Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter (10 page)

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.

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.

The elevator doors closed.

We lurched up ten more floors.

“Dad, what's a drag queen?”

“Oh, that's a man who enjoys dressing up as a woman,” Dad answered cheerfully, as though the question had been
What's a cheerleader?
and his answer had been
Oh, that's someone who roots for your team!

I began to worry. Did he think it was
okay
for men to dress up like women? Why had he explained it so
chirpily
?

The smell of stale feet greeted us as the elevator doors opened again. We walked down the hallway to Dad's apartment and he opened the door with a flourish, singing “Ta-da!” He had just painted the kitchen a strange beige-orange and hoped I would like it.

Dad made dinner while I picked my teeth and lounged awkwardly at the table. Then we got out the cards and played a game of cribbage, Dad all plucky with enthusiasm and me suddenly scared by all his pluckiness. It took me ages to work
up the courage, but I wasn't sure I'd be able to get through the night if I didn't ask.

“So, Dad?”

He was busy counting and shifting his cards around. “Yes?” he said without looking up.

“So, I was just wondering …” I continued, sounding as blasé as I could, “if maybe you're a drag queen.”

Dad laughed. Sort of whooped. Put down his cards and fluttered his hands around as though they were little sparrows, which I did not take as a very good sign. “No, don't worry. I'm not a drag queen. Not all gay men are drag queens.”

I could have inflated an air mattress with the breath I exhaled. “So why do they do that? Like, why was that guy wearing a tutu?”

Dad shrugged. “I guess he just finds it kind of fun.”

Kind of fun
.

I wasn't sure what to do with that explanation.

Decided to pick my cards back up.

Maybe try for a flush.

I can't remember where I used to sleep in that apartment (Dad didn't live there very long), but it might have been on the couch in the main room. Wherever it was, that night I lay awake listening to the traffic, staring at the city lights out the curtainless windows and carving out a slightly different perspective on my situation. Suddenly, there was something worse than being gay. There was being a drag queen. And at least Dad wasn't one of those. In spite of the cars roaring through my
head and the strangeness of the apartment, I relaxed slightly, knowing that there were men out there walking around in tutus and saying toodle-oo, and at least my dad was slightly more normal than that.

While divorce was not unheard of in those days, it was uncommon enough, particularly under these circumstances, that acquaintances in Peterborough were left to improvise the recipe for an Appropriate Reaction:

Which left me wondering.

Did my father now cease to exist to everyone but my brothers and me? Would he keep being part of our lives in secret or would he eventually disappear into some epicene vortex somewhere around the Toronto intersection of Church and Wellesley? What would I say if people eventually asked? Would I need to invent an imaginary heterosexual person called “my dad” and talk about all the great, straight things we
did together? What kinds of things did straight fathers engage their daughters in anyway? None of the ones that I knew baked or sang Broadway show tunes over breakfast or went to the ballet or liked shopping. What on earth did these enviable, heterosexual fathers actually
do
?

The only childhood friend I ever told was Jessica Bell. I was fourteen. I had kept the secret to myself for a year, until late one night when we were lounging on the floor of Jessica's basement, sloshing ourselves up with a mickey of rum she kept stashed for such occasions. I had never tried alcohol before, but pretended to be seasoned because I longed to be as confident and grown-up as I saw Jessica to be.

As the spiked Coke poured through me, I felt myself unfurling, my stomach unclenching. The basement pulsed with the high-pitched, chimpanzee-esque chanting of the Bee Gees and I felt cool and sophisticated for the first time in my life. And then the words came out: