by Honor Moore
In memory I saw the book in my father’s study, the black-and-white photographs of young men. The white jade figure. “For as long as he can remember,” my sister said on the telephone from the Adirondacks when I asked how long my father had known this about himself. Had he had “gay affairs” in the Marine Corps? At Yale? I remembered how Venable, a little drunk, would suggest, joking, that my father loved wearing “those long skirts.” “They’re vestments,” I would say, firmly tamping down the confusion and discomfort I’d feel, in spite of myself. Now my father himself had told me he was bisexual. And wanted to talk to me about it. Was it possible that when he came to visit “in a few weeks” we would, for the first time since my mother’s announcement in the Adirondacks, for the first time since he married Brenda, for the first time ever, speak with real intimacy? After all, wasn’t that all I’d ever wanted, to approach him as his true daughter? His firstborn who was living her own searching sexuality—sexuality that somehow, I was suddenly thinking, I had inherited from him?
I remembered our interview at the cathedral, all those years ago, my father gesturing to include his body when he told me that he believed that sexuality and religious feeling came from the same place in the psyche. I hadn’t found my way that day to questions I wanted to ask, questions about his desire and sexuality, and now I understood why—there was a crucial fact I hadn’t known, and it was that fact about his own nature, not his relation to God, that kept our relationship unsatisfactory. The piece was “too general,” the Ms. editor had said when she rejected it; it was “general” because I didn’t know my father’s complicating truth. “There is no conflict,” my father had said that day, “between ordinary life and what is ‘divinely ordained.’ It’s all connected.” My own experience of sex took me to a place I considered sacred, but I never imagined, when my father said those things, that he was talking about himself. I’ll tell you more when I see you. I had so many questions: When did you first sleep with a man? What was it like for you? Was it like sleeping with a woman the first time was for me? The searing opening of a closed part of the brain and consciousness, the dark forbidden bed, as if it were a reunion? Holding, being held naked, close to a body like one’s own?
I thought of the gay men I had known in the 1970s, before the epidemic, their stories of nights of sex in trucks parked under the West Side Highway, in the bars that lined West Street. I thought of how men I knew to be poets and intellectuals, men with refined and delighted sensibilities, dressed in cowboy jeans and plaid flannel shirts; how they squired their younger lovers to literary parties, only to disappear with them later. I remembered the dinner with my father on Eighth Street after my mother’s accident, the alien excitement of his smile, that silvery nimbus I hadn’t been able to identify. What had he done after we parted that night? When one of my sisters expressed concern about HIV, my father reassured her: “No tricks or hustlers.” And so I would not have to imagine my father in the vast warehouse spaces along the river, dancing among disco throngs as I had with Victoria, or finding his way to the bathhouses that were now, in the wake of AIDS, closed. But I wanted to know what my father’s gay life had been. I wanted to know how he had loved and whom he had loved.
As the days passed, there were more calls from the Adirondacks. My father had arrived, Brenda accompanying him, to face his children. Bits of the story were communicated, some peculiar tale of a speakerphone left on, a receiver not quite hung up as the source of Brenda’s discovery. Of Brenda one night on Martha’s Vineyard, intoxicated enough, after my father had gone to bed, to tell a visiting stepchild her agonized secret, how word had been passed until all of us knew, how I was the last to hear because I had been in Europe. His whole life. No names. What would you say, Brenda had asked her stepchild, if I told you your father was gay?
He came to visit on a quintessentially beautiful September day. The sky was saturated blue, the green beginning to turn gold. We drove the familiar roads past Kent School and up Skiff Mountain. We parked the car and began to walk. The khaki trousers, the frayed Shetland sweater. He seemed nervous. I wanted to help. After some conversation about how difficult it had been for him in the Adirondacks answering questions about a life he had never wanted to reveal, we began to talk, and after a while, I asked the only question that concerned me.
“Did you love any of them?”
“They were all nice people,” he said.
