Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter

by Alison Wearing

  The father acknowledges his sexuality will have some effect on his son.

  The boy won’t suffer because of his father’s homosexuality, but he will suffer as a result of society’s distaste for it, Mr. Lynch said.

  “I think a gay parent, like a Pakistani or black parent, has an obligation to prepare the child for the hate that he’ll be taught at school. Schools, churches, society, newspapers teach this hate and one has to say, ‘Look, be ready—your daddy is a faggot.’

  “He knows I suffer and have fears about all kinds of social hate. I tell him. I don’t know how much he understands fully. He may have some tough moments growing up, but so does a Pakistani child, and you wouldn’t take that child from a loving parent because a swastika has been painted on his door.”

  Mr. Lynch said he hopes to transmit to his son “a bitterness against a society which is sexist. I want him to have a kind of bitterness or strong rejection of those standards.”

  He also wants his son to understand that men, whatever their sexual orientation, can be affectionate, tender and loving with men and women. “He is not going to be a super-macho male. He’s not going to feel because he’s male he has to be rigid and distant or authoritarian.”

  Mr. Lynch laughs at curiosity about how a homosexual can be a parent. He says the public would be surprised at how many homosexual parents there are if every homosexual stood up and told the truth.

  He has organized a discussion group of eight homosexual parents of varied marital statuses and custody situations and knows of three Toronto homosexuals involved in custody cases.… In his own case, Mr. Lynch and his wife will divorce and are planning to arrange joint custody of their son.

  Excerpts from the small blue diary

  14.9.78

  Michael had told me about various discussion groups including one called Married Gays. Its extreme confidentiality appealed to me and so I found myself, very nervously, ringing a (coded) doorbell in a smart new apartment block not far from the C.N. Tower and the Royal Alex. The host was Stan Wild, a fiftyish, grammar-school Englishman who is very devoted to the gay social service system.

  This is my first introduction to the incredible array of situations one finds in talking with gay men. Warren and Jim didn’t look gay in the least. Warren in his late fifties has a kind of sexy self-assuredness. He has teenaged children and claims he never had any gay inclinations until two years ago. He is sure his wife doesn’t know about his affairs, but says their sex life has really fallen off.

  According to Jim, his wife has always known he was gay, even before they were married. Every so often, he feels the old urge returning, he picks up someone off the street, but he feels guilty afterwards. He is a big strapping fellow who looks like he would have been a typical student of the sixties. I talk about how this is all so new to me and I don’t know where it is going to lead. It is comforting just to talk it through and to hear about other men and situations.

  28.9.78

  I have surveyed most of the gay bars in the downtown area. Either they are not very conducive to meeting people and chatting with them—there is movement but too much loud music; or the men appear to sit riveted at their tables for hours on end. Buddy’s is for me, a happy mixture—lots of moving about, lots of opportunity to engage in casual conversation.

  This evening, I leave Buddy’s alone and continue my search at Richmond Street without much success. But as I am leaving, I meet George, a homely but sort of endearing lawyer who comes back to the Carlton Hotel with me. His approach is matter-of-fact. It is after experiences like this that I think maybe I could just quietly give it all up and carry on with my Peterborough life, which, incredibly, is so much like it has always been. But can I choose? I don’t know.

  12 to 15.10.78

  I am in Toronto for Contact/78.* I arrive raring to go—and go directly to Mutual Street where I am immediately picked up by a sexy Italian, Armand. He compliments me on looking Italian and on all sorts of other things—what a change from two weeks ago. Before I know it I am in a threesome with a man from Calgary—fantastic. After the evening session of Contact, Gerry and I get together. He turns out to be something of a fascist and not very passionate. We spend an unproductive night together. Somewhere through the weekend, I also met a computer programmer from Goderich(!), good-looking, but pretty officious once we had finished what we had set out to do. On leaving the establishment, I caught sight of him fully dressed—transformed into a regular Milquetoast!

  On Saturday morning, over breakfast at Le Petit Gourmet, I met a fabulously attractive man by the name of Colin. I know that he lives in the area, but unfortunately we parted without my having established certain important pieces of information. One of those delicious but maddeningly ambiguous experiences such as Isherwood writes about in A Single Man.

  Saturday evening, I go to Katrina’s, a sumptuous, but slightly glittery disco-bar. I am somewhat startled to meet John S. and a few others from Contact. I leave fairly early and, on my way back to the Park Plaza, John catches up to me and invites me up to the apartment where he is staying. I go up but decide that I will excuse myself after due proprieties.

  John, however, turns out to be a persuasive and sensuous man. We have great sex all over the living room and then do a lot of talking. He is one month older than I am and has been married for twenty years. His wife went through a bad period when she discovered a letter from John’s current lover but, in the end, she decided she would rather have him as he is than not to have him at all. Incredibly, he now has a lover who lives just a few houses away and who, John claims, is quite accepted by his wife. He has great sex with both, he says. All of this reassures me in a way because anything seems possible. But we part with the warning that I have pain ahead of me.

