When Jake Abhau’s son, Jon, came out as gay at age 13, he was stunned, for many reasons — not the least of which was the family’s adherence to the Mormon faith.

His shock, though, was very quickly overtaken by the fiercely defensive love that Abhau had for his son.

“In the Church [of Latter Day Saints], if you’re LGBT, you have to be celibate — you can be gay, but you can’t act on it. And I knew how high-risk that had to make a person for suicide and depression,” Jake tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “And I felt, OK, I think the church has this one wrong. I’d never thought about it to the depths that I was suddenly thinking about it.”

That culture clash, recalls Jake, who had been raised as Mormon since he was 9 years old, shook him and his wife, Meg, to the core. And suddenly, as they found themselves feeling like outsiders in their church and in their religious, tightly knit community in Scottsdale, Ariz., they began to question their place in it.

“I almost had to defend my decisions about how to parent and love my own child, as they didn’t always line up with the church,” the dad recalls. “What other father has to defend who his son will have sex with and marry when he’s only 13?”

View photos Jake and his son, Jon, at D.C. Pride in 2013. (Photo: Courtesy of Jake Abhau) More

Being unable to speak openly and honestly with their peers, who had once been their closest confidants, left them feeling “isolated and alone.” So Meg reacted by forming a support group that she called Mama Dragons. (She had written a coming-out letter of sorts to their congregation, in which she explained that “Mama Bear” didn’t feel like a strong enough term for how defensive she felt of Jon, and that it was more akin to a fire-breathing dragon.) And soon, Jake and the handful of other compassionate Mormon fathers of LGBT kids began lamenting that they didn’t have a group of their own. “We felt just as protective, but we were different,” he says.

So Jake answered the call. He created a private Facebook group called Dragon Dads, reaching out to people through a big, already-existing online community of gay Mormons — young people who had just come out, and men who had spent years in the closet married to women, and were just now embracing their true selves.

“There really wasn’t anything for dads. And our needs were special,” Jake says, explaining that he and other dads he knew were basically looking for something that could emulate water cooler culture at their offices — where dads can talk (and brag) about their kids and what they did over the weekend. “If Jon goes on his first date with another boy, I can’t say that [in my world],” he explains. “But I wanted to be able to share like they were sharing.”

The group started very small, with three dads and then five, from places including Utah, Washington, California, and Arizona. It grew to 30 men in the first year, and now four years in, it’s 125 strong and trying to expand further — beyond only Mormon dads to any who share the commonality of “coming from a religious-right institution where being gay is seen as wrong.”

View photos A Dragon Dads gathering. (Photo: Courtesy of Jake Abhau) More

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