From: anderson@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson)
Subject: Re: Letter from my father
Organization: Madison Academic Computing Center, UW-Madison
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 92 05:53:42 GMT


In article <1992Nov17.204906.23339@oracle.us.oracle.com>
dgilly@us.oracle.com (Daniel Gilly) writes:

>Yesterday I received a long, surprisingly personal letter
>from my father, who has recently returned from 5 months in
>Europe.  I thought I would share the relevant part of it,
>since the topics raised might be of interest to many people
>here.

I'm certainly glad you did this.  I was prompted by it to
think about my own father, who's been dead for nearly 30
years, and my mother, who died this past summer, and how
greatly they contrast one with another in *my own* mind wrt
my being gay.

>[the letter excerpts and some other things]

>To sum up, I'm amazed to hear that my father is attending
>PFLAG, apparently on his own initiative.  More than a year
>after I came out to my parents, my father is beginning to
>reconcile his feelings.

This is indeed good news.  Noting that another early
responder (Ronald Hayden) expresses doubt his parents will
ever be making these kinds of adjustments, it occurred to me
that perhaps my mother was something like your father,
whereas my father was (probably, I really don't know, we
never discussed it) was perhaps something more like Ronald's
father, within some limits.

>I'd be happy to hear comments about the above, as well as
>other people's experiences with their parents' coming to
>terms.

If you were reading this newsgroup in mid-June this past,
you would have seen some writing I did about my mother at
the time of her death.  It told how very close we had become
over the past 17+ years, how keen a fighter she was for LGB
civil rights, and how few children probably could hope for a
more loving, more *friendly* parent than she was to me.  It's
possible she knew me much better than I did (or do).

But this was not always so, and for much longer than 17
years she was far less accepting and far less my friend.
The situations are quite possibly not completely comparable,
since a major component of the problem in my case was her
alcoholism.  But I told her I was gay when I was 18 (she
asked), and we did not really become friends until she quit
drinking, when I was 40.

My point here is not to recapitulate all that long saga, but
only to say that one year in, that is, when I was 19, she
was as yet *very* far from where your father seems to be,
Dan.  My further point, then, is that from the sound of his
letter, your father is making what could be seen as a rather
rapid adjustment, which I'm sure would delight anyone to
whom it happened.

I know it's a homely old chestnut, but patience is one of
the most trying of all virtues.  The more so, it seems to
me, when we are young and full of the excitement and the
ferment of all these big changes in our lives, yet bogged
down in the dreadful inertia of the life around us, which
for so many of us seems a not unfair description of the
parental inclination to consider us children way beyond the
appropriate span of years.  Seen in retrospect, though, and
for me there begins to be rather a lot of retrospect :-),
things actually moved along all right, since it all came out
well in the end, and opened up what seems to me (again in
retrospect) an especially magical and rewarding period,
itself now a cherished memory.

By contrast, I imagine not a scintilla of a comparable
experience would have been possible with my father, even if
he had not been totally destroyed by booze.  Give or take a
couple months, my dad's life overlapped mine by 28 years (he
was just my present age when he died, a totally wasted and
broken person, in a state hospital, a real 19th-century
snake pit in Jacksonville, Illinois).

He wrote a diary in the madhouse, a really amazing document.
It took me the better part of a week to read it.  But the
quality about him, as revealed in it, was that he had not
the slightest hint of metaphor or any comparable heightening
of experience or language.  Yet he was very intelligent,
highly articulate, and consummately careful in everything
he said there (the writing itself is remarkable, very tiny
lettering, all in caps, less than 1/16" high, written in
very sharp hard pencil from exactly the edge of the sheet
perfectly straight across to exactly the other edge, with
almost no space between the lines).  He was, in life, up
to the time his descent became inevitable, an engineer,
designing industrial lighting systems, and completely
self-trained (he grew up in the coal mines of southwestern
Pennsylvania).

I have sat many times in the Lyric Theater, the opera house
in Chicago, an immense art deco auditorium, all aglow with
the golden light that in fact my father designed and
installed (the house lights, not the stage lights).  Yet
from his diary it became obvious that it was only the
technical problem that in any way engaged him; it was *just*
engineering, not art, not design, not enjoyment, not magic.
It was *these* fixtures, that much wire, so much current,
these faders, etc.  No golden glow; that effect couldn't
have interested him less.

I very much doubt he would ever have comprehended me in
any meaningful way, a dreamy musician, a passionate lover
of men, an insatiable seeker for yet *more*, whatever
it was more *of*.

In writing of his two marriages (by that time both long
since dissolved) and of his ten children (three by my mother
and seven by my stepmother), it was clear none of those
twelve people was an actual person to him; at best, we were
furniture in the chambers of his private horrors.  Although
he was not a nice man, indeed he was a real louse in a lot
of ways, it's impossible not to feel sympathy for anyone as
bereft as he was of anything warm or soft or kind or
comforting to offset the pity he felt for himself.

I was *very* surprised, some three or four years after he
died, to discover that he was bisexual, or at least he would
freely have sex with people of either gender.  If it were
possible to roll back time, there are several conversations
I might like to have with him.  I'm quite certain he never
loved anyone, unless it was his own mother, who died when he
was seven.  But somehow, I wonder if, given the chance, I
might find out that the other fifty years of his life were
a tragedy of shutting out everything good because, of course,
there are few vulnerabilities as acute as beauty, unless it
would be being abandoned utterly at seven.

-- 
[Jess Anderson <> Madison Academic Computing Center <> University of Wisconsin]
[Internet: anderson@macc.wisc.edu <-best, UUCP:{}!uwvax!macc.wisc.edu!anderson]
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