As I was growing up and
especially in my first years of college I wondered about the possibility of my being
"gay" since I found myself strongly attracted to women. I knew that for the most
part acting on these feelings was not considered normal behavior by either my peers or by
society at large (even though so much advertising energy is and has been devoted to the
adoration of semi-clad female bodies).
I remember it started at about nine years old, I became intensely curious about other
women's bodies and felt drawn to them in a vague unfocused way. If a woman changed her
clothes in front of me I would feel nervous and swallow a lot and sometimes catch quick
glances of her breasts as her clothing slid over her eyes. I hadn't had any brothers or
sisters and had had few other opportunities to observe other people's bodies any where
near my own age group except when friends would sleep over or at summer camp. Right after
High School I went to live with my father in North Hollywood. My passage through
adolescence had hit particularly hard and my mother and I were fighting like cats and
dogs.
My father had conveniently just
reentered my life after a nine year absence and was just in the process of coming out of
the "closet"  ,not to everyone though, just a few select
family members and friends. He felt open enough with me to share his lifestyle by talking
to me about his feelings and justifications and by taking me to a number of gay men's bars
around town. He evidently wanted me to understand and to see his "scene". Having
come from a very sheltered/repressive environment, there were times when I was not always
comfortable with the places or situations that I found myself in, but I believed with all
my heart that my father had the right to whatever choices he wanted and I was honored that
he had chosen to share his perceptions with me.
At some point, feeling carried away by the headiness of all this honesty, I confessed to
him shyly that I might actually have some sort of feelings for women. His reaction was one
of absolute repulsion. He grumbled and cursed about "dykes" and said things I
don't even remember to this day, which is strange because usually I have a very good
memory. It all came down to, and this part I do remember, that for my father the only
thing worse than being a "dyke" was being a "kyke" and he seemed to
hate both groups with such venom that the thought of either, I swear, would send him
gnashing his teeth to the fridge for another vodka-tonic. He directed, however, none of
that anger towards me specifically...he just dismissed the whole idea entirely as being
utterly ridiculous.
After this the rest of our
relationship,until he died in 1987, went pretty much the same way. I knew all about him,
the sling in the bedroom, the nipple-clamps, and the continuos sexual exploration and I
continued to tell him everything about myself, my hopeless romances, my limited finances,
etc. The only thing about him I would try to change was occasionally I would suggest that
he might stop smoking. He on the other hand was always suggesting that I loose weight on
my ass, giving me advice on how to get men, informing me of interesting, if not
disturbing, sexual variations, suggesting that I change my hair style, and for a while
there was even a very heavy push towards my producing a grandson for him. The catch here
was that he always despised any of the boyfriends that I brought home to meet him. He
dismissed them claiming that they were too "whimpy" (or too Jewish) for me. He
would ask me when I was going to start dating a real man and always the implication was a
real man like himself. I found it more that vaguely amusing, however, that each and every
year at Halloween he would dress up like Dr. Frankenfurter from the Rocky Horror Picture
Show with merry-widow and high heels, garters and stockings.
A particularly significant
revelation occurred for me one Halloween as he stood beside the bathroom mirror,
attempting rather clumsily to apply some eye liner. He became frustrated and asked me to
help him apply the make-up. I did try my best to help him but since I wear that mask so
infrequently, I have little knowledge of the refinements of applying a delicate line to
change the shape of one's eyes, or the right placement of blush to create sunken cheeks,
or the right application of differing shaded of lips color to make the lips appear pouty.
( I knew that it could be done since I had seen the miraculous transformations in women's
magazines). I tried to think of the whole thing from an artistic viewpoint applying color
expressively but evidently the same rules don't always apply and as he watched my
ministrations in the mirror he became more and more frustrated, almost to the point of
becoming infuriated. He, at last, insinuated that there was some flaw in my femininity
because I did not know these vital female skills. It was suddenly glaringly apparent to me
that what my father really wanted me to fix wasn't something that the simple application
of make-up would have changed. I could not make him a woman any more than I could take the
wrinkles away and make him young again.
