Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father

by Alysia Abbott

  With gay residents now accounting for approximately one out of every five votes in San Francisco, they could not be ignored by city government. Mayor George Moscone, elected in 1975, became one of the first American mayors to appoint openly gay men and women to government positions. And on August 2, 1977, after several unsuccessful campaigns, the first openly gay man was elected to public office in California: Supervisor Harvey Milk.

  Dad was a vocal Milk supporter and addressed the political urgency of gay rights in the best way he knew: through art. He wrote a poem about Anita Bryant, which he turned into a cartoon broadside and then, that May, read it live on the community radio station, KPOO:

  . . . O Humanity! When will we ever learn the lessons of history?

  If our children need to be saved from anything

  It’s witch hunters with their pink stars and gas ovens.

  Never again! This time we will resist.

  For the cover of his second book of poems, Wrecked Hearts (1978), he drew a picture of Jesus being gunned down in a gay bar by a thug bearing a shoulder tattoo reading “Anita Forever.” Jesus utters “Not again!” as the bullet rips through his heart. The inside title page shows Jesus posed with his open chest—sacred heart imagery my father knew intimately from growing up a devout Catholic in Lincoln, Nebraska. Next to this, Jesus issues a call to action: “What we sissies need is a good revolution.”

  Six going on seven at the time, I was too young to understand exactly why we’d switched from orange juice to apple juice in the mornings, but I did absorb a sense of persecution: They don’t want us. They want to do away with us.

  In fact, gay bashing sharply increased after Bryant’s win. Gays in the city started wearing police whistles and organizing street patrols. On a late June night, a city gardener named Robert Hillsborough, called Mr. Greenjeans by kids at the playground where he worked, was jumped by four teenagers when he and his boyfriend emerged from their car. One of them stabbed Hillsborough in the chest with a fishing knife, repeatedly shouting “Faggot!” until he died.

  I didn’t notice the flowers that collected for Hillsborough at that year’s Gay Pride parade, only days after his murder, and my dad didn’t point them out. Holding his hand, I delighted in the crowd’s defiantly jubilant energy, the loud and proud marching. The newspapers estimated between 200,000 and 375,000 turned out for that year’s parade. Colorful national flags waved in the air as bare-chested men danced with one another. Everyone cheered when a contingent of Straights for Gay Rights passed. I saw bright yellow balloons and the disco diva Sylvester singing from a glittery float. And everywhere we saw handmade signs: “We Are Your Children.”

  But even as I felt among friends at Gay Pride, I felt strange at school and at my grandparents’ house. I knew what families were supposed to look like, and I knew ours was different. Though I deeply loved Dad, I really wanted a mother. I started writing stories that resolved the problem of motherlessness—stories in which orphaned animals reunited with their mothers or found new mothers, or created families with other orphaned animals. These stories earned me praise from my teachers and from Dad. In the summer of 1977, he considered my desires for family and weighed them against his own:

  July 26, 1977: I find, at present, that my only deep, real and satisfying commitment is with Alysia. For a while, I had a fantasy (especially living with Ed) that I could find a man I loved to live with and that this would also be a good life with Alysia. But Alysia – the more as she gets older – protests against this. She is not getting what she wants and this, in turn, affects me. Whether because of TV or school or grandparent role modeling/conditioning OR because she is simply the honest child saying the emperor has no clothes, she does not want two daddies and with two men, one of them can’t be the mommy.

  So what are my options?

  1) Continue as I am – namely with roommates with whom there is no firm commitment. A drifting life.

  2) To more actively seek a man (boy) poet who will share my life with Alysia. This would be ideal but I wonder if it is not based on a fantasy, magical thinking, and thus not a real option.

  3) To attempt to overcome my homosexuality and to seek a full time heterosexual commitment.

  4) To seek a woman who would accept the homosexual part of me but who would have more than a friendship commitment to me (and me with her) and who would also take a mothering role towards Alysia.

  Option 4 seems the most realistic to me at present. The question now is: how to go about achieving this?

  A few months later, Dad ran an advertisement in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: “Looking for someone creative, especially interested in poetry who would also help with my young daughter Alysia.” In December a single mother named Lynda Peel answered the ad. The previous year, she and her thirteen-year-old daughter, Krista, had driven out from their small New Hampshire town to build a new life in San Francisco. Lynda’s boyfriend came along and helped them settle in, but when he suddenly left she needed someone to share her rented house in Noe Valley. We arranged a meeting.

  Dad and Lynda hit it off immediately. Lynda was a feminist photographer, sympathetic toward gay issues, and intrigued by Dad’s writing circle. More importantly, as a divorcee, she could relate to the challenge of pursuing a creative life as a single parent. Lynda said she could help with child care and the details of keeping house that Dad struggled with on his own. Dad would help with rent and groceries and projects around the house, as needed.