  What an erotic weekend!

  I almost forgot about having coffee with Arthur Motyer.* He gave me the sad news that he and Sarah were separating because she disapproves of his bisexual activities. I longed to tell him my story but somehow couldn’t decide how to begin.

  27.10.78

  I went to Toronto for a conference on “Social Upheaval in Italy” and Don Giovanni in the evening. At Buddy’s afterwards, I talked with an attractive American bookseller from near Chicago. He is married and when he told his wife about being gay, she said simply that she had always suspected he was. He travels a lot and confines his gay activities to out-of-town, but that unfortunately did not include me. Still it was reassuring to chat with another married gay—but what an assortment of situations there are.

  After Buddy’s, I continued my cruising at Dudes—an after-hours bar. I chatted with two U of T profs who had also been to Don Giovanni and then suddenly spied DG from Trent through the crowd—my first direct connection with Peterborough. We both talked openly of the excitement of our gay lives, but also how we both liked the calm and security of a heterosexual existence. He is going to be moving back in with Carol again—he seems to be in as much of a quandary as I am.

  4.11.78

  I go to Toronto for a concert in the Festival series. Armed with an extra ticket, I drop into Buddy’s in hopes of finding some company. That turns out to be Claude, a psychologist at University of Waterloo. He is very keen about music, married with teenage children. He confines his gay life to monthly visits to Toronto and elsewhere when he attends meetings. All very compartmentalized. He invites me up to his room in the Carlton Hotel and what transpires is pretty perfunctory.

  It is after this that I go through a period of being rather depressed about where all this is taking me. All of these casual encounters seem to be leading nowhere. What I really want is a male friend in the line of close male friends, which I have had over the years … but what I desperately want now is a close male friendship, which, for the first time is also a gay friendship.

  I go to the first meeting of a gay fathers’ group in Toronto, partly to have an excuse for seeing Michael Lynch, but also in hopes of meeting someone. Once again, there is an incredible array. One comes f
rom a family of five brothers, four of whom are gay. His wife knows and her acceptance seems to fit into a general pattern which they both have of fighting for minority causes. The most extraordinary is an extremely good-looking doctor who relates that, just as he was working up the courage to tell his wife, she, an international model, informed him, after the birth of their second son, that she was a lesbian.

  Excerpts from “Forgotten Fathers,” Michael Lynch, Body Politic, April 1978

  Preparing this article, I asked about twenty fathers if they could be pictured here with their child or children. Almost all turned me down. They felt that being known as gay would entail a large risk of losing their children through the efforts of homophobic relatives, social workers or judges.

  “The numbers of them weren’t all that impressed me,” Brian Miller (who is conducting a sociological study of gay fathers in the U.S. and Canada) recounts. “There was also an intensity of experience that I’d not expected.” He described instance after instance where a father had broken into tears recalling the pain of having to decide between being honest about his gayness and getting to keep his children. “Every father I’ve talked with experiences a gap between his life as a father and his life as a gay man. As a parent he is part of his children and they of him; as a gay man he finds that the available social structures discourage the presence of children—or exclude them flatly.” The invisibility is due not only to the homophobia of the non-gay world, but also to the failure of other gay men to make a place for children within their world as well.

  Surely, one might think, a gay activist experiences this differently, does not feel such a gap. Surely the gay movement has made room for these men.

  “Not at all,” says Maurice Flood.… Maurice is a gay leader in Vancouver and is the father of Isabel, 5, and Margaret, one-and-a-half. Maurice has chosen to live the life of what Don Mager, in a pioneering essay published in 1973, called the “faggot father”: “A faggot father is not simply a faggot who at some point fathered a child, but more significantly he is a man whose sexual orientation is gay and whose daily life includes an active participation in the lives of his children.”

  Maurice and Cynthia Flood live in a large house with two other gay men. All four adults have been active in feminist, left and/or gay politics. One might expect that such a context would make being a faggot father easier. But here’s what Maurice has to say:

  “The out-of-the-closet gay father is looked upon by heterosexuals and even by gays as a slightly ridiculous, bizarre creature. He doesn’t fit any current conventional pattern of behaviour and in that sense is considered weird and unacceptable. Many gays, particularly in the gay movement, regard parenthood as a retrograde step. The out gay father is seen as someone who has not quite rejected or escaped the family.… The status of the out gay father is a lonely one, particularly in the gay community.”

  John Lee of Toronto has been out to his daughter and son since they were four and two, respectively. Now 18 and 16, they have grown up comfortable in knowing their father’s sexuality.… “The single most important factor in being a good parent,” John says, “is being honest. My children have never had trouble with my living with men, though of course they have liked some more than others.” He counsels gay fathers to come out as early as possible. “If you tell children more than they can understand, they’ll let you know,” he says. “So I prefer to exceed rather than underestimate their comprehension. Children are remarkable in their attention and understanding. At an early age they won’t understand physical acts—heterosexual or homosexual—but they will understand affection, struggles, anger, tenderness. They can sense it, and resent it, when a parent is dishonest with them.”

