Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter

by Alison Wearing

  Oh my.

  While foraging for extra blankets at my mother’s house one Christmas decades later, Flip and I came across the old projector in her basement and set it up excitedly. We laughed at the same scenes all over again, rose up in our seats and filled in some of the sound effects or details about certain moments that we remembered.

  And then came the let’s all dance like pixies! scene: my father leaping about, actually pointing his toes as he lifted them off the ground.

  “Uh, that would be Dad,” Flip acknowledged, raising his eyebrows and rubbing his beard. As my father’s nimble body frolicked along the white basement wall, Flip’s shoulders began to shake. Mine followed. And by the time the film spun to a finish and slapped its loose end round and around the projector, we were both leaning into each other, laughing uproariously.

  Uh. That would be Dad.

  “Did you ever have any idea?” people often ask. “Did you ever wonder if he was gay?”

  Fair questions, I suppose. The crème brûlée and all. His preference for gambolling over gambling. Opera in the streets, yes yes.

  But no.

  As a Canadian child of the 1970s, no more did I suspect my father of being a closeted dandy than I harboured suspicions of my rice-enamoured mother being secretly Chinese. While it’s all mainstream sitcom nowadays, at that time the kind of thing my father was up to simply was not done. Except a few hours away, in a place called Toronto, where although one still might have been hard-pressed to find a drink on Sundays, if one knew where to go (and for a time the police did not) one could find a gay bathhouse.

  Or a gay bar.

  Though that was not, in fact, what my dad and I had visited during the notable father–daughter weekend that my mother would later refer to. What we had gone to was a restaurant, such a novelty to me then that it might as well have been a bar. It was a pleasant place, bright and fancy with an ample array of ornamental flowers. There was even, to my father’s felicity, a chandelier. Sitting there on a puffy vinyl seat reading an embossed white menu with a red ribbon draped down the middle, I felt very much the princess, and happily-ever-after-ly so.

  The tables were long and set quite close together, so in my recollection we were soon chatting with two men seated along the wall, as well as an older gentleman at the end of our table. It might well have been a pickup joint, a safe place for queers to get quietly acquainted, but if anything like that was going on, I was unaware of it. I only remember everyone being exceptionally friendly, sweet and attentive to me, and witty, full of jokes and giggles. When we stepped onto the sidewalk of a grey, early winter day, I recall turning to my father and exclaiming, “I liked going there!” As well as the dewy-eyed delight on his face as he said, “Well, maybe I could take you there again sometime!” Then he threaded his arm through mine and skipped me all the way to the subway.

  Could one of the men have ribbed him at some point, some innocuous joke about bringing his daughter to a gay bar? I no longer remember. It is said that children know everything, every unspoken subtlety that passes through the lives of their parents, and I suspect that may be so. But the only thing I know for certain is that I took the Greyhound bus back to Peterborough, walked to our house on Merino Road and flopped into the kitchen, where I found my mother sweeping. And to her then-standard question, So what did you and Dad do in Toronto? I leaned my elbow over the back of a chair and responded, “Oh, he took me to a gay bar.”

  Creak creak creak—crash.

  GERMANY AND HARVEST CRUNCH

  Germany was a well-ordered blur. Poppyseed-speckled Brötchen for breakfast, hairy-armpitted women, criss-cross fairy-tale houses, tours of cathedrals that all but drained the blood from my body, hundreds of games of backgammon with my host family’s fun-loving father, an intestineful of Wiener schnitzel, beds that needed to be unrolled every night in my “host sister” Jutta’s terminally tidy room, and a feverish insomnia that would have me huddled on the windowsill looking down on dark, empty cobblestone streets scribbling into the diary my dad had given me at the airport as an early birthday present.

  I had never really kept a journal before, certainly nothing of any substance, but I began to write in that little blue diary because I thought I would burst if I didn’t. So many questions churned within me that at any given moment I could have leaned over and vomited: hundreds of words spattering out of my mouth onto those immaculate German sidewalks.