Did he mean he hadn’t loved them, or was he just dodging the question? I didn’t want to believe he hadn’t loved them. If, as he taught, one’s existence was inextricably bound up with the liturgy, and if he had lived his life with the attention to the life of Christ that his preaching always evidenced, how could he now deny those he had sexually loved? Saint Peter in Gethsemane: Art not thou also one of this man’s disciples? He sayeth, I am not . . . Did not I see thee in the garden with him? Peter then denied again. I wanted to know that my father had experienced passion, that he had known love. The life my father had lived had brought suffering to my mother and to Brenda, but I had no judgment of his infidelity to his wives. I understood desire. But if my father had sacrificed the happiness of the two women whom he had married and now his children’s trust, I wanted to believe that he had loved these unidentified men.
“Did you love any of them?”
“I don’t want to talk any further about it. I would never have chosen to have this thing come out.”
Silence.
“I have some trouble with it, Pop,” I said. “Not with what you did. But with the deception. It will take some time to—” I was going to say “adjust to this new reality,” but suddenly my father was shouting.
“Well”—he was furious—“you haven’t had a perfect life! You had affairs with women when you lived with Venable.” What I wanted him to say was something tender. I wanted him to say, I am very sorry the lie has hurt you. I did the best I could. I tried to keep it a secret so your mother and Brenda wouldn’t suffer. I tried to change, but I could not because I love men. Instead he was accusing me of deception in order to justify his own.
“No, I did not have affairs with women while I lived with Venable,” I said. “I told Venable two weeks after I fell in love with Victoria, and then I left him. There is nothing in my life that compares to what you’ve done, nothing at all.”
By then we were sitting at the round table in my kitchen in Kent. It was dark. We had watched television, the Ken Burns Civil War documentary, because I hadn’t wanted to talk anymore. “I don’t feel we’re quite finished,” my father said when we returned to the kitchen. He wanted me to forgive him, by which he meant erase what I was feeling, erase how hurt I was. I poured him a Scotch on the rocks. I don’t remember what happened next, but I do remember turning away from him in my chair, so angry I didn’t know how sad I was. If he would only tell me something really true, something that would allow me to know this part of him, I could forgive him. I was so disappointed, looking at him cowering there in the darkness of the kitchen, and so sad. He wanted forgiveness, but offering forgiveness would mean giving something for nothing, and I didn’t have anything left.
“Why did you get married again?” I finally asked.
“I fell in love with Brenda,” he said.
“And you’ve stopped having male lovers now?”
“Yes.”
“And how is that for you?”
“It’s okay. Sometimes on the street I get that feeling, but I just don’t act on it.”
“And that’s okay?” I said, feeling at last some sympathy.
“It was an addiction,” he said. “I loved your mother, and I love Brenda.”
Why did having loved my mother or Brenda make his love for men an addiction? Now I felt revulsion, his self-loathing enveloping me. “You’re talking about feelings at the center of my life,” I said, using my disgust to say something dignified. But as I said it, a complicating truth presented itself,
something inchoate I deftly pushed aside. In time I would recognize it as another dream, a desire more painfully close to the center of my longing than my love of women—a desire for a man who was not like my father, who was, rather, a man who fully loved women, who loved me as a woman.
“I fell in love with your mother,” he repeated. I was thinking to myself, He looks at her and wishes she were a boy. No, it wasn’t that clear.
“It was something different with men,” he said. “It was like an addiction.”
I had found a therapist who was willing to witness a conversation between us, and in a phone call before his visit, I’d asked my father if he would participate and he’d said yes. That night, though, he said that he had rethought my request and that he didn’t, after all, want to come to therapy with me. “I have my own therapy,” he said. “That’s enough.”
At the time I took his refusal as another rejection, but now I understand the decision. His life was torn apart, he was working at keeping his marriage, he was going to lead a life without secrets. He was appalled at having hurt Brenda, suffering again the guilt he’d always had about “how I was made.” The sadness I’d seen on his face when he talked about resigning as bishop had in it Brenda’s discovery of his hidden life just before the announcement. He had begged her forgiveness, promised never to touch a man again, never to be unfaithful again. But could he forgive himself?
