Straight Father and Gay Son
A long time running misunderstanding about love
It’s pretty much a cultural given that fathers love their children and children reciprocate that love. There are obvious exceptions under fraught circumstances, but it’s more true than not.
When my father died, my four siblings attested to that give-and-give-back love, able to cite many examples of his acceptance and generosity, proxies for his love. And that manifestation of his caring was not rubber stamped. Each of us presented him and my mother with challenges of different sorts. I see the products of their love, long past their deaths, in the caring that all of us siblings still have for each other, in spite of slews of difference.
My younger brother at my dad’s funeral named him his hero, in recognition, I suppose, of all the starts and restarts my father gave him over some 50 years. The same with my older brother whose wife’s death from breast cancer left him to raise two young girls. Both my parents stepped in, my mother to afford him emotional support and my father to provide the fortitude. When our parents aged out of independent living, they came to live with my brother, and he reciprocated the love by seeing them peacefully through their own deaths.
There are similar stories that my sisters could tell about how my parents supported them emotionally and substantively with the rearing of their own children.
And then there’s me, the odd one out in a way, who even in early childhood had questions about how much my parents loved me, especially my father. The why of this took some decades to figure out. The issue almost certainly was that I needed or wanted more affirmative love than I felt I got.
I have an old family picture of my father holding me on his lap on the sidewalk steps in front of our new house. I was three, and we were resting from the moving in. I have no memory of whether him holding me was typical behavior, but the expression on my face and my posture showed I was at ease and feeling safe.
It wasn’t, however, more than a year later that I remember wondering why he didn’t hold or hug me anymore. He hadn’t singled me out. He applied the same reluctance to my older brother too. But my brother was already being socialized into American maleness, where overt affection between men is rare and at best awkward. I was resisting that socialization. I was turning out gay.
For all the intervening decades before I came out to my parents, I convinced myself that my father tacitly understood I was not going to turn out according to his masculine expectations. Being gay was something I felt early on — not by that label, of course; this was the 40’s and 50’s, after all. It was abomination times, mentally defective times, though I didn’t know those designations either.
It wasn’t until puberty started to assert itself, when I had to do something with the erections coming along big time, that I felt the truth of who I was. The boys who excited those erections made it clear that the homosexual label described me perfectly. And it meant, too, that I would also have to own the condemnations attached to it.
The real problem was the Catholic church, not my parents. I could keep the secret of my “condition” away from the family but not from the church. Its strictures demanded that I own up to all my lustful thoughts and later actions through the sacrament (to me humiliation) of confession. What might have been, should have been, a joyful adolescence of self discovery became a time of trying to deny who I was.
Oddly enough, though, it was the church that ultimately made me embrace my nature. I let myself be humiliated, in what turned out to be the last time. In the confessional, during which the priest invited me to the rectory for a private consultation, I recognized the church’s hypocrisy and the lie about homosexuality. I reprogrammed myself, rejected the lie and the church, and I haven’t looked back.
But considerable damage had already been done. I was 17 and socially unequipped to understand how the reprogramming would work. I went into a new life unprepared for how to navigate it.
The secret-keeping from my parents heightened in some catch-22 way my doubts of their love. I felt, as devout Catholics, they would have to disown me or detest me. Pitting their love for me against their love of the church, I didn’t think I’d come out on top.
The evidence I manufactured went all the way back to when my father stopped hugging me. I supposed with absolutely no logic behind it that he must have suspected I was gay (at four years old!) and had distanced himself because of it. But as asinine as that reasoning was, it set me on a path to distance myself from him. It didn’t help either that his joke repertoire for years included a lot of faggot jokes. There wasn’t any malice in the jokes. They were just funny in his mind. I remember at some point in my early 20’s that he’d stopped telling them sometime earlier.
All through my high school and college years he was supportive of my bookish bent. He told me later in his 70s that he’d felt pride in my academic success, enough to believe he could have done the same under different circumstances.
Me as a role model! It was a virtual hug.
My truth finally did come out years later when my first partner, Wayne, died. We’d been living together for 11 years, so there could be no misunderstanding of what our arrangement entailed. When he died, which was only a couple of years after my sister-in-law had passed, I was looking for the same degree of comfort that my parents had shown my brother. Because I’d never spoken of the emotional bond between Wayne and me, they couldn’t provide that comfort. My mother, particularly, couldn’t understand my grief. Why would I feel so ground down by the loss of a roommate?
I pushed them, via the intercession of my sister, to come to the memorial celebration of Wayne’s life, and they did, reluctantly. They were visibly uneasy in the crowd of our gay and lesbian friends, but my father found one of my lesbian friends fascinating and spent the majority of the time talking with her. For years afterward he always remembered her as “luscious”. It wasn’t creepy; he was playing off her name, Lucia. He never failed to ask about her when we talked. They had to catch an early plane back home, and one of my friends drove them to the airport. I don’t remember the words we exchanged.
It should be obvious from the clues I’ve dropped up to now that my dad wasn’t anything other than the loving person all my sibs regarded him as. It was me who took so long to recognize that. He couldn’t bring himself to be overt and explicit about his love. I wasn’t secure enough in myself to see underneath his reticence to acknowledge that love.
Courage to do and courage to be. Men have both, but the behavioral particulars differ. The courage to do we recognize in classic masculinity. Kicking butt, planting the flag, saving drowning children. Courage to be comes with less bravado and shows more subtlety. Being affectionate, doing housework, crying.
I only saw my father cry once in his life. It was at the funeral of his mother-in-law. Her death devastated his wife, my mother, and it was his wife’s pain and grieving that brought him to tears. I was nine years old at the time and his tears startled me.
Why showing another person your softer side should take courage probably confounds many women and many gay men, to whom affection is not something that needs to be pulled out of them. Why should men be given extra points for doing what should come naturally?
I’m posing a question I know doesn’t apply universally. Many men do come to affection naturally, but I’ve personally experienced it mainly outside of the United States. Whatever there is in the water in this my country, American men, and particularly straight men, only reluctantly or with evident unease show affection to other men. It’s gay, bro! It’s actually not gay at all, it’s human. We should all wish it were otherwise.