  Fag. Faggot. Poofter. Queen. Pansy. Gay. Why??? What does it mean?? Does Dad love Paul and Flip and not me? Does he still love Mom? Does he still like her at least? Can he still live with us? Does she hate him? Will they have to get divorced? How are we going to keep everyone from finding out???

  No doubt they found me strange, Jutta’s kind and welcoming family. Sleeping half the day, picking at my breaded lamb with sullen ingratitude, incapable of appreciating their hospitality or enjoying myself for more than a few minutes at a time. I remember weeping on the telephone to my mother the day I woke up convinced I had cancer in my knees. Or wishing I did, not sure which. I seemed unable to decide whether I hoped I was dying or was petrified that I was. In either case, I was desperate for some kind of reassurance from my mother.

  On the last night of my six-week stay, the Thiemanns threw me a beautiful if undeserved thirteenth birthday party with all the local girls and their families. A few days after that, I packed my navy blue fake leather suitcase full of souvenir coins, pins, leotards and postcards, along with a head full of the German words for things like potato salad—Kartoffelsalat—and butterfly—Schmetterling!—and flew home.

  At the airport, I was thrilled to see both my parents waiting for me. All the way to the parking lot, I bubbled over with stories and proudly recited a joke I had memorized in German, a language they both spoke a bit. My father was overjoyed by my state, exclaiming that clearly Germany had been very stimulating for me and wasn’t that wonderful! My dad often used that word, stimulating—Travel was so stimulating! Wasn’t that concert stimulating!—but all of a sudden the word made me squirm. I saw my mom roll her eyes, but we all said goodbye civilly, my dad getting into his car and explaining that he was staying in Toronto (clearly a more stimulating city than Peterborough) and he’d see me soon. My mom and I got into her car and drove back to Merino Road.

  A few days later, I came downstairs to find Dad in his French silk pyjamas reading the newspaper in the kitchen. We chatted briefly, even phlegmed our way through a few words of German, until he began fidgeting with the paper and said sternly, nervously, but with impeccable grammar, “Mom told me that before you left for Germany, you and she had an important chat.”

  Quickly, I reached for the Harvest Crunch. Plink plink plink. A tumble of glazed oats falling into my bowl. Lungs like limp socks on a clothesline. No breath, no breath.

  “Yeah,” I said with a stab at teenage aloofness. “She told me, but I don’t care.”

  Lie number one.

  Of thousands.

  Paul already knew.

  Dad had told him a few months earlier when they were having one of their father–son weekends at my dad’s apartment in Toronto, his time at home having become increasingly rare since his sabbatical the previous year. Paul was quiet for a bit, but shortly after that he brightened up and asked if they were still going out for Chinese food. Which they did and had a wonderful time. That’s what Dad told me.

  Chinese food?

  Quiet for a bit and then Chinese food?

  I looked down at my bowl of Harvest Crunch, the oat-balls swelling out into the splosh of now-syrupy, off-colour milk, the lumpy mass looking like something I’d already eaten and brought up. I could barely lift the spoon to my mouth. How on earth did Paul manage Chinese food?

  I have no memory of what we said next, but it was no doubt the verbal equivalent of covering up an unsightly stain on the carpet by looking towards the ceiling. I believe he offered to answer any questions I might have. And all I could think of was sitting in that windowsill in Jutta’s
room, and how I had been so frightened that someone would see the words I had spent the night scribbling into my journal that the moment I finished writing I shredded every page into pieces and ate them.

  Nope, no questions.

  Although there were a few. Like, how can you choose to live in that sleazy, graffiti-covered apartment building in concreteville Toronto when you could just stay here in our perfectly nice Peterborough house with all those gardens you spent years fluffing up?

  Or, why can’t you keep being normal during the week and just go to Toronto to be gay on the weekends? (I couldn’t have known that they had been trying that, he and my mother, but the obvious snag to the arrangement—namely, Married Life As Ludicrous Hoax—was making it impossible to continue.)

  Or, can’t you at least come back and cook once in a while? We could have one day a week when we all eat soufflé.

  Or, what’s so wrong with everything the way it is? I thought we were all having a pretty good time.

