My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents by Jonathan Silin (free novels .txt) 📗

the kindly and sympathetic listener who pursued a career in social work until the birth of my brother in 1941. My mother maintained her membership in the official social work association until the end of her life. She often explained with great pride that, despite her father’s distant and traditionally patriarchal demeanor, he insisted that both his daughters attend college, by no means a given in the early 1930s, and even graduate school to prepare for independent careers.

Dedicated to raising her children, my mother returned to work outside the home only when I was eleven and my father’s business was in difficulty. This was the 1950s and I believe that my father, like many men of his generation, felt his wife’s second career in commerce rather than social work as a blow to his self-esteem. In deference to his pride, my mother never admitted to liking her work. Of course, since she was also expected to keep the domestic world running smoothly despite the demands of a job that often brought her home well after my father, she may simply have resented holding two positions at once. For myself, I was both proud that my mother worked and angry when the work made her unavailable to fulfill traditional maternal functions.

From an early age, I was keenly attuned to gender-based role expectations. Growing up a sissy, I had endured many spoken and unspoken accusations about possessing the physical and social characteristics of the opposite sex. My feelings told me, however, that I was physically and emotionally attracted to other boys, not that I wanted to be a girl. I was certain of this despite the fact that I was 62 n jonathan g. silin

clearly more interested in the satisfactions of the domestic world than the rewards of competitive sports and other stereotypically male activities. At home I enjoyed nothing better than purchasing and preparing the special foods required for holiday meals. At school I was the nascent artist, my most enjoyable hours spent painting and drawing, crafting jewelry, and editing the literary magazine.

While being homosexual—in those days the word itself evoked illicit excitement—meant accepting parts of myself that are usually valued only in women, I did not question my gender identity. In retrospect, this seems all the more surprising given that my peers, re-gardless of their socially progressive parents, reinforced the confusion between gender and sexual orientation. It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that the concept of gender identity, as separate from sexual orientation, first began to take shape.

When I was growing up the primary stereotype—all male homosexuals desire to be women—informed the “scientific” literature which described gay men as undeveloped and incomplete because of their feminine characteristics. Inevitably, science is embedded in culture, its practitioners human beings who sometimes rise above and more often reflect the prevalent ideas of the time. Despite the theoretical twists and turns of psychoanalytic theory, Magnus Hirschfeld’s dictum—homosexuals are women trapped in men’s bodies and therefore an intermediary sex—was emblematic of more advanced, dare I say humane, thought. Worse still for me, the only visible homosexuals were the extremely effeminate men I encountered during my adolescence while cruising down Third Avenue and across Forty-second Street with its panoply of enticing pornography shops. Notwithstanding the complete absence of role models, I insisted on imagining a “normal life” in which two men were sexually and emotionally bonded forever, a relationship of absolute equality, devoid of the gendered roles I saw among heterosexuals.

During college I developed an interpretation of our family dynamics that remained unchanged for many years and that cut across the stereotype of distant, inexpressive fathers and close, emotionally m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 63

attuned mothers. This interpretation defined my father as someone who was deeply connected to his feelings. I read the toxic quality of our relationship during my adolescence, the frequent clashes and smaller misunderstandings, as confirmation of the directness with which he made his demands, stated his case, and knew his own desires. Much to my father’s chagrin, I also read his “honesty” as support for pursuing my homosexuality and for not conforming to social pressures.

As a young adult, I continued to be drawn to my father because he represented authenticity and clarity. His sadness and anger, his depression and elation, were always easy to see. In contrast, I felt alien-ated from my mother’s more complex and hidden emotional life. She seemed to make no claims for herself, always the facilitator and peace-keeper; she was quick to test for other people’s moods without revealing her own. If no direct reading could be ascertained, my mother did not hesitate to rely on secondary sources—phone calls to a teacher, notes to a tutor, or interviews with a psychotherapist. My mother’s concerns were always filtered through an intellectual scrim that concealed her own feelings. She was present but absent all at the same moment.

Although I was aware of their personality differences, I experienced my parents as a team. I don’t remember them fighting or even disagreeing, a perception that has been confirmed by many cousins who all recall my parents as loving, protective adults. Dedicated and self-sacrificing, they appeared to have few interests outside of family life. They did very little entertaining and never took vacations without us. Their work lives were spent purchasing education and therapy for their children, something that I found increasingly unsettling as I got older and began to think about my own career prospects. How could two obviously intelligent, well-educated people wind up in jobs that offered so little direct satisfaction? Eschewing conflict, their noses to the grindstone, it was hard to imagine my parents as separate individuals with unique desires or to see the fault lines in their tightly knit relationship.

64 n jonathan g. silin

Over the last decade I have been forced to rethink this image of my parents’ lives as going against the gendered grain of our society, my father