They were my family, but I resented them for the fact that in public, I was always afraid of who might be watching us. And from what I learned when they thought I wasn’t listening: party drugs, STD’s, park hook-ups, and a lexicon of gay slang.
I became the beneficiary of the fatherly advice of dozens of successful childless men learning how to arrange flowers, how to develop a skincare regimen, how to cook gourmet food, and how to sharpen my cocktail conversation. He gave me a suspicious look, then trotted off towards the action at the distant goal.įriends were a liability, so I spent every evening and weekend with my father and his friends. I shrugged, “Just some gay dude from his work,” I said. “Who’s that fag with your dad?” said a mid-fielder who was my closest friend at the school. One Saturday morning I was playing in a soccer game, and mid-way through, I looked up into the stands and noticed my father had come to watch, along with a friend. No friendship was worth the risk of any kids from my class coming over to our apartment and seeing a pink triangle on one of my father’s political newsletters, or even just our nude statue of David magnet on the fridge.Īnd my fears were not unfounded. But normalcy was never in the cards, and after my father came out to me, what few friends I had, I kept at a distance.
I’d chosen the school because it seemed like a place to reconnect with “normalcy” after my time with the meditators. The day after I arrived in Seattle, I started eighth grade at a Catholic School not far from his apartment. I had only visited my father in Seattle at the tail-ends of holidays, and his life seemed so exotic. I’d moved to Seattle six months earlier from Iowa, where I’d lived with my mother in a meditation community since we loaded up a U-Haul during sixth-grade Christmas break, and left Louisiana after six generations there. And it would take me years to realize that getting to know him as he really was, would deepen our relationship and give me a clearer pair of eyes on the world. That was the moment I knew that I would never look at my father the same way again. As I walked beside him, the man I had always seen as an extension of myself and a vision of my future, suddenly seemed like a stranger. But this time, I knew what he really meant by “space.”Īfter our talk, my father and I walked up to Capitol Hill’s main drag for some lunch the clock said I needed but my stomach couldn’t fathom. The irreversibility of what my father was saying suddenly hit me in a wave, and I became that same child crying on the dock four years earlier. I’d chosen to believe it was normal for “roommates” to share a queen-sized bed, even though a bigger part of me knew otherwise. at a viewing of the AIDS quilt, was actually his ex-boyfriend. On the loveseat that day in Seattle, my father told me his former roommate, a Brazilian man named Rubem whom he met in D.C. Wasn’t I proof that he loved women? Denial became my religion in those years. The kind of people with gay friends, even in 1980’s Louisiana. Then again, my parents were ex-hippies turned open-minded yuppies. And he almost did, but my mother took his hand and insisted: “This is a decision that we have both made,” she said.īefore Seattle, he started his new life in New Orleans, surrounded by young, handsome male “friends” who were always careful with their pronouns around me awkwardly tiptoeing with phrases like “his ex” instead of “ex-boyfriend.” I could tell that at least some of them were gay, and I wondered why he had gay friends. “I just need some space,” my father had said.