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5:09:00 AM EDT
If you had a gay dad...
Doing this video series based on my memoirs and play, "Daughters of the Shadow Men," is naturally calling up a lot of memories about my dad. Doc and I are preparing to do the next scene which is my dad coming back and talking to me in a dream. When the dream takes place almost everyone in the family had gone to Utah to a big reunion up there. I didn't go because all my relatives were so upset with me for surfacing my belief that my dad was gay even after 50 years of silence. I was just trying to get through having to be absent the best I could.
My sisters finally started calling me about half way through the reunion saying that the family was finding their black sense of humor again and were making a lot of jokes about me thinking half the world was bisexual. I remember my son Raymond making a joke during that time when we pulled up to a Circle K. He said, "Oh wait a minute, Mom, I think the clerk in there is bisexual, do you think you can handle it?" But I still knew if I had gone to that reunion my mere presence would have thrown a damper on the whole proceedings. They were all too upset with me to get over it that fast.
But as a child I expected my dad's buddies to be gay, so I saw our world as peopled by a lot more gays or bisexuals than my family even thought about since they did not see my dad as gay. His buddies were the only ones he could be himself with, so I just took it for granted that most of them, married or not, were more gay than they were homosexual. Their marriages from what I could see were about as tortured as my dad and mother's marriage. Mother never found my dad to be a satisfactory love, and he wasn't for a woman.
But I loved my dad and when I realized how suicidal he was, I thought the lack of acceptance had cut him so deep that he was miserable enough to die. I thought my job was just to reassure him that he was okay, whatever he was, and that I did not want him to commit suicide.
I knew his own mother's acceptance of him would be based on him admitting that he was a sinner and needed to reform. Not that she ever looked that deep into his tortured soul. She was very religious and that is how the church looked on homosexuality. You could be 'cured.' It was an addiction andyou had to tackle it just like you did alcoholism. I told my dad one time that his mother was not as perfect as he thought she was, that she could make the best apple pie in the world but she did not understand him. I could just see him agreeing with me, even if he did not admit it out loud. I thought it was sad that just because you were religious you could not know why your own son was in constant suicidal crisis. One of her sons did commit suicide, but his daughters kept Daddy alive, I am sure.
In a way I thought Daddy clung to marriage with my mother because he thought as long as the marriage lasted, he was making progress on the road to heterosexuality. But us sisters were practically begging our parents to get a divorce before it was over with. I don't recall them ever talking to one another in nice voices. They were always angry.
I thought my dad would finally be able to accept what he had been for a life time after the divorce, but he had to try one more marriage. And that marriage led to his death I thought. His new wife fled the scene in two months she was so turned off by his attempts to have sex with her. It seems he had promised her that they would just live like friends and would even have separate bedrooms. He and my mother had always shared a marriage bed, so he broke that promise as soon as the wedding was over with. When she fled the scene he went to the city where she lived and tried to talk her into coming back. She flatly refused and so he got drunk, and on the way home crossed the center line and hit another car head on. He did not kill anybody but it was a bad wreck. I thought complications of this wreck brought on his fatal heart attack nine months later at the age of 64.
His relationships with his buddies was I thought a lot more pleasant. He would always be laughing and joking with them, even when drinking. I remember being shocked one time when I cast my dad and his best buddy in a program I wrote. Those two were like stand up comedians together. And sober, they were just hilarious, brilliant. They worked together like Doc and I do. I thought, gee, O understands how Daddy's mind works a lot better than Mother does. No wonder he always has to be with O as often as he can onthe weekends.
Daddy just wouldn't accept that his idea of marriage with a woman was not a pleasant thing. His unfaithfulness, for one thing, was intolerable. It was intolerable to me, just as Mother's was when she started having affairs after she had a tubal ligation and could not get pregnant. Imagine parents who insist on staying married even though both are having affairs with other people, and expect you to respect that marriage. No wonder we daughters were now trying to persuade them to part. When we were little I thought they needed to stay together because I did not think either one of them would have made a good custodial parent. Daddy was still drinking and Mother had a horrible temper and would probably have beat up on us worse than she already did. Daddy would protect us if she got too carried away, so none of us were enthusiastic about going off with her and her current boyfriend, whoever that might be.
Anyway, I am hoping that Doc will be able to convey a Daddy that for the first time does not just sit there and lie every word that comes out of his mouth. Daddy and I will not be able to talk about the past unless he controls his temper and lets me say what I want to say, which he never did in life. He always shut me up. I couldn't talk to him about the molesters. I could not talk to him about the mental hospital, about my disability. He just said mean things so I would have to shut up.
That scene will be as much about telling Daddy how I want him to talk to me as it will be about anything else. I think Doc will be able to understand that. He had a friend when he was on the street who was homosexual. He was very intelligent and he and Doc were able to have a breakthrough in understanding, but Doc had to go through the experience of having him commit suicide. He kept saying he was going to do it. Doc offered to go to Oregon with him if it would keep him from suicide, even if he was straight and could not be his love. But C did it anyway. Suicide almost an epidemic among struggling gays who cannot find enough people to accept their homosexuality. Just accept what their predominant sexual feelings are whether they had a gay gene, whether it was from enivornmental factors, who knows, but acceptance.
Daddy always lied, but you had to look at what he did, not at what he said. I am going to start by just asking him to tell the truth. Just quit telling lies. He was unfaithful on his wedding day. That ought to tell you something about him, too. He lied of course even though caught in the act of sex by my mother. He tried to tell her the man was a doctor 'examining him' which she tried to buy, but I know she was always suspicious of him, for good reason, even if she did not dare voice these suspicions. She feared him too much! Nobody was going to talk to him about such stuff. He wouldn't allow it, and she had a right to express herself. It was her marriage, too, so they got off entirely on the wrong foot.
He needs to take responsibility for that. I have had a bisexual husband and I have lived with bisexual men, and I asserted my right to have my say about what I suspected them of doing, if I didn't think they were faithful. It is the hardest thing in the world for a bisexual man trying to pass as heterosexual to admit the truth when he is unfaithful with a man. My dad is not the only one who tried to intimidate me, but sooner or later I got rid of a violent man like him.
But some men like my dad could not just go away when little children were involved he had to be responsible for, too, and he did not shirk that responsibility. It was a very complicated situation, but then a lot of marriages are complex.
Wish Doc and me luck on this scene with my dad coming back to talk to me in a dream. A lot of ground has to be covered in ten minutes!
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7/19/08 5:28 PM
Missie