Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter

HONEYMOON IN PURDAH: AN IRANIAN JOURNEY

Partway through the writing of this book, I called my father to ask if he and I could have a cup of tea together and talk about a few things.

“Sure, that would be terrific!” he replied, his voice bouncing with enthusiasm, so I travelled into Toronto a few days later with a notebook in my bag.

My dad knew I was writing a book about growing up with a gay father. I had sent him early drafts of the first chapters, and while he had squirmed initially, asking if I wouldn't mind waiting until he had gone dotty before I published anything, he agreed that it was indeed an important story and would do well to be out in the world.

He just wished it didn't have to focus so much on
him
.

I arranged for us to talk because I had reached a bit of an impasse, having written all the scenes that I knew were important to telling my side of the story and feeling the need to broaden the narrative's perspective. I knew little about my father's early
adulthood, except what one gleans from passing mentions of university days and commentary on old photos, so I had questions about that period of his life. And I knew that he had come out during the vanguard of the gay revolution in Canada and I wondered if tying his story into that cultural and political history would give the book the wider vision I was seeking.

So we had tea. Earl Grey, I believe, with milk. And toast with Marmite. Between sips and bites, I asked him about his childhood—
when did he first have the hots for a boy?
—about his years at university—
did his time at Oxford, the stomping grounds of Oscar Wilde (among others), give him the freedom to consider the possibility that he might be gay?
—and about the gay revolution in Canada—
was he at the famous Toronto bathhouse raids protest and what was it like?
We talked for hours, our conversation spilling over into all sorts of other topics along the way. I made a few pages of notes.

“Ultimately, this is
your
story, Dad,” I said towards the end. “So is there anything else that
you
feel would be important to include?”

My father mentioned a few books I might read—academic treatises on gay social and political movements, the odd novel—and I jotted them down. Then he looked away pensively, inhaled sharply and opened his mouth, as if to add something. But instead of speaking, he simply held both posture and breath. Without explanation, he then got up and disappeared to his basement, reappearing a few minutes later with a small box, which he placed on the kitchen table.

“You might want to look through this,” he said, and walked over to the counter to begin preparing dinner.

I asked the obvious.

“Oh, just a few papers,” he replied. Casual as could be.

I peered inside: newspapers, magazine clippings, notebooks and loose papers. The first page I pulled out was filled with my father's inimitable scrawl. It was a diary entry dated January 31, 1980. I read the opening sentence aloud: “ ‘Last night I made it with a Roman Catholic priest.' ”

My dad shrieked and turned around. But instead of running over and tearing the page from my hands, he melted into a coy posture and cooed, “Oooh, I remember him. He was
so
cute …” Then he giggled and returned to the task of making dinner. Duck à l'orange.

I looked back at the collection of yellowing pages and realized what it was: a writer's dream. The Mythical Box, the treasure trove containing priceless original documents, the journals, the letters, clues and confessions. Everything necessary to inspire and inform a literary portrait.

Or, in this case, finish one.

After years of denial, introspection, reluctant suspicions and eventual surrender, my father came out in the 1980s. While it was difficult for a plethora of reasons, stepping into the truth of who he was brought with it such immense relief that my father must have flung the proverbial closet door right off its hinges, for he went from living a life of secrets and (for a time) deceptions to being open, forthcoming and exuberantly transparent about everything.

So while it was well within his character to share personal details, it was still a bit of a shock to be handed his
diaries. Doubly extraordinary, however, was that he chose to share everything with me knowing that I was writing a memoir—one that he already wished did not have to focus so much on
him
.

At my father's kitchen table I began to sift through the papers: drafts of letters he had written to friends in the early days of his coming out, letters he had received, newspaper clippings about “Faggots as Fathers,” his diaries, and various drafts—furiously handwritten, then typed on a manual typewriter, then on an electric one—of something he called “My Story,” his attempts to understand and articulate what he was discovering about himself, who he had been, and who, to his combined relief, distress and amazement, he was becoming.

As my dad julienned orange peels and trussed the duck and I sifted through the treasures in The Box, I asked him the odd question—“Who was Tom? You sure wrote a lot about him …”—and occasionally I read some of the steamier passages aloud. Dad cooked nonchalantly throughout, interjecting and laughing periodically. The only troubling moment came when I lifted the box off the table and prepared to carry it upstairs.

Looking alarmed for the first time that day, he said, “I think it's wonderful that you've decided to focus on writing about the broader gay movement and its political history and so forth. That's far better than just doing a personal story.”

Perhaps it was the voice of regret. Terror at what he had just done. What he knew I was likely to do with it all. But any ideas I might have had about weaving my memories into a brief
history of the gay revolution had been summarily eclipsed by the words,
Last night I made it with a Roman Catholic priest
.

Write about political history? Was he kidding? With
that
kind of material batting its eyelashes at me?

Over the next few months, I pored over the contents of The Box, sometimes so rapt that I would pull up from the middle of a page as though surfacing from an engrossing dream. Certain realizations prompted a reordering of my inner world as pieces of my sometimes puzzling childhood fell into place—
oh
, that's
who that guy was
; or,
so
that's
what Dad was doing there
—and a few memories that had had a hazy quality slid into focus.