Coming Out in the Spotlight : Gay son of a prominent military father recounts his struggles : ALL-AMERICAN BOY: A Memoir <i> By Scott Peck (Scribner: $22; 235 pp.) </i>

In 1993 during the congressional hearings on President Clinton’s proposal to rescind the ban on homosexuals in the military, Col. Fred Peck testified that he had just learned that his son Scott was gay. “If he were to actively seek a commission in the military,” Col. Peck said, “I would counsel him against it, and I would fight it. There is no place in the military for him.”

Although the subsequent media coverage revealed diametrically opposed beliefs on homosexuality in the military between the colonel and his son, that debate is largely absent from Scott Peck’s nonetheless absorbing new memoir, “All-American Boy.” Instead, the younger Peck grapples with the growing awareness of his sexuality in his adolescence and early adulthood, a complex quest for self-acceptance wrapped up in the anger over an absent father, an ingrained religious guilt and distress caused from his mother’s struggle with cancer.

Raised by a violent, alcoholic stepfather, a deeply religious mother and manipulative grandparents, Scott Peck’s real father, a Marine and a Vietnam veteran, was a distant fantasy figure to him as a boy, “a tin box full of pictures, and a name signed to a check that appeared in our mailbox once a month with military regularity.” Peck’s parents had divorced shortly after his father had returned from Vietnam, and while growing up Peck often blamed his missing father for his gay thoughts, a belief grounded, in part, within the psychiatry of an uncompromising and fearful religion.

At the heart of this coming out story is the powerful account of a young man’s struggle with his faith. Chastised by his grandmother in first grade for being “perverted” for liking a boy and warned that he would not go to heaven when he died, Peck learned very early on to keep his gay desires hidden, to walk “inside myself to that place where a million other boys like me have gone, to reinvent ourselves and commence growing up silently. Went inside, closed the door, began hiding, began fading, began trying to fit that label, ‘pervert,’ on myself, trying it on like a parochial school uniform that scratched and itched and I hated it.”

Wanting to become a fundamentalist preacher since he was a boy, Peck believed that “the pulpit was the center of the universe.” But he is respectfully cautious about demeaning his religious background in “All-American Boy,” however, never mocking nor cynical, instead perceptively delineating his own path toward the reinvention of his faith. The glimpses the author provides into the Bible Belt environment are detailed and fascinating, from his fellow “charismatic” high school students who speak in tongues, to the tag-team revivalist style preaching techniques he triumphs in at a Bible college in Florida.

Gradually, however, Peck begins to look out into the world for other guides in how to accept and live his life, moving through boyish infatuations and a suicide attempt, until he ultimately finds comfort in a lesbian who has served as a surrogate mother for him. Transferring to the University of Maryland, he inches further into gay life by first covering the subject as a reporter for the school newspaper.

Peck’s vivid prose never falters in its insights, even as it randomly changes voices and styles, often invoking a second-person narrator or italicizing unspoken comments.

His portrait of the enigmatic Col. Peck remains the weakest element of a remarkable debut of a talented young writer. Unfortunately, the anger and confusion within the Peck household during the congressional hearings seems hurried through in order to reach a literary and emotional resolution between father and son. So it is not surprising, then, when the younger Peck remarks on the fragility of real fathers, he also subtly reveals the way that many gay men have learned that families are sometimes created and defined far beyond simple blood relations.