By Margo Harakas – Staff Writer for Sun-Sentinel

He was a good kid, a mother's dream—altar boy, patrol boy, Boy Scout, athlete, senior class president, recipient of his high school's Christian Leadership Award. The middle of seven children in an Irish-Catholic, Detroit family, Brian McNaught's overriding ambition as a small boy was to be God's best friend.

But in 1974, then a 26-year-old Catholic newspaper columnist and cable TV talk show host, McNaught drank a bottle of paint thinner, downed a vial of pills and sat down to die. "I'm going home to God," he thought. He'd be free at last from the pain of pretending to be someone he could not be. Download the article here as a PDF