Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter

by Alison Wearing

  Dad would pour the coffee, I, the hot milk, and we would begin chatting. Perhaps it was the distance from home, the anonymity of that hotel room, or the new independence I felt after living in a foreign country on my own. Whatever it was, all the questions I had never before had the courage to ask found passage to the surface there, and each one my dad considered carefully before answering with excruciating honesty. Many mornings, we talked so much it was after noon before we got out of our pyjamas.

  As we divided up the pastries, passed each other the butter, the jam, he confided the torment he had experienced about his sexual orientation at different points in his life, the anguish he had felt in deciding how to go about living truthfully, how long he had struggled with the question of his being gay. Far longer, I learned (taking a hard gulp of coffee), than I would ever have guessed.

  “If I’d been born ten years earlier, it’s very possible that I would never have come out at all,” he said in response to something I had asked about the timing of it, his being in the vanguard of the gay revolution. “And if I’d been born ten years later, most probably I would never have married.”

  He paused. Reached over, touched my arm and smiled. “But I’m glad things went exactly as they did,” he said, his eyes glistening in the dust-speckled light.

  He took a bite of his croissant, a crumble of greasy, golden flakes gathering on his lips and fingers, a few on the cuff of his periwinkle-coloured raw-silk pyjamas. With his eyes closed, he licked each finger dreamily, taking so much delight in that damn croissant that I beamed just watching him.

  PEACE

  I began coming out as the daughter of a fairy shortly after those Paris chats. Like many people who come into the truth of themselves, I began by sussing out a few sympathetic people far removed from my world and trying the news out on them. When that wasn’t catastrophic, I took note of how good it felt to exhale and be myself, and went from there. Slowly, one person at a time.

  Mostly it was easy; people were surprisingly accepting. But I remember in my second year of university seeing an article in the student newspaper about the difficulties of being gay on campus and still being so secretive about my life that I would not even sit at the same table with someone reading that issue. It was the late 1980s, when AIDS was roaring through the gay community and the public perception of gay people was formed largely by images of gaunt, blistered men. Faces that haunted us all. Those were frightening, devastating times. The death toll was immense, impossible to calculate. To contract AIDS was to die. And many of my dad’s friends did. I knew who was HIV-positive and I used to watch them at Dad and Lance’s dinner parties, wondering how they managed to talk, eat and laugh, knowing a monster was devouring them from within.

  One Christmas, Dad invited me to a concert of the Toronto Gay Men’s Chorus, a variously talented group that performed a variety of music from Brahms to Broadway. Dad was the conductor. For the choir’s finale, he parted the group in two, opening a wide space in the middle of the stage where a long white canvas had been hung. Every man held a candle, the lights dimmed, and Dad conducted the choir in a half-tempo, pianissimo performance of “Stille Nacht”— “Silent Night” in its original German.

  The stage was dark, save the teardrop flames of the candles and a small spotlight illuminating my dad’s dancing arms. As the choir began the second slow verse, slides were projected centre stage: thin, blemished men in hospital beds, gaunt smiling faces surrounded by loved ones; face after face after breaths-from-death face.

  “Schlaf in himmliche Ruh’ …”

  Sleep in heavenly peace.

  It didn’t matter if the faces were familiar or not, the slowness of the tempo allowed everyone who needed to, to sob. Which I did not, though some were faces I recognized. People I knew, but none I had been very close to. And I had not yet learned to share heart the way I do now. Today I would have cried; then I did not.

  Until the last verse, when the images changed. To simple scenes of love and celebration: families arm in arm around Christmas trees and dinner tables, athletic men embracing at Pride Day parades, mothers and sons, an older man with a broad smile holding a sign saying PROUD OF MY GAY SON, and then me at age fourteen, cheek to cheek with my dad, arms flung around his neck, the two of us cuddling, all teeth and brown eyes, the same curly dark hair. There were some of my brothers laughing with Dad in the kitchen, then one of all of us, including my mother.

  Throughout it all, against the backdrop of the family he had left in order to come into the person he is, my dad was held in a circle of light, his arms sweeping through the air with a conductor’s transcendent grace.

  In all my life, I had never seen him more beautiful.

  SELECTED CONTENTS OF THE BOX:

  • a small blue diary

  • newspaper clippings from The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Body Politic, Weekend Magazine

  • drafts of letters to friends and family

  • letters received from friends

  • notes to self

  • inspiring excerpts from plays

  • loose-leaf journal entries

  • “My Story”

  Excerpts from the small blue diary

  1978!

  I feel compelled to take up this diary again, to write from the heart and the gut about the excitement and trepidation of the last few months, my changing perceptions of where I am and where I am going. Perhaps by recording this I can find some release from the churning and re-churning of those events and thoughts which I dwell on constantly. And, if anyone else reads this, perhaps they will start to understand my view of where I am at.

  Halifax, 28.6.78

  Finally after years of wondering about myself, wanting and often hoping that someone else would take the initiative, I have taken it myself. Attending the Association of Canadian Orchestras Conference in Halifax gave me the opportunity to do some essential interviewing of Nova Scotia Liberals, but also to be in the same city where the annual Canadian Gay Conference was taking place.