  I was excited by the prospect of moving in with another kid. We’d already lived with roommates, but few took interest in me and I usually played by myself. Krista was different. She was a kid but something of an adult too. She wore skintight blue jeans and lots and lots of eye shadow. She smelled of perfume and hair spray and would later remind me of the sassy teens from movies like Little Foxes and rock bands like the Runaways. I hoped she’d teach me how to wear makeup, or at least play dress-up.

  In January 1978, we packed our things and moved into Lynda’s place. Hers was a real house, with two floors and a backyard. Far from any street life, it was quiet, which made Dad happy. Our first week, I hoped that I could play with Krista after school, but it seemed she was never around. Then one afternoon a police car pulled up and she emerged with eyes down, her face twisted in a scowl. She’d run away from home. There was lots of talking behind closed doors. My dad tried to smile it all away. “Family stuff,” he said. “We don’t need to get involved.”

  The next evening, after Lynda left for her Spanish class, Krista asked my dad if she could take me out to see her boyfriend. She promised that she’d have me back for my 8:30 bedtime. Dad was working on a new poem and, delighted by the prospect of extended quiet, agreed. He helped me with my coat and sneakers, then waved goodbye. The boyfriend, a skinny guy in jeans and whiskers, drove us down 25th Street in his rusted-out car.

  Some hours later, I found myself sitting in the front seat alone while Krista and her boyfriend smooched in the back. I didn’t know what time it was, but it was dark and I knew I was supposed to be in bed. I had school the next day. At first it was exciting to be there without my dad. The street was lit by flashing red neon. The radio played stories of longing and survival, stories told with thrilling and triumphant orchestration: “If I can’t have you . . .” But after a while, I was uncomfortable. I tired of opening and closing the glove compartment. A damp draft blew in through a hole in the door.

  “I want to go home, Krista.”

  No answer.

  Bored and cold, I started to worry. Who are these people in the backseat talking to each other? What are they saying? Who are the people walking by the car speaking languages I don’t understand? Where are we and how long will we be here? Other children must be in bed, I thought to myself. I imagined them under blankets holding their stuffed animals close.

  “I want to go home, Krista. I’m cold!”

  “Don’t be such a baby.”

  I nuzzled into the cracked upholstery and tried to lose mysel
f in the songs on the radio. The music sounded like the night—exotic and grown-up, dark and endless. I listened until I fell asleep.

  January 19, 1978: Krista was out till midnight w/Alysia. Gary (Lynda’s ex-roommate, lover) picked her up at 22nd & Mission. Lynda was very angry at me too. After taking A-R to school I have long talk w/Lynda. I get into some deep emotional feelings & weep (about parental rejection partly). Very open, deep conversation but very draining . . . Lynda reviewed her hassles with Krista. (Who tried to burn down their house last summer, gave booze to neighbor kids, etc.) I feel somewhat exhausted by it all & bad that Alysia doesn’t have sister figure here. But house is quiet and peaceful.

  Determined to make this alternative family work, Dad tried to adapt us to our new home. Many nights, he and Lynda cooked elaborate vegetarian meals, which were followed by long “rap” sessions where they drained bottles of wine. Dad retreated to his room periodically to smoke since Lynda had a rule against smoking in the kitchen. She had lots of rules.

  My father enjoyed Lynda and still hoped that she’d be the household partner he’d imagined in his journal the previous July. When he went out dancing, he’d leave me at home with her and the two of them would make dinner together. But Lynda was an intimidating surrogate mother. Broad and muscular in painter pants and a Mexican peasant shirt, she moved brusquely through the rooms of the house setting up her photo sessions, during which she wanted no interruptions. My playing in the kitchen was enough to prompt her to lumber down the stairs, eyes flashing. She was often angry and she and Krista fought constantly. Slamming doors. Yelling in the halls. It scared me.

  Dad knew I was upset and, after putting me to bed one night, resolved to talk with Lynda as they were cleaning up from dinner, a conversation he recounted in his journal:

  I expressed a couple of Alysia’s feelings (i.e. that we not talk in her room, that Lynda not come in her room all the time, some fear of Lynda). Lynda said she wanted to deal with AR directly on these things, that I was “rescuing” by acting as a go between. She went “there’s a psychological term for that, do you know what it is?” & then went on to tell me I was transferring my feelings onto Alysia. I replied that I resented being put in a category & explained situations when I had to stand up for Alysia before (when people had eaten her food, bothered her at school, etc. – that if parents don’t do this, the species couldn’t survive. It’s survival).

  I feel Lynda’s trying to have it 2 ways . . . When she’s expressing a need, it’s “being open with her feelings.” When I do it’s “bitching at her.” Despite this, I do like her, her strength & buoyant spirit, her dealing with the underneath of interactions. I can see living here being a character building experience for me.

