Dad Tells Me

Fast forward a year.

By now Bert was living with my father. To a young boy this seemed normal enough. My Dad had a roommate. If I could live with my best friend I would, so there was nothing wrong with this.

Bert was a tall, thin man with dark eyebrows and hair, the bushy type that if not well maintained quickly becomes outlandish. He always seemed to where black or grey clothes. In all the pictures of Bert, he had a very serious, pensive look. Bert was soft spoken and nobody would have guessed in looking at him that he was somehow 'gay' except perhaps for the fact that he was a decent looking guy! He was not playing “the part”. This was just the way he was.
Bert was an architect and designer. He worked for Swanke, Hayden & Conell, one of New York's most prestigious architectual firms, one which was chosen to design the Statue of Liberty Restoration.

Bert was much younger than my father. When they met Bert would have been 25 whereas my father was 34. As such he never experienced the pain and guilt my father did by trying to hide behind a family in the suburbs, although I do remember Bert saying that he had once had a crush on a girl in grammar school. He did not know much about children, and in truth three boys probably presented baggage no young man wants. Still, he respected my father's role in our lives and encouraged it. Years later when my Dad struggled with alcholoism, Bert would confide in my mother in the hopes that they could find a way to help Dad.

So when does a Dad tell his son that he is gay? If he waits too long, then his son is bound to figure it out himself, or worse have someone else tell him. A feeling of betrayal would result, and soon he would want no part of his father. Tell him too soon, and he simply will not understand. Back in 1978, there wasn't any source of information that helped with this. No parenting guides existed for the Gay Father.

I was reading a front page article in the New York Times about a new spy plane the Air Force was developing, or it could have been a bomber, I can just remember the picture of a space age looking plane that appeared to be just one wing. I was sitting next to my father on his white woolen couch in the open living room. He asked me to put down the paper for a minute. There was something he wanted to say.

"You know I live with Bert don't you?"
"Yeah, you guys are roommates", I replied, not knowing where he was going with this.
"Well, we are sort of more than roommates."
I must have thought that he meant they were best friends. I understood that.
"We are going to stay together for a long time. I love Bert, and he loves me."

There was an awkward moment of silence, but in the end the message did not compute. I could not understand how this was any different than the relationships I had with Chris down the street. I did not know why men and women got married let alone why two men would, it all just seemed like my father was saying that he had found his best friend in the world.

After a long 30 or so seconds of silence, I asked my father if he had heard about this new plane the Air Force was creating. "How fast does it go?" To this he responded sadly, "I should have known better, you are too young to understand all of this."

Looking back, I probably was too young. A child tries to frame his environment to his own experiences. In my mind, Dad liked Bert the way I liked my best friend, and you bet I would have wanted to have lived with him. Funny though what this teaches us. A child can accept a gay man like he accepts anyone else because he does not recognize, or care for that matter, that the man is gay. I liked Bert. He was not the coolest guy in the world, but he exuded a sense of calmness that even I could recognize. He clearly had a charitable spirit, and he provided a sense of stability my father needed. Soon my feelings toward him would change, but only because of me, not Bert or my Dad.

Africa

In time my two brothers and I began regular visits into the city. Two times each month we would pack enough clothes for the weekend, get into the brown faux-wood paneled station wagon, and have Mom drive us via Route 80, over the George Washington Bridge, and into Manhattan. Dad did not stay long in his studio apartment. Soon he was living in a one bedroom unit with two perfectly symmetrical rooms. One was his bedroom, and the other the living room, where my two brothers and I slept on a fold out couch, along with a kitchen. Bert was not yet living with Dad, at least not when we were there, but he was a frequent visitor.

Dad first introduced me to the Gay Fathers group at a restaurant somewhere in downtown Manhattan. New York City has more flavors of food than anywhere else on the planet. All you have to do is walk a block in downtown to see a half dozen options from Vietnamese to Nepalese to French. Dad always insisted on eating fine food. Years later when he and I were visiting colleges in North Carolina, he would refuse to eat at "Stuckeys," a tacky fast food chain, despite it being 9pm and having gone 10 hours without a meal. Anything with a drive through might just as well be serving dog food. Fortunately for him New York City provided that certain opium for his addiction to fine dining.

I was not so cultured. New Jersey in the mid 1970s was far from cosmopolitan. I gravitated to the restaurants where food was served in styrofoam containers and drinks came from a fountain. Although an innocent byproduct of childhood, I would later cling to this disdain for anything more sophisticated than a hamburger and fries mostly as a protest against my father. Perhaps it started as a deep-seeded anger at my father for leaving us, and then perhaps once I learned he was gay it turned into a mechanism to prove that I was not. Or maybe that is just psycho-babble and I was unsophisticated. In any case, I would end up eating more greasy french fries than most adolescents probably should.

So despite my wanting to go to the nearest cheese burger joint, Dad hailed a checkered cab and we all were whisked off to some restaurant he most likely read about in the 'New Yorker.' Riding in a cab through the city on those swivel-seats that only the checkered cabs have, nothing is more fun to a seven year old. The taxi drivers could just as easily have charged for a roller coaster ride as the thrill of weaving in and out of traffic in the darkness of a winter evening, using my father as an air bad when the cabby stopped short, all of this was the highlight of the evening. The atmosphere at the restaurant, however, was not near as intense. It was very typical New York - a bar near the front and a handful of cloth covered tables. Entering an apartment building or restaurant always elicited the same abrupt change of emotions as you exited from the incredible chaos of honking cars and crazy men saying that Armageddon was here and then stepped into an almost surreal calmness. Waiting for us within these walls were two other men, Bob and Fred, along with a boy my age.

Bob was a dentist who had left his family around the same time Dad did. Shortly thereafter he met Fred who held an administrative position in the Department of Admissions at Columbia University. Bob was the stereotypical middle-aged man, and he would look exactly the same for the next twenty years. Balding and excessively calm, Bob did not have the capacity to lose his temper. Sometime later I would remember him talking about how his apartment had been broken into. Not in the least did he feel violated or angry. No, the only thing he could mention was how the robber took the time to make himself a sandwich and did not bother to clean up the dishes before leaving.

Fred was not so calm. An Irish man through and through and a rather short one at that, Fred had an alcohol problem. He was not a mean or violent person, but he was bound to fits of depression and over indulgence. Fred could not help but exaggerate on his circumstances. Perhaps this was why I liked him so much, for all night at dinner he told me about his travels to Africa. Now to a seven year old boy Africa means only one thing - adventure. Sensing this, Fred certainly spiced up what probably was a virtual tour of Africa courtesy of a travel catalogue. He spoke about the wild lions that would put their noses under the opening of your tents while you slept and the elephants on which he would ride from town to town. Fred knew how to keep a child's interest.

This chance meeting at the restaurant would stick with me for some time to come. Despite Fred being a raging alcoholic and an increasing liability to Bob and others, I always would think of him as that cool guy that gave me the scoop on Africa. Bob, perhaps because of his little boy, would become a close friend of my father. We'd soon be introduced to more and more gay fathers, but Bob and Fred would always have a special place in my memory.