  For a year or two now, I have walked by gay bars, discos and baths in Toronto without daring to venture inside. I have been titillated by Playgirl and Mandate and have learned something from the outside by reading Directions*, Body Politic, and an article about gay capitalism in Toronto Life (September 1976). I guess the latter was crucial, as it described in detail a Toronto gay scene, which I supposed existed, but which I knew nothing about. Then, there was the article about Michael Lynch as a homosexual father in the Globe.* It leapt out of the paper at me, because here was someone with whom I could identify: University of Toronto professor, about my age who looked like a normal, down-to-earth person. He loved his son and wanted to be a good father. He did not see that his being gay made that impossible.

  When the ACO conference ended, I attempted to find out where the gay conference was taking place. I wandered around the university without seeing any signs of it, though I passed a couple of men defiantly arm in arm, wearing Body Politic T-shirts—a rather unsavoury pair, I thought. Not knowing where to look next, I returned towards the downtown and, in the Public Gardens, caught sight of the B.P. pair again. Tailing them at a discreet distance finally produced utter frustration when they were picked up by friends in a car! I again called a gay-line number at which there had been no answer earlier in the evening and was informed that the social activities were taking place above a German restaurant and at the Turret, a kind of disco club. The German restaurant didn’t look very promising, so I ate in one of the Historic Properties restaurants … running into some of the people who had stayed on to tidy up loose ends from the ACO conference.

  By the time I could tear myself away from them, I was so impatient that I strode straight into the Turret without my usual indecisiveness. But I was nervous as I had my hand stamped and signed a fictitious name in the guestbook. Once inside, my head spun as I saw men dancing romantically with other men. An unattractive, stupid (or drunk) looking young man asked me to dance and the next couple of minutes a
lmost turned me into a confirmed heterosexual! However, building up courage, I asked a rather attractive man to dance and decided that this sort of thing might be pleasant after all. After one dance he told me he “couldn’t get it together with me.” Whether that referred to my dancing or my body, I didn’t know, but I stayed until the end, thoroughly fascinated and “turned on.”

  29.6.78

  I was back again the next night and saw a man whom I immediately recognized as Michael Lynch. I introduced myself, told him how the Globe article had made such an impact on me and asked him if I could talk with him sometime in Toronto. For the first time in eighteen years, I blurted out to another human being that I thought I might be gay, though I added that it would be an awful lot easier if I wasn’t. I asked him to dance, with the nervous confession that I didn’t know how to dance with a man. It was short, but I kept saying to myself, “I’m dancing with Michael Lynch,” and that blew my mind.

  30.6.78

  Michael had suggested that I come to some of the conference and after a day interviewing Liberal politicians, I [went and] listened (at the back of the room!) to a session on the problems of older gays. I was terrified I would see someone I knew and for a second, thought I saw someone from Trent, but it turned out to be Michael Lynch. The talk was all so strange to me, though a lot of it pertained to the problems of volunteer organizations—political parties and orchestras all over again! Michael’s carefully considered, questioning intervention was, to me, reassuringly professional.

  I went back to the Turret again that evening and talked with Michael a bit about the sabbatical which he had just completed and some research that he was going to be doing next month, but he seemed very tired and I left early because I had to catch a 6 a.m. plane the next morning.

  1.7.78

  Michael had told me where to write him and on the trip home I carefully composed a guarded but (so I hoped) affectionate letter, asking him to send me his telephone number.

  July/78

  I spent the month impatiently looking for Michael’s reply in every mail delivery to the university. Bit by bit, I found out that he was out of town for the month. I got his number from B.P. and, after a couple of telephone encounters with his roommate, found him home at last. We arranged an afternoon when I could see him at his house.

  August 1978

  I must be mad, I kept saying to myself on the bus to Toronto. I am going to tell someone whom I hardly know things about myself that I have never discussed with anyone. Michael greeted me in a friendly way, though taken aback by the moustache of my new persona. My expectations of a promising friendship rose when I saw a Steinway grand in his living room and was informed that, yes, he did play. I calmed myself down with a couple of Bach preludes while he got lunch for his son and another youngster.

  In the garden we had desultory conversation for a minute or two and then I launched forth. I told him about the various male friends to whom I had felt physically attracted, my consuming but unconsummated passion for Stephen [at Oxford]. My disappointment with him, my decision to opt for marriage with the expectation that my homosexual drives would fade (how many men have been misled by that wildly propagated myth?), my affection for Anne and our children, but the disappointment and ultimate sterility of the sexual side of our marriage. (His experience was strikingly similar, even to his wife often having been sick during the first years of their marriage.*) I told him about how all the subjects of my homosexual infatuations invariably turned out to be heterosexual and how I had finally been driven to the point where I had to know, before I was too old for an active gay life, whether sex with a man was really what I thought it might be.

