Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter (12 page)

When author Margaret Atwood heard about the bath raids, her response was, “What have the police got against cleanliness?” One month after the raids, she spoke at a Gay Freedom Rally in support of the found-ins. “It always made me want to throw up when I would see big kids beating up little kids on the playground. And I always wondered why they did that. And then I realized, it's because they can. Or at least, they think they can.” The crowd cheered and whistled. “But I don't see why anybody, in a society that calls itself a democracy,
should have to suffer from institutionalized contempt.”
^*
The gay community agreed, although there was no such thing as a “gay community” back then—not really. There were gay groups, collectives and political organizations working behind the scenes, but nothing close to the solidarity and sense of shared identity that began to emerge the night the police gave everyone a common cause to gather around.

Just as the 1969 Stonewall bathhouse raid and riots in New York had galvanized the gay and lesbian community south of the border, the 1981 Toronto bath raids marked the moment in this country that lesbians and gays stopped believing that small, quiet (Canadian-style), tiptoeing steps might be enough to secure them the respect and acceptance they deserved. It was the night that enough was finally enough. Enough of succumbing to fear. Enough buckling under to blackmail, pleading guilty and going back into the closet, as most people had done after similar raids in the past. It was the night people said,
Hang onto your hockey helmets, Canada, this country's about to get a lot more colourful
.

Or, in the words of the gay/lesbian publisher Pink Triangle Press, “The outcome that we seek is this: gay and lesbian people daring to set love free.”

That was Toronto. I was a hundred miles and several galaxies away in Peterborough, which was, in those days, a quiet, homogeneous town whose newspaper rose to the self-appointed task of confirming, daily, that virtually nothing of any interest or import ever occurred there.

The night of the bath raids, I was at band practice. Had been, at any rate, having developed a furious fascination for percussion shortly after I started high school, the rhythmic beating and clanging of willing objects providing me with such ineffable satisfaction that I often stayed late after practice just to whack some of the larger drums.

So while police were striking homosexuals into submission, I was probably in the music room of Crestwood High School, thwacking the cauldron head of the timpani with a hard mallet, creating a roomful of thunder cracks with my bare hands and feeling like a teenage girl version of Zeus.

I didn't learn of the raids or the protest march until much later, when Jessica Bell (who had become aloof in recent months; my mother said she looked “unhappy”) casually mentioned that she had heard something about my dad from a friend down the street.

I can still feel the flames of shame that shot up from my stomach to my cheeks.

We were in Jessica's bedroom collaborating on a Harlequin-type romance story in which we would each write juicy, quasi-sexual scenes of the other being greatly desired by the
hairy-chested Barry Gibb (the eldest Bee Gee). He probably sucked in real life, Jessica had told me. But in our imaginations, he could be perfect. That was the nice thing about writing. I was never very good at creating erotica, Jessica being far more worldly and knowledgeable in such matters than I. She would lie on the floor and moan, “Oh, can you just imagine what it would be like to have Barry Gibb as a
lover
?” I couldn't. Try as I might.

But once, before she shrieked her disgust and shamed me into never uttering such a pathetic thing again in my life, I admitted that sometimes I did fantasize about having Barry Gibb as a
father
.

Hip, hairy and heterosexual. I couldn't imagine a more thrilling combination of traits to have wandering around the house.

“You're so
weird
,” she said, returning to penning scenes of Barry undressing me by a poolside in Australia. (My scenes of Barry seducing her were never quite as exotic or lubricious as she hoped.)

“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” she said, pen in her mouth. “Victoria Brown said that your dad's been very naughty.”

I was burning within seconds. Nothing gradual about it. Just: hot.

“What,” was all I could say, scarcely moving my lips. It wasn't a question at all. It was a demand. I hated Jessica in that moment. The power she held over me.
This is what happens when you tell someone about this
, I concluded, my jaw forming a hard ridge against the world. “Just tell me
what
.”

The trials for the found-ins had taken more than a year to complete (total taxpayer bill for the raids: more than $250,000) with the vast majority pleading not-guilty and winning their cases. One of the techniques of the gay rights organizers fighting the cases was to fill the courtroom with “decoys” to confuse the police, who had to identify, from among a roomful of men, those they had arrested during the raids. The decoys were gay men who resembled the accused. One of them was my dad.

One afternoon, as my father and his moustachioed friends were quack-quack-quacking around the courtroom trying to get the police to shoot confused glances in their direction, the judge arrived.
All rise
. My dad did. But he nearly sat down again when he saw the black-robed, bespectacled man presiding: Judge Brown, his former neighbour from lovely, leafy, suburban Merino Road.

Everyone having been sworn to an oath of privacy, the matter did not leave the courtroom, though somehow news of Dad's participation in the trial
and what that meant
did reach the judge's teenage children, who were kind enough not to shoot off the firecracker gossip too loudly (Jessica was told not to tell many people), and fortunately, none of them were the
nah-nah
type.

Jessica was out of rum, so once she'd divulged all the details of the gossip, we drank a pitcher of Kool-Aid with extra sugar and fell asleep with twitching eyelids and pink tongues.

