Darkside Rainbow

Continuing my “I refuse to rant about the news because I don’t want to spoil my mood” trend this week, I’d like to tell you guys the little story that I mentioned in yesterday’s post. Yesterday we talked about Chelsea’s father; today we’re going to talk about mine. I’m going to get a bit personal, but I’ve done that before. I’m probably going to embarrass the hell out of my family, but I’ve done that before, too. And I’m going to embarrass myself a little, but…well…that’s definitely nothing new.

I love my father dearly; I really do. I love both my parents; I’ve just always had problems getting along with my mother, and went through a period where we didn’t speak for almost five years until Hurricane Katrina scared my butt silly and had me thinking she might be dead. We’re only now starting to deal with each other as adults, rather than snarling at each other like twelve-year-old girls fighting over a Hello Kitty handbag.

My Dad, though…we’ve always gotten along. He’s the quiet type, says little but thinks a hell of a lot, has a bit of an obsession with Billy Bob Thornton (Slingblade) and sometimes acts a little too much like him. He’s the kind of guy you can sit on a back porch with for hours, drinking a beer or two and quite comfortably not saying a damned word to each other. Just watching the mosquitos, watching the bayou, watching the Louisiana sky fade from a hard blue-white shell to a soft, deep rose that bleeds into twilight like watercolors running together.

It’s probably no big surprise that when I had The Talk with my parents about my sexuality, I was more comfortable telling my father than my mother. Even so, it wasn’t easy; first I had to get them to actually listen to me because they really didn’t want to know and deal with the whole “having a gay child” problem, and it was a long time before things settled down and my mother stopped nitpicking at me and making me feel like crap about it. My mother and I still have some small tiffs about it, though overall she tries to be supportive now. My father, in the end, took the news the same way he takes everything: quietly and calmly, thinking it over for a while before saying anything. In the end he told me if that’s what makes me happy then it’s my life, and I’m still his son and he loves me - and that’s been his stance ever since. I was and still am grateful.

Nonetheless, even now they still have those talks with each other. Those talks where they talk about me and my sexuality and ask where they went wrong, not really understanding that my sexuality has nothing to do with them or how they raised me, and I’d have been gay whether they abused me (they didn’t) or if we were the bloody effin’ Cleaver family - or even the bloody effin’ Addams family. They also can’t get this “wrong” concept out of their heads, but…they’re trying. [deep sigh] They’re trying as best they can, bless their nappy little heads.

Still, I wasn’t really surprised when, during a phone conversation with my mother the other day, she mentioned that she and Dad recently had another one of their little talks about “where did we go wrong with Adrian?”. In between making a few comments about my sexuality that set my teeth on edge (not out of malice, just unfamiliarity/ignorance), she started to tell me something that my father had said while a few beers under - then abruptly cut herself off. As blunt as my mother is, I should have taken that as a sign that no, I really didn’t want to know what my father said. She even said that I didn’t want to know.

In hindsight, I think she was right.

I finally pried it out of her, and when I did, I couldn’t believe that those words had come out of my quiet, slow-speaking, even-tempered father’s mouth.

“The only reason that boy’s gay is ’cause he ain’t had a good f***.”

…

Um.

Dad?

No.

I don’t think I’d ever really realized just how old-fashioned my father is, until that moment.

And I don’t think I’ve ever been more disgusted with my father in my life.

At first I was horribly angry when I heard that. One, I didn’t think my father was the kind of person to think like that even when drunk (that’s a Mel Gibson cop-out anyway, and we’ve all heard variations on the adage that alcohol makes a man honest), so I was horribly disappointed in him. Two, what does he know about my sex life and my experiences? I don’t talk about sex with my parents, unless my mother’s asking me uncomfortable probing questions and I give her just a touch too much detail to get her to shut up. It’s just not done, not where I come from. Talking about your sexual exploits and experimentations with your parents? Totally not on.

So my mother and father don’t know that yes, I experimented a little trying to get myself sorted out. Yes, I even tried being with girls to see if I liked it, and maybe I was just confused. And yes, Dad, I have in fact had many absolutely stellar f***s.

They just haven’t been with women.

I’m not attracted to women, and sex with a woman isn’t going to change that. It horrifies and hurts me to think my father would even think that way. Last I checked (now granted, I don’t spend much time rooting around down there), labia don’t secrete magical straight-making pixie dust that causes all men who come into contact with them to suddenly crave women - just like sampling a little cock can’t automatically make a lesbian want men. (Actually, it’s probably just going to make her want women even more. A lot of things come out of the tip of a cock, but they’re quite a bit messier and not nearly as pretty as pixie dust, and I doubt a lesbian’s going to find those things particularly enticing.)

To me, my father sounded just like your average chauvanistic straight male who will happily leer at a lesbian and tell her that the only reason she likes women is because she hasn’t met the right man to make her feel like a real woman, nudge-nudge wink-wink.

Yyyeah. Ha. No. I really don’t think so. Ladies? You want to chime in on that one?

I’ve never dealt with that sort of thing from a male perspective before, and to have it come from my own father just left me flabbergasted; apparently he thinks that I need the right woman to make me feel like a real man. I laughed when my mother told me, even if some of the laughter was sheer incredulity; more, I didn’t want her to know how angry I was.

I’m not so angry now, but I am at a loss, and deeply hurt. The worst part is that I know I’ll never bring it up to my father. My parents don’t really read this column; my mother glances at it now and then, but my father’s barely computer-literate enough to check his e-mail once a year, and I don’t think he knows I even write this thing. (He knows I’m “a writer” and I can support myself; that’s good enough for him.) The fact that I have a different last name from most of my family even preserves their anonymity, which is why I don’t feel so bad openly discussing these things here.

But I will feel bad if I confront my father about what he said. I love him too much to start a fight by telling him that I was angered, hurt, and deeply disappointed in discovering this side of a man that I’ve looked up to and adored for my entire life. It’s all he-said, she-said anyway, hearing it secondhand through my mother. You know family politics; if you act on something you heard from one family member about another family member then suddenly all three of you are in a mess, and drama comes raining down.

So I’m stuck with this. I’m stuck with the knowledge that one simple statement has changed my perception of my father so deeply, and it’s going to take a lot to change it back and make me believe that he really is the man I thought he was and the man that I, in a few small ways, wanted to be. Even worse, I’m stuck feeling as if his sentiment is somehow my fault, even though I know better and I’m not even the slightest bit ashamed of being gay. It’s one of those annoying, irrational guilt things that comes with family, and with love.

And you know what?

It absolutely sucks.

coming out, sex and sexuality, gay life, parents of gay children, mother, father