When my father had left office the year before, it was as if the ritual of succession became tangled in the turbulence of his private life, as if forces long held in check had abruptly surged to life, their energies erupting randomly, with an odd but distinct violence that seemed uncannily directed.
In the Episcopal Church, bishops are elected at diocesan conventions, and going into the convention called to elect my father’s successor, there were five candidates. The front-runner was Walter Dennis, black and a suffragan bishop who worked with my father, behind whom many liberal, African-American and West Indian delegates, and the gay caucus had united. The other candidates included two white priests, also liberals and both from the Diocese of New York, and a priest from California. The candidate of the conservatives, those who for instance opposed women’s ordination and those who wanted a break from the activism my father personified, was Richard Grein, the bishop of Kansas. Early in the balloting, Dennis was far ahead, and as voters filed to the machines to cast the decisive ballot and he stood, beaming with the probability of his victory, he fell to the floor.
Janet Kraft, then a seminarian at General Seminary, was in charge of the balloting, and she was standing next to my father, who leapt from his chair, bounded to the dais, and crouched next to Bishop Dennis, cradling his head. Call 911, he said forcefully to a young priest, then he asked another priest to call Dennis’s doctor, whom he knew by name and who was at St. Luke’s Hospital, close to the cathedral. “The EMT guys got there,” Janet Kraft said, “and your father said, ‘Take him to St. Luke’s Hospital.’” The driver said that legally EMT had to wait for orders as to which hospital to take him to. But Bishop Dennis had a known heart condition, and there was no time to waste. My father rose from his crouching position to his full height and, raising his voice, spoke firmly to the orderly. “Take him to St. Luke’s Hospital. I am a very important man in this city, and if you don’t do as I say, you will be in serious trouble.” Janet remembered the exact language, she said, because the tone of voice in which my father delivered this order was so striking, so unlike the bishop she knew. My father, in his memoir, Presences, recorded a different, but no less dramatic threat: “If you don’t take him to St. Luke’s Hospital right now, I will lie down in front of your damn ambulance.”
“Yes sir,” the EMT orderly replied, and then my father grabbed a young priest.
“You,” he said. “You go along. In the ambulance. Make sure they get him there.”
After Walter Dennis was put on a gurney and wheeled out of Synod Hall and was safely en route to St. Luke’s Hospital, my father returned to the business at hand. The African-American caucus asked that the voting be stopped, that the convention be canceled, that the whole nominating process be repeated. The decision was my father’s, and as sternly as he had insisted EMT take Walter Dennis to the hospital, he declared the voting would continue, a decision that seemed hasty and out of character to people who knew him well. And so the election did continue, new candidates were put forward, others came forward themselves, and still others dropped out. The supporters of Walter Dennis held out all day and into the evening, and it took until the tenth ballot and the early hours of the morning for my father’s successor to be chosen. Though Richard Grein was known as conservative, he was not an archconservative, and he pledged to continue the process of bringing women equality in the priesthood and to sustain certain other progressive initiatives within the diocese. He was, my father told me, a bishop who saw as central to his mission being a pastor to his priests. “And that can’t be bad,” my father said.
In fact, my father reported over the succeeding years, Bishop Grein reversed many of his initiatives—decentralization of power in the diocese, the establishment of regional governing bodies within the diocese so that churches could keep a closer eye on each other. These changes had been the fruit of my father’s decades of work on how best to make parishes effective in the contemporary life of New York City. When I saw him in the months after Bishop Grein succeeded him, my father did his best to be philosophical. He was no longer bishop, he would say when I asked if the changes made him angry. But another time—I remember we were crossing the street—he said, “It just makes me so goddamn mad.”
“I’m so sorry, Pop,” I said.