  But I didn’t ask him anything. I just wanted the conversation to end. As did my dad, it seemed, for I had never before seen him so uncomfortable: nervously clearing his throat, fidgeting with the newspaper, running his hands down the sides of his pyjamas as though he were trying to rub something off. He may have tried to say a few reassuring things, but I have no memory of what these might have been.

  Years later, I learned that Paul’s reaction had not, in fact, been “quiet for a bit” and then out for Chinese food, as had been recounted to me that watershed morning. Perhaps my dad had wanted to spare me my brother’s pain, or maybe he had hoped that making Paul out to be such a take-it-in-stride kind of a guy might inspire me to similar heights. Whatever the reason, I remember feeling that the bar had been set quite high (far above the realm of tears, blubbering and pleading, certainly), and that I had better fling myself over it as best I could.

  But thirty-two years later, a national newspaper contacted my dad and me for a story they were doing about children of gay parents. We agreed to the interview, and soon after sat together in the living room of Dad’s Wedgwood blue house, the soft-spoken reporter asking a series of standard questions, prodding, in that unapologetically intimate way reporters can, into some of the most private moments of our lives.

  “And how was it telling your children you were gay?”

  Dad inhaled deeply and pressed back into the sofa. I looked at him, freshly seventy-five and looking fit but undeniably like the grandfather he was.

  “Well, it wasn’t easy, of course. I remember that after I told my eldest son when he was thirteen, he sat in a corner of my apartment, crying and crying,” Dad said.

  I sat beside him, stunned. “I thought he just wanted to go out for Chinese food.”

  Dad looked puzzled. “What?”

  “You told me he was quiet for a bit and then you went out for Chinese food.”

  His face held both bewilderment and amusement. “Well, maybe we did. I don’t remember. We certainly ate a lot of it in those days. But he was very, very upset for a long time. Watching him crying was one of the most agonizing moments of my life.”

  As the interview continued, I sat on the sofa flipping through the pages of memory until I came to the scene in question, and rewrote a passage that had never quite read true:

  Paul was quiet for a bit, but very quickly he brightened up and asked if they were still going out for Chinese food.

  Paul sobbed and sobbed. Watching him crying was one of the most agonizing moments of Dad’s life.

  The moment I adjusted the memory, I felt a palpable relief.

  This is what truth does for us.

  MENSTRUAL CRAMPS AND DRAG QUEENS

  I crossed into adolescence prosaically. It would embolden my ego to report a fascination for Yeats, an early devotion to Shakespeare or Shostakovich, but alas, my early teenage years saw me reading teen magazines and listening to the Bee Gees. I spent my afternoons wandering alone in the back fields reciting mawkish poetry to wildflowers. Had ze-ro interest in smoking or having a toke. Even found swearing offensive. And having spent my early years bouncing bath toys on Paul’s stretched scrotum—a game we called Trampoline—or being pinned down while he and Flip both dangled mucilaginous strings of spit over my face or spread their corduroy-wrapped cheeks over my face and farted, I was also cured of any romantic curiosity I might have developed for boys and what it was they went in for. When my body began brewing the hormonal cocktail of puberty and serving it up in two tender nubbles on my chest, my life was still an intensely virginal, vaguely insipid non-event.

  The day rust appeared in my underwear (at the embarrassingly advanced age of fourteen), I gathered up my canine-inspired vocabulary and approached my mother in her bedroom, producing the evidence and announcing solemnly, “I think I’m in heat.”

  Calmly, she said, “Let me get you something for that.”

  While she disappeared into the bathroom, I remained fixed—terror bolting me to the spot—hoping to God she wasn’t going to fix me up with a pair of that padded underwear with a hole cut out for the tail.

  It pleases me greatly to say that she did not. Intimacies of that kind were not my mother’s forte, however, so she passed me the feminine hygiene products and left me to decipher them alone in the bathroom. The situation was never spoken of again.

  Once I had mastered the art of hiding menstruation from the world, I got back to the secret of having a pansy father. What weighed more heavily than anything else was what everyone would say. Not to mention the confusion of not understanding what exactly the whole thing meant.