It is interesting to note that
as a child I grew up in a house with no prejudice. Until my father left when I was six
years old for that proverbial pack of cigarettes there was never a racial or ethnic slur
or any inference or innuendo that humans were not all equally worthy of respect. Years
later I found that my father had forbidden my mother to befriend the two gay men (a
couple: John and Jeffrey) who lived in the same apartment building as us on Bundy Drive.
(She ignored him). But I never had any hint of any of that when I was growing up. At
Montessori school, I was told that people were different colors because they had
originated in parts of the world where more or less melanin was needed to protect the body
from the rays of the sun.
I was able on a several
occasions to talk with father about this. I would say words to the effect of,
"here
you are a member of a group subject to a great deal of prejudice, how do you justify
hating Jews (a definition he later extended to include anyone person acting any of a
number of different ways that he did not approve of) and dykes"
(which, after a point,
began to include even the women in restaurants who asked him politely to extinguish his
cigarettes) My father claimed that his reason for disliking women started with his two
failed marriages. His conclusion was that women were notorious "ball-busters"
and he had various specific injustices he would site. He was perpetually expounding on the
fragility of the male ego. As to why he didn't like Jews, that he said, was because when
he went bankrupt in the late sixties it was he said because of one man (who happened to be
Jewish) who had been embezzling big time from his company.
I would try to reason with him
logically that you can't possibly judge an entire group by one or two experiences but he
always dismissed my ideas as my not having been in the world long enough to know the
truth. When I told him that I was afraid to loose my virginity because I might get a
social disease he said. "Baby, there isn't anything that a good dose of penicillin
can't cure."
When they cut my father open in
June of 1987, to explore the cancer's path of devastation, they found that not only were
his lungs totally riddled with cancer cells but also all organs of his body, including his
brain. (He was also hiv positive.) I would like to think that this is why he started
hating so bitterly and with such intensity later on his life. Sometimes I even use that to
excuse him, most of the time I can't. The point of this all being that here was a man who
grew up in the thirties in south Texas who felt something different enough in him to make
him move to California, different enough to adopt a lifestyle totally opposite from his
nuclear family upbringing. Even in the "gay scene" my father found himself
different and ended up being into the more esoteric forms of sexuality. (I will add - with
consenting adults only). Even with all this, he couldn't learn from his experience of
being a minority, of being the one other people were prejudiced toward. He couldn't turn
that around and give other people their freedom. He still judged people by his rigid rules
and how closely they conducted themselves to a way that he thought was correct.
I was never sorry that he was my father and I never wished that he was not gay. What I
wished for was that he could listen to me more and love me just the way I was. I know that
he loved me and I am grateful to have had a chance to get to know him. I do not mean to
represent my father one-sidedly, he also introduced me to some of my favorite books and
authors: Stranger In a Strange Land, Erewhon, Ouspinsky, Sexual Secrets, John Lilly, The
Foundation Trilogy, etc, etc. I still have an interesting collection of books that he left
me (and sometimes I will find his handwritten footnotes among those pages). I was proud
that my father never stopped trying to find himself. He started flight lessons, karate,
hang-gliding and motorcycle riding well into his late fifties. Many of his friends in the
scene told him that he shouldn't have told me about being gay but I am really glad that he
did. I also don't want to lead anyone to the generalization that all gay men are like my
father. I know a lot of gay and gay identified people, some in and out
of the closet, and they are all as different from each other as
individual os any other group would be. And I know of gay male couples who are in happy long term partnership
relationships and assume in good stride productive societal roles and
exceptionally educated and real witty on
top of it.
As far as my having resolved the question of whether or not I was gay, as I matured I
learned to look beyond gender or beauty in determining a person's attractiveness and to
listen instead to what they were saying and how they manifested their words in the world.
For me now kindness is exciting, and intelligence. I also learned that the question of
whether or not I was gay or whether or not someone else was gay was trivial, love
is.
I also learned that sometimes
sexuality is a form of ownership and that I do not need to own everything I find
attractive but can love from my heart wherever that person is without needing to touch
them or own them.
-V. Vaughn-Perling
|
|
