It sounds like almost everyone had the same experience. My dad was also the one who got super weird about GTA.

Whenever I'd go to my grandparent's house to stay the night, they would pretty much always take me by Blockbuster so I started taking my Dreamcast with me and would rent GTA 2 because they didn't really know what it was and I'd stay up nearly all night trying to cram in as much as I could. I did also at one point try and get away with "accidentally" putting the wrong game back in the case before it was returned but my grandmother got a call like an hour or so later and I was busted.

Around the time San Andreas came out I made another push for it and my mom thought the whole thing was dumb because it was just a video game but then fucking HOT COFFEE was all over the news and no matter how hard I tried to explain that I wouldn't be able to do that in the PS2 version, it didn't matter. So I ended up with Total Overdose instead.

Didn't win until I got a PSP, hacked it, and loaded a pirated copy of Liberty City Stories on it. It was cool to finally scratch the itch but it was quite the same. I also managed to sneak a copy of Chinatown Wars on DS, but it still wasn't quite as satisfying as I hoped.

Never made any sense to me because they let me watch stuff like Jackass and I pillaged my dad's CDs for stuff like Nine Inch Nails and Jane's Addiction but GTA was such a battle.