We remained friends, but guardedly so. And I wasn't close to anyone after that.

How could I be.

From then on, it was difficult to shake the feeling, as I walked around the neighbourhood, that there was this teensy little gargantuan secret, and if it accidentally slipped out, well, it just might have the social effect of whacking me to my knees with a metal bar and knocking my teeth out.

And then there were the looks of pity, which might well have been worse than a metal bar to the knees.
Oh, poor you, your life's so awful
, neighbours could say with a simple glance. I had moved into the “we're fine, carry on with your lawn mowing” stage of scandalous-pansy-in-the-family living, and I didn't really relax or feel part of the neighbourhood for another few years.

Maybe ever.

In my quietest moments, I began to believe that there had to exist—far, far away—a place where none of this would matter. Where I wouldn't have to lie or pretend, where I could walk out the door, wave to neighbours, and feel like I belonged. Though I'm sure I didn't put the feeling into words at the time. It was more of a churning, a queasiness I ached to resolve. The way a seasick person longs for land. Scans the horizon for it, constantly. Dreams of it, the sensation of stillness beneath her feet. Yet the only thing visible in every direction is water. Waves everywhere.

That search for land would come to shape my adult life. It would take me to the far edges of the world, have me peering out over the edges of continents, moving through war zones and revolutions, learning languages and songs of belonging, and revelling in the sensation of being deliciously alone.
Anonymous. Suspended from the world. It was a quest that fuelled some of the richest, most fascinating periods of my life.

Who knows. If Dad had been hip, hairy and heterosexual, I might never have left Peterborough.

One day shortly before my fifteenth birthday, I walked into my parents' bedroom and the twin beds were gone.

“Your dad needed them for his new house,” my mother said without any music in her voice at all.

And that was that.

He'd moved out for good.

I don't remember whether or not I cried.

Dad moved into an old house on a quiet residential street in a comfy neighbourhood of Toronto. He had considered buying a house closer to downtown, but a friend had warned him that his children might not feel comfortable with the neighbourhood, so my dad took the advice and chose the fixer-upper with posh-potential.

I didn't really like the place. For one thing, it smelled funny. Smelled
old
. There was gaudy wallpaper throughout that was heavy with other people's lives, and the kitchen floor sloped so severely we couldn't put a dish down on the table without it sliding off the other side. I can't remember how we ate in those days; I guess we all held our bowls. The stairs creaked excessively (still do), the bathroom was black and white with a tile floor that was always cold, and the yard was the size of two parking spaces at Kmart.

But the neighbourhood felt better than the gay ghetto: no graffiti or drag queens, lots of narrow houses with tidy little gardens, and no traffic. Toronto was still filthy, littered with cigarette butts and advertising, the subway like a rat pit. And the Chinese food Dad took us out for was all slurpy and bumpy, bowls of white spongy blobs and gooey vegetables, nothing like the chow mein and chicken balls you could get at the Crest Chinese & Canadian Restaurant at the edge of town in Peterborough.

Why live in Toronto? Especially when you still work at Trent University in Peterborough!

Why eat weird stringy food?

Why be gay?

There were so many questions I didn't have answers for and no one I felt I could ask.

Actually, I don't believe I ever thought of asking anyone anything, or that I even considered myself full of questions. I just moved into a period when my life became made up of things I did not fully understand.

Dad tried to fill our visits to Toronto with things we enjoyed, in my case ballet and chocolate. He got season tickets to the National Ballet and introduced me to things like profiteroles with extra
crème fouettée
, so quickly I began to associate the city with things less dreary and smelly.

Occasionally my brothers and I went together. Early on, when the kitchen was still slopey, Flip and I were taken to see a touring Chinese circus and we were so inspired by the superhuman feats of the troupe that we spent the rest of the evening flinging each other around Dad's house, balancing dishes on our feet and leaping from the back of the couch onto each other's shoulders. Dad came downstairs at one point—someone had fallen and was in tears, probably Flip, as I was never very good at catching—and once it was established that everyone was okay, Dad said, in a voice that was kind of froggy, as though there were tears gurgling in his throat, that he enjoyed hearing our laughter in the house.

It got a bit awkward at that point because no one wanted Dad to cry, so Flip got all cheerful and said that we sure had found the Chinese circus
stimulating
.

He knew that would cheer Dad up.

For Paul, eating, and food itself, was stimulation. He and my dad spent months scoping out the best holes-in-the-wall in Chinatown, eating dim sum, and buying bizarre Asian fruits that had prickly skins and smelled like farts. Paul went on to develop a passion for food and wine that has turned into a successful and much-loved career, which began around the age of fifteen, when he began catering the parties of our neighbours in Peterborough. Using ingredients he picked up in Chinatown and a large set of Chinese dishes my mother had given him for Christmas, Paul served multicourse meals of exquisitely prepared Chinese food to parties of astonished neighbours. It was just about the last thing anyone expected of a teenage boy on Merino Road.