My daddy gay

I gave my first talk in San Francisco’s famed Castro District, one of the most historic gay neighborhoods in the U.S. I was surprised when I received pushback from two men in attendance. Unfortunately, someone took some items out of their house. It was a Saturday afternoon and he’d called me up to his office in the attic.

Typically I would only see my Dad at dinner.

Slowly we began to grow closer

It wasn’t until I was in my mid-30’s, with my step-father long deceased, that I forced myself to start calling my father “Dad”.

It felt unnatural at first because our relationship felt forced.  We never had the traditional father-son roles, and so trying to forge that out of almost nothing took time.

As an adult, I clearly remember the 2nd time my Dad ever spent a large chunk of time in a house I lived in.

I always knew he was gay and never had that “my Dad is gay” aha moment of realizing I had a gay father.

But then our relationship was far from conventional (but not due to his sexuality).

Together we learned how to be a father and son in a day and age where being a gay father was most certainly frowned upon. Until one day he told her the truth – an experience he had found easier than having to tell his children.

I was 6 at the time. A long time before their divorce, she had asked my father if he liked men, and he had resolutely denied it. After a pause, he told me the truth. If he had dabbled with infidelity, maybe I wasn’t such a bad person after all. And anything not directly tied to the business was secondary.

For most of my life that was the category, I fell into.

Being a gay father in the 1960s

I didn’t really see my Dad very much in my early years.

By my earliest recollections, he would come to see me a few days out of the year.  By then I had grown accustomed to calling my step-father “Dad” and so I called my own father by his first name of JT.

I’ve detailed my life with my step-father as well in a post about Growing Up with an Alcoholic Father as that relationship was also a mixture of pain and love.

I always suspected that coming to terms with my Dad’s sexuality was probably easier not having to parent me on a day-to-day basis.

I’m grateful for that, and still my heart breaks for him. — INNOCENT IN NEW HAMPSHIRE

DEAR INNOCENT: No, you are not. But he told us he didn’t want to confuse us, and he would have gone about it the same way if he had had a new girlfriend. Thus I never had that aha moment of realizing “I have a gay father”!

But my childhood was far from conventional.

My Mom and Dad were married over a decade before I came along.

They can’t understand that we feel so insulted that we no longer want to remain friends with them. Had I been wrong about my dad — this man I knew to be so wonderful and caring and loving, not only to my mom and my siblings and me, but seemingly to everyone he knew? Until, out of nowhere, my brother suddenly asked, “Dad, are you gay?”

As far as I remember it, my father was silent for quite a while.

He often spoke of my mother, one time telling me he heard her calling his name from another room.

The news hit me hard – I couldn’t understand it at all. She barely spoke unless spoken to but did hug me goodbye.