  We talked for four hours, walking to a swimming pool, standing under an apartment building out of the rain, at the pool, in his bank. I was disturbed by the developments in his own life—the dissolution of his marriage, his increasing disinclination to associate with people outside his gay world. I said I was very contented with my straight milieu and hoped I could preserve it. I said, “Do you think I look gay?” and he answered, “Yes, definitely—you’re good looking, you’re loose and that moustache is very trendy.” I felt strangely reassured, even though that appellation was one which I had done everything to avoid for twenty years. In fact, I had believed my “straight” image to have been so successfully nurtured that it explained why I had never been approached by anyone (apart from New Year’s Eve 1958*).

  It became clear that Michael had no intention of initiating me, but he said, stay at the Carriage House, eat at the Grapes on College, go to the Duke (behind the Park Plaza) and then try the Quest. Again, with fear and trembling, I did everything he suggested and missed (in retrospect through ignorance) a pretty clear lead from an actuary in the Duke. (“Are you cruising?” “No,” said I.)

  Finally, upstairs at the Quest, I got into conversation with a nice, but not especially good-looking fellow. I told him how all this was new to me. He asked how I liked it. “I do.” Then he said, “I like you as a person and I’d like to spend the night with you.” “Okay,” and he leaned across the table and kissed me. I warned him that I was a neophyte but he wouldn’t believe me. Finally I had to lie and he seemed reassured.

  Skip told me that he was a silversmith and shared a room with a woman, so we went to my hotel. In the elevator, I had my first thrilling experience of kissing a stubbly face passionately. Once inside, we made love wildly and without inhibition. It was as if a veil of misunderstanding about my own self had been ripped away. Stripped and without his glasses, Skip was very attractive. When we had finished, he showered and left, saying that he often went to Dudes. Alone, I was surprised to discover that I wasn’t afflicted with the guilt feelings which I had always feared would follow my first sex with a man. Instead, it was as if a huge oppressive load had been lifted from me.

  10.8.78

  I called Michael, thanked him and told him I had done everything he had suggested and had had a marvellous time. Back in Peterborough, I had a cello lesson, but could barely take in what J was saying.

  11.8.78

  Attended orchestras’ meeting in Kingston; had a glorious swim with JG in Lake Ontario; longed to tell him about what happened on Wednesday, but didn’t dare!

  24.8.78

  Not having much success in the bars in Toronto, I plucked up my courage to try the baths on Mutual Street. It was mind-boggling to see the endless parade of naked men with towels around their middles, circulating back and forth with hardly a word, looking at each other and peering into the little rooms with opened doors. I was not getting very far until I went into the top-floor room with the bunk beds and sat beside a trim blond from Buffalo. His body and especially his tongue were exquisite and delicious. How rude of me afterwards to have to dash off and catch my bus—and we never even exchanged first names. The delights of that experience haunted me for weeks afterwards.

  28.8.78 to 2.9.78

  I take Alison and Flip to September Camp.* What a powerful reinforcement of my existing lifestyle seeing all those old friends, especially the Snells.† But is this really me? Was it ever? I don’t know.

  Clipping: “A Homosexual Father: many consider him unfit, but ‘I love my son,’ ” The Globe and Mail, March 30, 1978

  “I’m a gay father,” Michael Lynch said. “And there are more of us around than you realize.”

  Mr. Lynch shares custody of his 6-year-old son with his estranged wife, whom he married eight years ago to “follow the mob.”

  Today, the University of Toronto English professor is an “out-of-the-closet gay.” He separated from his wife nearly a year ago and lives with his boyfriend and his son.

  Mr. Lynch and his boyfriend don’t hesitate to show their fondness for each other in front of the little boy, who has been told that “daddy is a faggot.”

  Mr. Lynch, a youthful 37, knows that many consider him unfit to be a parent because he is homosexual. “But I love my son … it seems so simple to me,” he said.

  He spoke with frust
ration about his reaction to a recent county court decision giving a Montreal father, a self-professed homosexual, custody of his two children.

  Mr. Lynch scoffed at County Court Judge Elmer Smith’s stress in his Jan. 16 judgment that the Montreal father is worthy of having his children live with him, in part, because he is “discreet … has never exhibited any missionary attitude or inclination towards militancy in this difficult area … disclaims ownership in any homosexual club … doesn’t indulge in exhibitionistic behaviour in the presence of the children.”

  “These things are not at all relevant,” Mr. Lynch said. He and his lover hold hands, kiss and hug just as heterosexual couples do. Yet he has the same concern that many partners have about “being too intimate in front of the children.”

  “I am completely open with my son. Children should know from the beginning. He hears the word ‘gay’ all the time and he has questioned.… I explain to him it means wanting to be with boys and having especially close relationships with boys.”

  Mr. Lynch is politically active in the homosexual rights movement, writing occasional articles for the homosexual rights publication Body Politic; acting as chairman of the committee to defend John Damien (a race steward dismissed in 1975 by the Ontario Jockey Club because he is a homosexual); and doing research on issues affecting homosexuals at the university. He taught the university’s first homosexual studies course and is on sabbatical to write a book about homosexual poets.

  Although these activities might be considered militant, Mr. Lynch is convinced that they will not harm his son or turn him into a homosexual.

  “Look, I was exposed to aggressively heterosexual parents for 18 years of my life. They did everything they could to turn me into a heterosexual. Nothing I do can turn my son into a homosexual.”