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.