Maybe next year...