  Above all, the problem facing the forgotten gay father is the spectre of isolation. Gay men may no longer be invisible, but gay fathers remain so. Like all subminorities, they suffer a more intense version of the general oppression experienced by the minority as a whole. Upon learning that I’d talked with other gay fathers, one almost shouted, “Where on earth did you find them?” The hunger to share experience is one that any gay person who has been isolated would understand. So would any parent who has been isolated from other parents. Parenthood, like sexuality, becomes a crucial component in one’s sense of oneself.

  “There’s a lot I’d like to talk about with another gay father,” one man told me, “but there’s no place to do it. In the parent association at school we’re not out to one another, if there even are any other gay parents there. And I feel completely apart from straight parents. In the bars there’s an unwritten rule against talking about something like parenthood, except as an oddity.”

  “My loneliest hours,” another said, “are those in the park while the boys are playing. I’d like to be with another gay adult then, to talk over the week’s discoveries and decisions. I watch the heterosexuals who meet there to chat while their children play—but I’m alone.”

  Two days ago eight gay fathers, and three of our children, gathered for the first time, and I found in that group a sense of commonality I’m not used to among gay men. “Being a parent,” one of them said, “is a more engulfing experience than just being married or being gay—we are bound to have much more in common.” All of us are battling sexism, both Out There and within ourselves. In each other’s presence, we eight were no longer forgotten fathers.

  Where do we go from here?

  Letter from Arthur Motyer, a former colleague and friend from the mid-1960s, to my father; handwritten on the letterhead of Mount Allison University, where Arthur taught for twenty-three years

  Monday, Nov. 27th, 1978

  My dear Joe,

  “Does any of this surprise you?”

  No, not really. My intuition has proven a pretty reliable guide over the years; but since you are not the conventional stereotype (the sort society thinks to exist and rarely does) any more than, I hope, I am, I could not be sure. I was sure, when I told you my story, that you would understand, but I did not wish to press the point about yourself. I felt the time would come when you would tell me something, but I didn’t know when. Thank you now for your trust. I’m glad I made it possible for you to share this with me.

  But, dear, dear Joe, how strange life is in all its unfoldings! Can we believe it is unfolding as it should? I look back now and understand more clearly why it is we have always had a special kind of bond and how it is we have always been able to be quickly in tune with each other, even after gaps of years. In my intuitive way I knew this about you before you were married; but I never thought you were dishonest in marrying (which Sarah now accuses me of being), for exceptional people (and I think you and Anne are exceptional) can sometimes cope and make such a marriage successful. Yet I wondered. And I wondered for years about you, and I wondered while I was talking to you the other day. Still, I think you were right NOT to mention it then. That was my moment. Now is your moment.

  Of course I have no advice for you. If you are in such a group as you are in in Toronto, that is probably help enough. Yet I may have some special insights since I’ve been through so much myself and because I know you and Anne.*

  I would assume that you and Anne could work out a modus vivendi in a way Sarah and I cannot, and I say that because Anne has long had an interior quality which sustains her (or seems to) apart from you. She is thus her own person and may, because of it, be able to come to terms with you. If you honestly try to recognize the quality of yourself and come to terms with that, then I believe you are (one is) in a better position to come to terms with others.…

  When it comes down to it, I probably don’t know Anne all that well. Our relationship has been a surface one of fun …. but I suspect she doesn’t need you to be herself a secure person in her own right. If you want a modus vivendi, you have, therefore, a good chance to work on something from such a base. You might just think about that.

  I told Sarah before we were married, but I suppose I thought I was “over it,” and she has a view that all of this is
a lot of immoral (not to mention “illegal” when you’re married) nonsense; and all a man needs is good old heterosexual sex enough times to make him see the light. Of course it doesn’t work that way. But her greater knowledge of me, over the last 10 years, has not brought with it a greater understanding of me, and that is the sad thing. With you, it might work differently.

  But do you want to stay married? With a wife’s understanding (and it takes an unusual woman) it can work as an extra dimension within a marriage and not just a rigid alternative to it. It seems to me there is some chance that Anne might see it this way.

  I did not mean to get onto yet another page. You will tire of all my words. But how I wish I could see you! There is no chance before Christmas (unless you are in New York between Dec. 15th and 21st), but I shall look for an excuse early next year to visit Toronto. In the meantime, please write again and feel free to discuss anything you like with me, knowing there’s a fair chance I will understand.

  But you intrigue me! Whom did you meet last weekend in Toronto? Someone I know? Not Robertson Davies, I hope. The social fabric really would crumble.…

  Write again soon. I think of you.

  Love, A

  Handwritten draft of a letter from my father; undated and unfinished

  Dear Arthur,

  Thanks very much for your warm, understanding and very perceptive letter, which I received today. I think you are right about Anne and it could very well be that because we have never been completely dependent on each other, we could incorporate this new dimension. She does have self-reliance and an inner toughness that allow her to be her own person. On the other hand, I would dread bearing the brunt of that toughness!