My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents

by Jonathan G. Silin

  I begin to authorize my own life.

  Now, like Jean Genet, I turn the act of writing itself into an erotic moment. Seeing my words provides an illicit pleasure that I hardly understand. Hiding nothing from myself, I spend hours secreting away my desires from others even as I hope they will be discovered. These brief, furtively written narratives are the precursors to a more formal statement, a homoerotic short story deeply indebted to my first reading of James Baldwin. Undertaken as a senior English project, this personal declaration of independence, no parental editing required, is ultimately returned by the teacher without a single comment—so much for coming out in 1960. Although I am ready and able to put my desires onto paper, albeit transformed into the lives of fictionalized characters, I speak to no one about the essay. The one person who reads it is herself left wordless. This move to represent what is inside undoubtedly functions as an effective distancing mechanism through which I can better see myself, part of the drive to get on with the inevitable. Emboldened by my imminent graduation, I use the assignment to prepare for the real coming out that will take place only weeks after I arrive at my freshman dorm at college.

  As I become a writer, I also become a reader. In his short but memorable essay “On Reading,” Proust describes the places and days in which he first became absorbed by books. What remains most vivid about childhood reading, he claims, is not the text itself but the call to an early lunch when the chapter is not quite finished, the summer outing during which our only desire is to return to the book left hastily aside on the dining room table, or the secret pleasure of reading in bed m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 77

  long after all the adults have gone to sleep. While particular phrases titillate our curiosity and provoke our desire, Proust assures us that there is no truth to be found in words themselves, just the keys that help us to unlock interior rooms of our own design. Only in adolescence does the solitude required of the engaged reader become tolerable, dare I say attractive, to me. And only then am I able to set aside my own immediate interests to lend the book my larger life.

  Although I favor long family narratives and bildungsromans with lots of character development and psychological complications, my tastes are eclectic. I am especially given to perusing my parents’ bookshelves, which contain everything from Kafka’s Metamorphosis, for-bidden to my best friend by his more protective parents, to Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol. I have no interest in lightweight subjects such as the thirty-five-cent Signet edition mysteries that my father reads on the train to work each day and then jams into his raincoat pocket. Once stacked high in separate piles around the house—my father is a fast reader—they eventually begin to disappear, replaced by my mother’s ever-growing library of hardcover fiction.

  Now, on the very same shelves, wedged in between books on Jewish history and biographies of Zionist leaders (my father’s) and piled hap-hazardly atop an assortment of art books (my mother’s) are the volumes containing my own essays on education. I have never become used to seeing them mixed in with the volumes of my childhood; they seem oddly out of context, misplaced fragments from the academic world. And what do these carefully proffered “gifts” mean to my parents?

  They are proud of my scholarly achievements, clearly unimagined when I announced my intention of working with young children thirty years ago. Then 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 i
s 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 powerful than now, as I write to assert the continu-ation of my life in the face of his death.

  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 p e r n 83

  the school-reform project. Given the difficult politics in the school district, do we want to release a report that is highly critical of the current change efforts and that documents the ongoing mistreatment of children and adults in the system? Will we lose our place at the table of reform? Will our adversaries in the district use the report, which is also self-critical, against us?

  I am a few minutes late when I enter the president’s office. An administrative foul-up has required that the meeting be held an hour earlier than expected. Slightly out of breath, irritated by the change of time, and hoping to keep my impulse to speak too quickly in check, I am surprised when a women turns to me saying, “We haven’t really started. We were waiting for you.” Although I am one of a handful of men in the college and the only man on this project with a staff of twenty-five, I am suddenly struck by being the only male in the room of five female executives. Can they have been waiting for me to lay out the agenda? I don’t want to be the dominating male, although this is unlikely, given that the president is always well prepared and is known to have done an especially close reading of the report. Concerned about how the college represents itself to the larger educational public, she questions whether our ethnographic approach to research will convince elected officials and funders of the value of our work. In the age of educational standards and intensified testing, what kind of research will be most effective in helping others to understand the benefits of progressive education?

  While some in the room express hesitations about the impact of the report on our future relations with the school district, my overriding concern is our commitment to the teachers and staff who have told us their stories and which we have tried to represent. Our obliga-tion, I volubly argue, is to them, and our ability to continue telling their stories will be severely compromised if we withhold the rep
ort from wide-scale circulation. I say that if teachers and staff feel that they have been misrepresented, then we must bear the consequences.

  A consensus for widespread distribution builds as the meeting ends.

  On the inside I participate in a very different dialogue. For I am 84 n jonathan g. silin

  only too aware that in other contexts, I am much less confident, unwilling to accept the imagined consequences of sharing my documentation projects. Where my parents are involved, practical and ethical considerations give way under the weight of the emotional baggage I bring to researching their lives and mine.

  In need of validation, I send my essays to two cousins with explicit instructions not to share them with other family members. I am only too happy for strangers to read these ruminations on aging, but the more people who know my parents read the essays, the deeper my feelings of disrespect. One cousin advises me to show them the work. She says that she would be proud to have children who write so lovingly about her. But she speaks as a sixty-year-old at the height of her powers, not as a fragile eighty-seven-year-old near the end of life. I don’t believe she knows what it has been like for me to be the perennial target of blame, the container of so much parental anger and anxiety.

  Nor is this a role I ever anticipated playing in my parents’ life. Indeed it is only in 1990, at age forty-five, that I have my first insight into the nature of the drama that I am destined to participate in.

  My father is undergoing risky and complicated surgery to save the sight in his one good eye. My mother, my aunt, and I are waiting for him when he returns from the operation. Only local anesthetic is used during such surgeries, and my father lies fully awake but motionless in the bed. My mother and aunt hover over the patient, trying to make him comfortable. I stand at a distance. Suddenly I hear him call out my name in terror, declare the operation a failure, and blame me for having allowed it to happen. My father believes that he is permanently blind because he can’t see anything at all. A surgical patch, which will be removed in twenty-four hours, covers his good eye. I am paralyzed and cannot respond. My own vision is beginning to blur. I feel dizzy and unsteady on my feet. As my father continues to wail in despair, my mother tries to calm him. I slip out of the room and find a seat on a window ledge in the hallway. I place my head between my legs as I have been taught to do in these situations, but the dizziness m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 85