  I certainly puzzled over it. Spent the wee hours of a few nights flipping, with a combination of horror and unanticipated titillation, through the copy of The Joy of Gay Sex that sat on a bookshelf in Dad’s apartment. But once I got a handle on the crude logistics, I discovered that, gay or straight, the maxim is the same: when it comes to our parents’ sexual practices, we’d rather not think about the details. And for good reason: they’re not meant to be any of our business.

  When the initial Dad-does-THAT? incredulity wore off, it became clear that my real interest lay not so much in knowing the how or in what position, but in understanding what his being gay meant in practical, day-to-day terms. What it meant to the world, for our family and, more pertinently, what it meant to me.

  “Don’t make a big deal about your father being gay,” advised Ron, a friend of my father’s and host of the Gay Fathers of Toronto potluck we were attending. Dad had thought it would be nice for me to meet some other gay dads and kids “in my situation,” but I just stood there, shocked, watching men’s fingers intertwining as they spoke to each other, one man laying his head on another man’s shoulder on the sofa.

  I didn’t want to meet other gay dads or kids in my situation.

  I wanted a different situation.

  But here I was.

  Dad’s friend Ron wore an earring(!) and spoke with one eyebrow constantly raised, an expression that made him look condescending even when he was trying to be kind. “Being gay is just part of who your father is, so try to think of it as you would anything else about him: he has curly hair, he’s a professor, he likes music, he’s gay,” he said so matter-of-factly I could only nod in agreement.

  “He’th the thame perthon he alwayth wath,” added Sammy, a leather-clad man who called himself “Ron’s lover” (although with his ultra-gay sibilant speech, it sounded more like “Thammy, Ron’th lover”). Thammy leaned forward and took my hand in his. “It’th jutht that you’re theeing more of your father than ever before,” he said, his cheeks rippling around a broad smile.

  I nodded again, wanting to yank my icy fingers from his pillow-soft palm and poke both my eyes out.

  Four men were giggling on the couch, one of them my father, who was at that moment being tickled by a grey-haired, pot-bellied man with an extravagance of nose hair. An Anglican minister, I later learned. Scattered around the house, playing as though they didn’t even notice, were kids of
all ages. I escaped to the kitchen, where a round, floral-clothed table held a large ceramic bowl of pesto pasta, a startlingly symmetrical salad made of something called “endive,” a tray of melon balls, and crystal glasses filled to a swirled point with chocolate mousse.

  I spent the rest of the Gay Fathers of Toronto potluck with a girl my age named Pilar, who had grown up with her father and his “partner” (new word for me), knew things that I did not (endive, for example), and had a confident ease about her, sauntering through the party as though it were a Girl Guides meeting, chatting and joking with the men, men, men. Trailing behind her, I could feel myself resisting, pulling my foot back as it swung out for its next step, mentally turning and scrabbling on the heavy psychic door marked Innocence. Making gouge marks down the one marked Normal Life.

  After the potluck, Dad and I returned to his apartment in St. James Town, a collection of seamy high-rise apartments where—bafflingly—he had chosen to live on the weekends. It was at the edge of Toronto’s Gay Village (gay ghetto, in those days), and so home to some colourful characters in full expression.

  We got into a graffiti-splattered elevator and just as the doors were closing, a large man wearing a pink tutu, pink tights and a blond wig trotted across the dismal lobby, waving at us to keep the doors open. Which—bafflingly—Dad did. The man greeted us politely (I’m sure I didn’t even cough out a hello), and moments later, a few floors up, as he prepared to step off the elevator he waggled his fingers and in a squawky high-pitched voice said, “Toodle-oo!”

  “Have a good night,” my father replied in a friendly way.

  And I remember turning and being quietly astonished that my father would know what to say to a man in a pink tutu who said toodle-oo.

  As the tutu-clad man stepped out of the elevator, he was greeted by a man in skin-tight white jeans. “Ooooh, look at the shiny drag queen!” he squeaked, giving the tutu a little tug and the man’s cheek an affectionate pinch.