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

my parents were convinced that I had thrown away my chances at a career that would bring significant financial re-muneration or public recognition. My mother always reads my essays, careful to comment on how well written they are and to acknowledge 78 n jonathan g. silin

how difficult it is to follow the details of the arguments. My father is less interested in what they say about education than in what they signify about my career. Of course, the books on early childhood find a more prominent place on their coffee table than those on queer theory. So I am surprised to learn how eager my father is to send a journal article on the impact of HIV/AIDS on the gay community to my cousin’s daughter who has recently come out. Needless to say, he doesn’t read it himself, but the mere fact that he will traffic in once contraband matter is an indication of how far he has come in acknowledging the existence of gay and lesbian lives.

When I was thirty-four, just ten years before this request to send on my article, my father evidenced a very different attitude. We, Bob and I and my parents, have just eaten in a favorite Chinese restaurant and are walking across Eighty-sixth Street in Manhattan. It’s a broad thoroughfare, bustling with pedestrian traffic and lined with clothing shops, electronics-cum-Oriental-rug outlets, and discount drug stores.

My mother and Bob are in the lead while my father and I trail behind.

He is already showing the first signs of the spinal stenosis and limited vision that will eventually undermine his balance completely. For now, I am only aware that he sways slightly as he walks, and I am forced closer to the buildings with every step. He cannot move in a straight line.

I am eager and a little apprehensive about sharing my news with him. I have just published my first article in a radical gay newspaper, a diatribe against mainstream political organizations. My father listens carefully to my description of the article even as I see him become increasingly upset. “But why did you have to publish there?” he finally blurts out. My father hates the word “gay,” winces every time I use it, and would never refer to a “gay” newspaper. I explain my desire to speak to a particular audience, the community of which I am a member, and to influence the direction of the political current. Then, his anger boiling over, he asks the question that goes to the heart of our muddled relationship, “And why did you have to use my name?”

I am stunned by this of all responses and caught totally caught off m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 79

guard. It feels as if I have been punched in the stomach and I am breathless. Naively I had wanted to gain my father’s approval by announcing myself a published author, an adult who might influence the thinking of others. Instead, he suddenly makes me feel like a shamed child who has stolen something inviolable, his father’ name. In his eyes I am not a separate, autonomous adult but a dependent child, an extension of his ego, who has failed to request permission to grow up.

My life is conditional, contingent upon his approval.

We continue walking in silence. “But Dad,” I finally stammer, “I never thought about using a pseudonym. I am proud of my article.”

More silence. I can feel his fierce, unrelenting anger, a father betrayed by his own son. I try to fill the void again with a more practical suggestion that again misses the mark. “Dad, remember,” I offer, “that the Gay Community News is a very small Boston paper and that, if any of your acquaintances should read it, they are most likely gay themselves.” Still no response.

While I anticipated his discomfort with my public identification as a gay person and the potential harm to which I might be exposed, I did not foresee my father’s sense of personal injury and the shadow my gayness casts over his life. I am shocked to realize that he fears more for himself than for me. While I have long been aware of the paranoid temperament that makes my father loath to reveal any but the most benign information to others, I didn’t realize that he would feel directly contaminated, perhaps threatened, by my gayness. So now I am driven by a child’s need for parental approval to say the painful and the obvious, “Dad, you know it’s my name too. It’s true that I never thought about the repercussions that publishing in an ob-scure gay newspaper might have for you. But what would you expect me to do? I have no intention of hiding and every desire to participate in a larger public world.” By now we have caught up to Bob and my mother, and it’s clear that my father has said all that he can or is willing to say.

Our conversation is brief, but its impact long lasting. My father’s desire to control my use of “his” name reflects the confused boundaries 80 n jonathan g. silin

and emotional intensity that characterize our relationship. Once again, it is words that bind us together and keep us apart. My father’s response also confirms what I have long suspected: my resistance to reading and my difficulties mastering the basics of composi-tion mirrored an intuitive understanding that the written word would lead me to new places, on my own, away from the protective shelter-ing of my family. Always given to severe attacks of homesickness as a child, I neither wanted to venture forth nor, once pushed forward by others, to be surrounded by reminders of the people and places that I had left behind. Reading and writing still carry an emotional resonance tinged with these fears of separation from and desires for my father. This resonance, the feeling of alienation and homesickness, has never been more