the main link doesn't resolve for me. here's an archived version
posted by chavenet at 12:50 AM on December 2 [2 favorites]

Previously I'd thought Daniel Lavery had a good relationship with his father. I had no idea about the tragic backstory to all this.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 2:51 AM on December 2 [1 favorite]

I find great comfort in the fact that no one I am related to now knows where I live. If they wanted to find me, they could not.

Not to be combative, but just from following a couple of accounts on Instagram I know that Daniel lives in Lansing, Michigan, in a house owned by Lily Woodruff, one of his partners. He is easily findable.
posted by jokeefe at 10:50 AM on December 3

Michigan, huh? The essay references "our flight to New York" so they probably moved in the four years that have passed since it was written, and maybe become more findable, as some of the drama within his family of origin has maybe become less urgent.

I really do think this FPP could benefit from context. First it's worth knowing, for those who don't, that Daniel Lavery is trans, and his father John Ortberg was an evangelical mega church pastor. Lavery transitioned in 2017, and while I don't know that he's ever publicly described his father's reaction, I don't have the impression that it was exactly warm and understanding.

Some further context can be provided by this timeline in John Ortberg's Wikipedia page:

In the summer of 2018, Ortberg's son, John III, confessed to him that he was sexually attracted to minors. At that time, Ortberg did nothing to ensure that his son stopped his volunteer activities with minors at Menlo Church [where the elder Ortberg was senior pastor.] Ortberg also did not alert other church leaders to the situation.

In 2020, Ortberg's other son, Daniel Lavery, posted on Twitter that a member of his father's church had disclosed his "obsessive sexual feelings about young children" to Lavery on November 15, 2019. Upon discovering that his father had not shared this information with Menlo Church Leadership or the Elder Board, Lavery went to the church's leadership himself.

On November 22, 2019, Ortberg went on leave from his position. The reason for his leave was not stated at that time.

On January 21, 2020, Menlo Church issued a statement indicating the reason why Ortberg was placed on leave: he had allowed a church volunteer (John III was not named in that statement) to work with children despite that volunteer's confession of a lifelong sexual attraction to children. Ortberg was reinstated after an investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing.

On January 24, 2020, Ortberg returned from leave. He stated that he "failed to do the right thing" and apologized for his "lack of transparency". After completing a restoration plan, Ortberg returned to the pulpit on March 7, 2020.

The essay linked in the FPP is dated Mar 12, 2020, so it was written just five days after John Ortberg returned to his position. So that is what happened just before the essay... I very much believe that Lavery had made himself unfindable by his family at that moment.

And this is the after:

Lavery alleged that this investigation was inadequate, because the lawyer who conducted it had no experience with matters of sexual misconduct, but rather was a specialist in protecting clients from litigation.

On July 29, 2020, Menlo Church announced that Ortberg had resigned from his position, effective August 2, 2020, citing broken trust and fallout from the “poor judgement” in decisions he had made in allowing his son to continue to volunteer with students after his confession of an attraction to minors.

In October 2021, the third-party organization Zero Abuse Project completed an investigation into the matter after interviewing 104 witnesses and reviewing or analyzing more than 500,000 documents. Zero Abuse Project did not find any disclosure or other evidence that Ortberg III committed any acts of wrongdoing against a minor.

So the essay was written very much in the middle of all this, not after the end.

And here are some more details about Lavery's life in an April 2024 article from the Cut.

Danny met Grace [Lavery], an academic, in 2015, two years after the birth of The Toast, a sly and chaotic website that also made Danny’s co-founder, Nicole Cliffe, a beloved internet presence; it closed up shop with a eulogy from Hillary Clinton in 2016. [Grace transitioned in 2018]. In 2019, [Daniel] turned 33, married Grace, took her last name, and broke contact with his family, publicly holding his pastor father to account for choices you’d never want your pastor to make. As now perhaps the most famous trans couple of a certain slice of literary America, they decamped abruptly from California to New York.

A year after the Lavery wedding, Grace met Lily online. Lily was teaching art history at Michigan State [...] She wanted to join their gang is how Grace considers it. Eventually, Lily moved in. (It would probably interest you to know, because we’re all nosy, that, yes, they all sleep in the same bed. It also doesn’t seem particularly large.)

“For a long time, I didn’t want to have a baby because I was worried about what the world’s going to look like,” Lily says. She is in the middle of the seating arrangement, flanked by Grace and Danny. But in the summer of 2022, her point of view, which was previously and naturally quite pessimistic, changed. [...] Grace was eager to do it but wanted to have a baby only if Danny was onboard too. Danny agreed.
[...]
They would like to stay in New York, and they hope it works out. Right now, this includes Danny getting a day job. On the weekends, he is working with senior-citizen artists. “It’s $18 an hour,” he says. “We were kind of talking about if we are not able to make it work, we’ll go where we have to. But I would love to get to stay here if possible.
[...]
On April 3, Rocco was born. Grace says that by the time he arrived, she had talked with a lawyer.
”

I didn't really know the post 2020 parts of this story. I followed Lavery's early work and "Dear Prudence" advice column (which got very "just cut them out of your life already" for a little while there, understandably) but have lost track of him the last couple of years. Interested to know how having a baby and moving to Michigan is working out for him! Does he still have a day job?! I am genuinely invested in his story, and would like to know where to find the latest updates that he has voluntarily shared...

posted by OnceUponATime at 12:44 PM on December 3

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