“Well, what can you do? I just feel so badly for all those parishes, all those people who did all that work.” Or words to that effect. And he was moving on. In the late 1980s, he and Brenda were asked by Human Rights Watch to visit East Timor, where they met Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo, the great bishop who would be cowinner (with José Ramos-Horta) of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996 for his successful effort to stem violence by teaching and employing passive resistance toward “a just and peaceful solution” based on self-determination for the people of East Timor, an estimated third of whom had lost their lives due to starvation, epidemics, war, and terror as the result of Indonesian aggression. On the way, they stopped in Guadalcanal, visiting the battlefield where my father was wounded in 1942. Eventually, after two more visits and after East Timor won its independence, my father organized a partnership between the graduate schools of medicine and of management at Yale and agencies in East Timor to rebuild the devastated infrastructure there. When he told me about this, I saw some of the old excitement in his face, and when Belo received the Nobel, my father and Brenda traveled to Stockholm to witness the speech and celebrate.
But Brenda’s alcoholism was progressing, and weeks in a few rehabilitation centers had not worked. Then, in a freak horseback riding accident, she broke her pelvis. Though she was just over fifty, drinking had cut into her health, and her recovery from the accident was very slow. My sisters and I intervened with my father; we were worried about his drinking, but we were even more concerned about Brenda—I was certain that if she didn’t stop drinking very soon, she would never recover her health. As it turned out, the accident was the beginning of her decline, difficult years in which, more and more, my father became her caretaker.
It was during those years, in May 1994, that the part of the family living on the East Coast, including my father, gathered for the graduation from high school in Hartford of one of my nephews. Pop did not look well—he had a tooth gone, a front tooth that had been missing for almost a year. No one could understand why he hadn’t replaced it, and when I joked with him about it, there was some story about an infection preventing replacement. It was a period of time when we were barely speaking—it was my failure. I was still angry at him for his refusal to come to therapy after the revelation of his
homosexuality, his inability to talk to me about it, and, though my continuing anger was at odds with how I believed people should behave, I couldn’t help myself. After the commencement, we all sat around the kitchen table celebrating the graduate, my sister Adelia’s second son, having lunch. Afterward, when I made a move to leave, my father stood up and said, “I’d like to talk to you for a minute.” He had a begging look on his face, and the black emptiness where his tooth should have been exaggerated it. We left the kitchen. The house was Victorian and there was oak paneling in the front hall, and near the carved oak doorway, a shallow built-in bench. My father and I sat down there.
He said that what he wanted to tell me he would rather not have to tell me, or anyone, but that he was quite sure I would hear about it by other means, and he wanted me to hear it from him. He’d already talked to most of my brothers and sisters, he said, and by the end of the week would have talked to all of us. A priest in the Diocese of New York with a job complaint had gone to see Bishop Grein’s chaplain assistant, and in the course of the conversation had revealed that he and my father had been briefly sexually involved. The chaplain took this information to Bishop Grein, and, my father said, the priest with the complaint was encouraged to put forward an accusation of sexual harassment within the disciplinary mechanisms of the church. In preparation for a meeting with my father and the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Bishop Grein called in several friends and colleagues of my father’s—one was asked, he later told me, about “Paul Moore and men.” This man, an Episcopal priest, also told me that he had known my father very well, and had never known about this aspect of my father’s life; his first reaction, and, he told me, that of many around the cathedral, was that what Bishop Grein had implied was not true.
When the summons came for the meeting with Bishop Grein and the presiding bishop, “Brenda was just wonderful,” my father said. Not only did she encourage him to bring a lawyer to the meeting, she came along as well. The investigation produced no evidence that my father had been guilty of anything but a consensual liaison—there were no grounds for defrocking, for stripping him of his orders, no grounds even for censure. In spite of that fact, my father continued, he had been “inhibited” from celebrating communion and from performing confirmations or ordinations in the Diocese of New York for a period of two years. “Inhibited,” a medieval ecclesiastical term, meant that my father was not permitted to exercise his orders in his home diocese. He was not, either, to preach at the cathedral. Later, a priest who was then working at the cathedral told me that my father had once been disinvited from celebrating a funeral there of one of his friends. The bereaved arrived to find that my father would not be officiating; some excuse was made. At least one New York City parish flouted the bishop’s orders and invited my father nonetheless.
