First Trip to New York City

Dad would soon move into New York City. I am not sure how long it was before we had our first trip in to see him, but my mother came with my two brothers and me. From New Jersey we drove into the city in our Pontiac station wagon, the kind with the fake wooden panels and the fold down seats in the back where children could pretend to be door gunners. Driving in the city with that locomotive for a 5'3" southern mother with three young boys was an experience. Parking it took an eternity.

It must have been winter time because when I look at pictures I wore a bright red wool hat and a puffy winter coat that covered the lower part of my chin. 1976-77 was a cold winter on the east coast. That picture was taken on the top of the Empire State Building. What does this say about my father? He must have wanted to show me something exciting about his new home, something that would make me want to come back to see him. How nervous he must have been. Leaving a family, three small children, and venturing into a new life - he must have been terrified that the father-son link was very thin and could snap quickly.

When a man becomes a father, an instinct within him is born. He must protect the child. He does not realize why he feels this way, but the survival of his species depends on this human behavior. Yet when he brings his child into an environment that might frighten and make his son feel vulnerable, he has an innate desire to calm this fear. He wants to make the child feel safe, protected, and most of all, not to run.

Dad's first apartment was no more than a kitchen, a bed and a fold out couch. All red bricks on the inside, it was somewhere near 86th street. I do not recall the cross-street, but it was on the east side of Manhattan. The fold out bed is where my brothers and I slept. Soon Dad would begin to move from apartment to apartment each one bigger than the one before. By any standard, these were humble quarters.

Dad had begun his second life. After ejecting from white, straight suburbia where he never felt like he belonged, my father now found himself in a place where he was anonymous, where nobody could replay his history of the past 34 years. He might as well have been an expatriate in a country where nobody knew his name. He could now remake himself in his own image. It was during this time that Dad began to take a new form. It was the father I fondly remember, one that seemed confident, content, and even blissful at times. He would meet Bert here, someone with whom Dad would spend his best days. He would also join the Gay Fathers group where he would gain acceptance and learn to endure the guilt which came with leaving a family and being gay. This group of men had all left families behind, something that no human ever wants to face, but all for the same reason. They were gay, and they could not continue to live a lie. For the first time Dad had met not just one but many men who had experienced what he thought only afflicted him. Dad felt like for the first time that he belonged and was accepted.

Most people can identify with the initial glee of acceptance. A child feels this when he holds up his mitt and unknowingly catches the final out of a game. As his team surrounds him with frantic congratulations, he realizes that he has made a life-sustaining connection with individuals that before his game saving catch were ambivalent, perhaps even adversarial, to the child. He is now accepted into a tribe that provides protection and meaning for his life. Man thrives with companionship and dies without it. Dad was learning to prosper.

Distant Memories

Memories fade after thirty years. I remember only bits and pieces of my father living with us. When I think about him at home, some small, irrelevant event penetrates my mind. It usually fizzles into a small excerpt of the past with little direct meaning but with startling warmth.

I recall standing by Dad in the bathroom as he combed his hair. He had just shaved his mustache, something he would grow and then cut off with predictable frequency. He was wearing what he referred to as a "racing jacket" - just a shiny brown vest with three buttons in the front and no sleeves. This was yet another indication of how important my Dad was. How many kids had a father that raced cars?

I would later realize that Dad was not a race car driver. He was not a firefighter, a cop, or an Army General - none of the occupations a five year old imagines his Dad to fill. He was a lawyer working at Ma Bell - AT&T for those not old enough to remember. As a brilliant young attorney who had received a full scholarship to Florida State, my father opted to enter Corporate America for its security and guarantees. The phone company before divestiture offered a lifetime employment plan that only the federal government could match. Entering the relative comfort of a corporate behemoth was a decision that would torment him for years to come. As a law school student, his dreams had been larger. Even the Senate seemed within his grasp, but MaBell had a very short list of senators to its name. At the phone company, you worked for thirty years, lived comfortably, but died anonymously. Dad followed this path because it was the right thing to do. A family needs stability, but comfort comes with a price and the person providing it normally is the one who pays.

Dad seemed to go on business trips quite often, but one seemed to last much longer than usual. Young children have a hard time grasping lengths of time, but this one seemed to make an impression on me. Then one day I remember coming down into the den. We had a tri-level house, and in the lower level was a long rectangular room with a television and some much worn pieces of furniture. Dad, back from his business trip, was wearing his normal blue sports coat and was sitting on a brown, faux-leather rocking chair. A short-sleeved collar shirt was about as casual as my father got. His clothes were impeccable.

Dad explained that he was back to try to live with us again. This should have seemed strange to me, but it didn’t. Dad was there, I liked that, so all was well.

That is the last memory I have of Dad living in the same house as me.

It could have been a day, a month, three months, a child cannot tell, but one day Dad was gone. Mom called me into the house from a game of monkey in the middle I had been playing in the front yard. We lived in a nice suburban neighborhood in northern New Jersey. In 1976, our town was not yet stuffy or even yuppie. That would change in the next 20 years as it became a hotspot for commuters into New York City, but for now this was an unpretentious, sleepy neighborhood.

When I came into the house Stu was already in the kitchen. Mom was tracking Steve down who had gone to his room. When we were finally together, she braced for what she expected to be an outbreak of emotions.

"Your father and I are getting a divorce."

I had no concept of what a divorce meant. She repeated it. Divorce sounded like a bad thing, so I forced myself to cry. Truth is I had no idea what any of this meant, but like at a funeral, crying seemed like the right thing to do. Dad was moving into New York City, a place I had never been. It was a place I would later come to hate, than to love, as I was about to experience the beginning of a societal movement that continues to rock our culture to this day.

I did not know this at the time, but Dad had finally come to grasp with the fact that he was gay. So had my mother. Despite psychologists who claimed first that they could "fix" him, than others that explained to my mother that he could "get this out of his system" with some periodic escapades, Dad was gay and always would be. Years later I would find out that he knew this as early as 12 years old. Despite his sexuality, he got married, had children, and tried his best to live the life he thought he needed. 1976 was no time for a gay.

My mother must have been devastated. A southerner by birth, being divorced was bad enough, but to have homosexuality as the reasoning, that must have been more than she could withstand. 1976 was not only a bad time to be a gay man, but also a bad time to be married to one.

Hundreds, then thousands, of men began to "come out of the closet" in those early years. Dad would enter a group known as the Gay Fathers. This band of men, who had had children in a former marriage, would become a very tight knit clique as they attempted to raise their kids in a society that believed they should have none, that the children were better off without them. Mom could have shielded us from this culture. Any judge would have gladly supported her had she wanted to completely cut off Dad, but she showed amazing forgiveness and foresight. The odds were grossly in favor of abandoning my father, but this did not happen.

Soon I would begin to go into the city every other weekend to see Dad. There I would unknowingly begin to witness a movement and a culture that so few wanted to understand, and so many wanted to just go away. There were many times that I too wished that this had never happened, that Dad never had to be gay. Nevertheless, Dad was gay. Nothing was going to change that.