There was a bedtime and morning ritual in the Malebranche household. A kiss from the family patriarch to his son David and daughter Michelle that was so routine—his decision to replace David’s kiss with deafening silence—reverberated loudly throughout their home in Galway, NY, in the summer of 1992.

Despite being an exceptional student with degrees from Princeton, Emory, and Columbia Universities, Malebranche, now 53, had become accustomed to achieving a level of success that appeared to impress everyone but the Haitian-born surgeon he called dad. Yet he was not accustomed to being viewed as a disappointment by the man he idolized.

“Donna, is our son trying to tell us something?” Malebranche recalls his father asking his mother almost daily, particularly after getting his ears pierced, and choosing to wear an earring in the right ear only on this particular day, which in the early 90s was a cultural indicator that a man was not heterosexual.

“He would ask her that question every morning. He would not let it go,” Malebranche said. “So after the third or fourth morning, she'd say, ‘What do you want me to do? I can’t cover for you.’”

“I'm 23. If he's not man enough to ask me directly, he’s not man enough to hear it from me, so you tell him,” he said. “And so she did. Those three days that I was home, he didn’t speak to me at all.”