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

Over time, my parents have learned to take some pride in my career, which has been built on subjects that once seemed more a source of private shame than a cause for public discourse. They have come to recognize that throughout my work on young children, HIV/AIDS, and gay/lesbian life, there is a consistent interest in creating a more equitable society. While never politically active, they understand this demand for social justice as a matter of ethics, for what, in the Jewish tradition, has been called tikkun olam, or repair of the world.

As a teacher and researcher I am all too familiar with the postmodern literature that declares a crisis of representation in the humanities and social sciences. Is it possible or even desirable to be objective when describing the lives of others? What if informants disagree with our interpretations of their lives? What if the “other” is a loved one or parent?

While I have studied this theoretical literature at length, attended endless conference presentations, and spent hours in debate with colleagues, I am woefully unprepared for the personal crisis that occurs while writing my first book. Depicting the death from AIDS of my San Francisco boyfriend, Michael, I obsess about my ability to capture m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 81

his life in words. A commanding and powerful writer himself, would he approve my efforts? Would he contest them? I tell myself that I am writing my own story as much as his and that I am not benefiting from his death but using our experience in the interests of education, of children, and of other people with HIV/AIDS. I rely on his profound understanding of the political, his engaging sense of humor, and Zen sensibility to conjure up his consent to my project.

The actual publication of the book precipitates yet another crisis as I consider how people who know Bob will respond to the portrayal of my deep attachment to Michael and the terrible grief I experience at his death. Bob and I have never been monogamous and in this sense our lives mirror those of many gay people who have constructed a culture in which erotic pleasures and intimate attachments are not constrained by traditional mores. A revelation of this sort in a memoir is not unusual, and it is often the stuff of great fiction. But people who write books about early childhood curriculum aren’t expected to describe the complexity of their domestic arrangements, especially if they involve same-sex love. While privately many gay people express gratitude for my frankness, in public arenas nothing is said. Academic decorum or simple denial? Perhaps those made uncomfortable by my work simply stay far away, dismissing it as irrelevant or self-referential.

A similar silence falls over my parents with respect to the stories about Michael and my gay adolescence that appear in the book. They never ask about these narratives, not even the final one in which my father metaphorically stands by my side as I stand for Michael at the gay synagogue during Yizkor, the memorial service for the dead. Did he even read it? Nor does my mother’s almost complete absence from the text give rise to the recriminations I worried about. Did she even notice it?

I suspect that with the passage of time from my first Gay Community News article, my parents came to terms with my sexual orientation and the role it plays in my public/professional life. This process did not involve extensive dialogue with me but it did resolve the 82 n jonathan g. silin

anger and resentment expressed earlier by my father. Like many other parents of gay children, my father and mother must have arranged an emotional boundary between their feelings about “homosexuality”

more generally and their continuously loving disposition toward me.

It was not until their own physical decline set in, however, that they experienced directly the kindness and care that endeared Bob to them. I am not sure that my parents could love anyone who was not flesh and blood, but I do know that their tolerance and acceptance eventually turned into the deep appreciation that characterized their later relationship with him.

These concerns that shadowed my first book soon begin to pale when I start to write essays in which my parents themselves are central characters. Weighing my feelings of guilt about hiding something from them against my fear of the blame they will heap upon me for misrepresenting their lives, initially I decide not to show them anything. How will they respond to reading that they are dying, that I am resentful of the demands their care places on me, that I see them as pathetic and helpless? I am quickly becoming the kind of writer/

researcher that I have scorned in the past, the kind who does not involve the informants or share the results of his work with them.

I always seek to build collaborative relationships when conducting research. For example, studying the work of staff developers, I lead regular focus groups with them. Before each new session, I hand out a written summary of the prior meeting in order to elicit their feedback.

Am I representing them accurately? Have I misunderstood their intentions? These collaborative strategies are practical; I want to conduct research that is meaningful to the participants and that helps them to look at their experience in new ways. These strategies are also ethical; I want to minimize the distortions and judgments to which outsiders are given in describing the experience of others. Sometimes, however, political considerations interfere.

One such politically charged effort at collaborative research stands out for me. I have spent three weeks anticipating the meeting with the college president to discuss the distribution of our report on m y fat h e r ’ s k e e