The Patriotic Cottage is easy to spot. It’s the small ranch-style house with the neatly landscaped garden out front, the working fountain, the array of bird feeders, and the 15 or so little American flags lining the walkway.
When we’d spoken on the phone, Mylinda had politely declined to participate in my story, but one day in early November, I showed up on her doorstep anyway, hoping to change her mind. A compact woman with high eyebrows, heavily mascaraed eyes, and a strong chin, she’d cheerfully invited me in and offered me a tour of the place. Eventually, she agreed to participate.
Inside, the cottage was floridly ornamented with needlepoint Bible quotes and inspirational sayings, a profusion of candy in dishes, works of edgy political art by MAGA painter Jon McNaughton and others, National Rifle Association swag, collectible plates, Americana-themed throw pillows, and a scale replica of the Liberty Bell.
If it contained a single unoccupied surface or a bare expanse of wall space, I didn’t spot it. Some juxtapositions were jarring: A mirrored shelf bore a printed quote from Martin Luther King Jr. (“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”) beside a Confederate flag coffee mug sporting the motto “Southern by the Grace of God,” despite the fact that no one in the family is really Southern. An entire bookshelf in the bathroom was devoted to the literary output of radio host Michael Savage. On the refrigerator door, old family photos and Bible passages written out in a graceful hand on Post-its were displayed alongside images of dismembered fetuses.
Although Thanksgiving was still more than three weeks away, the large dining room table was already set for the holiday. Figurines of pilgrims, male and female, decorative gourds, and artificial foliage surrounded an old-timey model pickup truck filled with pumpkin-shaped candy corn.
“I redo this room each month,” Mylinda explained, handing me a cup of coffee.
Later, she showed me Matthew’s childhood bedroom, with his framed awards from the California ProLife Youth Oratory Competition and the Yesterday’s Books Summer Reading Club, a collection of lava lamps, and a list of daily chores. Except for the recent addition of a Trump-Pence 2020 sign, Mylinda told me, the room was essentially untouched since the family’s falling out.
Matthew never spent a day in what Mylinda calls “government schools.” By the time he was ready for kindergarten, she had already pulled her other two sons out of the system. Not only did forcing energetic little boys to sit behind a desk all day constitute “cruel and unusual punishment” as she put it, but government education ends in tyranny, she said, as the Founders well knew.
Instead, she taught Matthew herself, focusing on literature, history, and religion and turning to a local co-op for math and science. In the sitting room, several walls are given over to the family’s library, with sections devoted to theology, biography, and history. Matthew was allowed to read any book he wanted, provided it was in the family collection. TV was forbidden, Matthew says, although conservative talk radio blared throughout the day. As for music, classical and some gospel were acceptable, but anything contemporary, including Christian rock, was deemed off-limits due to its use of syncopation.
Providing for the education of her boys and protesting regularly at the local “abortuary” were hardly Mylinda’s only responsibilities in those years. One day in April 1996, her husband, Ron Mason, a corrections officer, was driving back from nearby Oakdale when a pickup broadsided his car. He was nearly killed. After Ron spent several weeks in intensive care without regaining consciousness, doctors began talking about removing him from life support. Mylinda told them no. “I’m pro-life,” she explained. “If God takes him, I’m good with that. But pulling the plug? I am not good with that. I can’t do that.’”
To everyone’s amazement, Ron pulled through, though a full recovery took years. It wasn’t easy holding everything together after Ron’s accident. She had to dress his wounds with fresh gauze, clothe him, feed him, teach him to talk again, everything, all while raising her two older sons and Matthew largely on her own.
Mylinda in the living room of her home, which she calls the Patriotic Cottage.
“That’s when I became the person that you see now,” Mylinda told me. “Because before that, I believed it here.” She placed her hand on her heart. “But I didn’t have to walk it. That made me walk it.”
Shortly after adolescence, Matthew took an interest in a book that was not in the family’s home library, the novel Wicked by Gregory Macguire, the imagined backstory of the two witches, good and evil, who feature in The Wizard of Oz. Mylinda said no.
“I was obsessed with The Wizard of Oz,” Matthew recalled over dinner at an Applebee’s in Manteca. Now 29, he is pursuing his bachelor’s in kinesiology at California State University, Stanislaus, in nearby Turlock with the goal of becoming a nurse practitioner. He wore jeans and a colorful striped tank top that showed his soft, narrow shoulders. His hair, still floppy, hung around his ears. His beard was trimmed into a sparse goatee, and his youthful earnestness seemed to have given way to a wry sense of humor.
He said he’d eventually been mystified that his parents had missed the signs of his emerging sexuality. “They were very open to letting me bake and do girly shit,” he said. “Looking back, I’m like, ‘Mylinda, really? Really? You were surprised?’” He lifts one skeptical eyebrow. “And she’s like, ‘I just thought you were special and sensitive.’”
Although Ron eventually recovered and began a new career as a real estate agent, he’d undergone a personality shift, from stalwart family patriarch to a quieter, more easygoing figure, happy to stay in the background while his wife set the tone. During the afternoon and evening I spent at the Patriotic Cottage, he was welcoming but wary, speaking only a few words.
Mylinda had always been a strict parent, but managing the family on her own seemed to bring out an authoritarian streak. Painful spankings, sometimes administered with a long glue-gun stick (the kind popular with scrapbookers), were routine. And the spankings would generally continue until the boy stopped crying or trying to wriggle free. “Once the child becomes compliant, then you’re done,” Matthew remembered, flashing a sardonic smile. Asked if he now considered the treatment to be abuse, he replied, “Oh, definitely.”
“When I said to my kid, ‘Pick that up,’ they picked it up,” Mylinda told me. “It’s called first-time obedience. They learn that when they’re like six months old.”
For Matthew, coming to terms with his sexual orientation was a long process, made infinitely more complicated by Mylinda’s anti-gay activism. She’d spent years picketing Pride events and rainbow proms, carrying signs warning attendees of the death and damnation that surely awaited them. Often, Matthew had been at her side, secretly longing to bolt from the group of protesters and hit the dance floor himself.
Once, when he was 14 or 15, a counterprotester got in his face. “You’re gay,” she said, somehow intuiting the truth just by looking at him. “Why are you doing this?”
“I am not,” Matthew replied.
“Denial,” the woman said bluntly.
It was around that time that Matthew gained access to the internet in order to take online high school courses. Eventually, he began blogging on Xanga, where at one point, a piece about his birth story became one of the most-read posts. While he never opened up about his sexual preference on the platform, he did encounter other LGBTQ people, confirming his hunch that they were far from the degenerate fiends he’d been taught to fear.
He didn’t come out to his parents until he was 19. He’d been staying with his brother Josh after an argument with Mylinda. When he left a browser open on a gay-oriented website, his brother had alerted Mylinda and Ron. Eventually, Matthew leveled with them. “You cannot be gay,” Mylinda told him. “I know you can act gay, Matthew, we all know that. But God doesn’t make those.” As long as he persisted in “practicing homosexuality,” he was told, he’d no longer be welcome to live at home.