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

end, I am never quite sure who is the real author of these anguished collaborations. They reflect my deep ambivalence about being held accountable for my own words, my own life.

This reluctance to claim my ideas on paper, I now believe, was connected in some complicated and still incomprehensible way to my recalcitrant and unacceptable sexuality. The written word was both the medium that tied me to my parents in endless battles over periods, commas, and paragraphs, and the medium that eventually allowed me to see myself as an independent agent with a unique story to tell.

Initially seeking confirmation of my burgeoning homosexuality in the words of others, I consider the pseudoscientific tomes of Edmund Bergler and Alfred Kinsey, but the former’s case studies of tortured, unhappy lives and the latter’s statistics have nothing to do with the desires that course through my body. I am forced to look for more arresting representations to guide my future. Abandoning the public library and inconvenient bookstore for the corner newsstand, I discover the modest physique magazines of the 1950s. Filled with well-oiled, fig-leaf-clad torsos—no match for today’s perfected, unveiled gym bodies—the Grecian Guild models are all the more human because of their imperfections. Mostly they are posed alone, however, which is both a disappointment for a teenager desperately seeking images of men together in any format and an incitement to imagining their lives as lived both on the page and off. What does the jauntily worn sailor cap or beach towel casually placed on the ground suggest about what has occurred before or will follow after the photograph is snapped? I carry on silent dialogues with all my favorites and try to enter the photographed scenario so as to have my way with these 76 n jonathan g. silin

mysterious icons even as I create new stories for after the shoot has ended.

Despite these efforts, I am still dissatisfied. Unable to see myself reflected in the protoclones of that era, I draw on immediate experience as the source of my first literary efforts. Electrified by the touch of Marc’s hand on my shoulder as we walked home from the museum, unnerved by Roger’s invitation for a sleepover date that New Year’s Eve, mesmerized by the folds in Donald’s electric-blue bathing suit—

I begin to authorize my own life.

Now, like Jean Genet, I turn the act of writing itself into an erotic moment. Seeing my words provides an illicit pleasure that I hardly understand. Hiding nothing from myself, I spend hours secreting away my desires from others even as I hope they will be discovered. These brief, furtively written narratives are the precursors to a more formal statement, a homoerotic short story deeply indebted to my first reading of James Baldwin. Undertaken as a senior English project, this personal declaration of independence, no parental editing required, is ultimately returned by the teacher without a single comment—so much for coming out in 1960. Although I am ready and able to put my desires onto paper, albeit transformed into the lives of fictionalized characters, I speak to no one about the essay. The one person who reads it is herself left wordless. This move to represent what is inside undoubtedly functions as an effective distancing mechanism through which I can better see myself, part of the drive to get on with the inevitable. Emboldened by my imminent graduation, I use the assignment to prepare for the real coming out that will take place only weeks after I arrive at my freshman dorm at college.

As I become a writer, I also become a reader. In his short but memorable essay “On Reading,” Proust describes the places and days in which he first became absorbed by books. What remains most vivid about childhood reading, he claims, is not the text itself but the call to an early lunch when the chapter is not quite finished, the summer outing during which our only desire is to return to the book left hastily aside on the dining room table, or the secret pleasure of reading in bed m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 77

long after all the adults have gone to sleep. While particular phrases titillate our curiosity and provoke our desire, Proust assures us that there is no truth to be found in words themselves, just the keys that help us to unlock interior rooms of our own design. Only in adolescence does the solitude required of the engaged reader become tolerable, dare I say attractive, to me. And only then am I able to set aside my own immediate interests to lend the book my larger life.

Although I favor long family narratives and bildungsromans with lots of character development and psychological complications, my tastes are eclectic. I am especially given to perusing my parents’ bookshelves, which contain everything from Kafka’s Metamorphosis, for-bidden to my best friend by his more protective parents, to Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol. I have no interest in lightweight subjects such as the thirty-five-cent Signet edition mysteries that my father reads on the train to work each day and then jams into his raincoat pocket. Once stacked high in separate piles around the house—my father is a fast reader—they eventually begin to disappear, replaced by my mother’s ever-growing library of hardcover fiction.

Now, on the very same shelves, wedged in between books on Jewish history and biographies of Zionist leaders (my father’s) and piled hap-hazardly atop an assortment of art books (my mother’s) are the volumes containing my own essays on education. I have never become used to seeing them mixed in with the volumes of my childhood; they seem oddly out of context, misplaced fragments from the academic world. And what do these carefully proffered “gifts” mean to my parents?

They are proud of my scholarly achievements, clearly unimagined when I announced my intention of working with young children thirty years ago. Then