  Away from home, Dad continued to focus on poetry. Having established himself at the Cloud House, he now became a regular presence at open readings around town: City Lights in North Beach; a folkie café in the inner Sunset called the Owl and Monkey; and the Rose and Thistle, a straight bar on the corner of California and Polk. But though Dad enjoyed these evenings, he sensed within straight and even mixed audiences a discomfort toward his overtly gay poems. He began reaching out to writers he admired in the pages of Fag Rag and Gay Sunshine. The papers, both started in the 1970s, published poetry, fiction, and interviews with older writers such as Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal, along with the work of emerging writers, including Dad and the San Francisco poet Aaron Shurin. In a letter to Shurin, Dad wrestled with questions of identity and writing:

  Is there such a thing as Gay poetry or a Gay aesthetic? Is any poem by a Gay poet a Gay poem (some certain unique un-straight consciousness informing it) or is it just certain subject matter & viewpoint field which makes poems Gay?

  He told Shurin he wanted to create an intellectual “scene” where he could get feedback on ideas and work with like-minded writers. That February of 1978, Dad organized a Men’s Valentine’s Reading featuring Shurin and other noted gay writers including Dennis Cooper, Paul Mariah, and Harold Norse. He called the event “From Our Heart to Yours.” He illustrated two-color posters, which he printed up in the hundreds but because our old VW’s engine had died, Dad had to do all of his promotion via bus and BART, lugging heavy stacks of flyers and posters to bookstores around the Bay Area. The event was covered by both the San Francisco Sentinel and the Chronicle. Though the reviews were mixed, Dad was delighted by the attention, cutting them out and pasting them in his journal.

  Krista left home and moved in with her boyfriend. I later learned that she’d fallen in with a local Latino gang and started smoking angel dust and pot. Lynda couldn’t control her anymore. Tired of the constant battles, Lynda asked Krista to simply make up her mind where she wanted to live so that she could get another roommate. Dad tried to explain to me what was going on and I, having imbibed San Francisco’s collective spirit, suggested we all have a meeting with Krista to see what we could do to make her happy. The meeting never happened.

  ON APRIL 25, 1978, St. Paul, Minnesota, became the second American city to repeal its gay civil rights ordinance. Anita Bryant took her familiar position in front of the TV cameras: “Once again, as in Dade County nine months ago, the morally committed majority has gained a great victory. The message to the politicians is clear: no longer will God-respecting Americans submit to the oppressive yoke of militant, politically organized immorality.”

  As news of the St. Paul loss spread, protesters took to the streets of San Francisco by the hundreds. A friend of my dad’s called to invite him to a massive demonstration under way in the Castro. Most nights Dad was too busy watching me to take part in the many rallies and protests organized by Harvey Milk and his circle, but on this night he left me with Lynda so he could go.

  By the time Dad arrived, the protesters, many wearing “Squeeze a Fruit for Anita” t-shirts and “Anita Bryant Sucks Oranges” buttons, had scattered to various bars. He headed over to Toad Hall, which was teeming with young men in tight jeans and work boots. Dad quickly found some friends, downed several drinks, and started dancing with a cute kid named Stu.

  On the crowded dance floor everyone pulsed to a loud disco beat. Previously just a “gay thing,” disco music was now everywhere. The Bee Gees’ “Night Fever” was that week’s number one song and its lyrics seemed to capture the spirit of the night:

  Listen to the ground

  There’s a movement all around

  There is something going down

  I can feel it.

  After settling their tab at the bar, Dad and Stu shared a cab back to our place.

  April 26, 1978: This morning Lynda and Krista are yelling at each other. I take Alysia to school late and when I return this kid Stu is gone as is a box of my antique jewelry and my tape-recorder. The little fool forgot the cord even! Lost my Jack Spicer tape too. Maybe he was desperate for money. I don’t know. Can anything really be stolen from me if I don’t “own” anything? Such a strange event. The phantom of Toad Hall – if he only steals your heart you will be lucky!

  At first Dad tried to keep the theft secret, but then he discovered that some of Lynda’s camera equipment was also missing. She was, of course, very “pissed off.” She couldn’t believe that my father would bring a strange man into her house. Dad wanted to replace everything that was taken but Lynda said she’d been thinking about her needs and wanted to put together a women’s collective. “[She] feels she has too much male energy in her life,” Dad reported in his journals. Dad offered no argument. He was just as glad to find an out.

  The search for a home was on again.

  READING THROUGH my father’s journals, it’s hard to not feel disappointed by some of his choices. Sending me out with Krista the runaway, keeping us at Lynda’s for months even after it was clear that hers was an unhappy home, leaving me alone. What was he thinking? How could he put his work and community ahead of my safety? Was he too stoned to see that this wasn’t a good situation in which to raise a young girl?

  But then I see ever
ywhere evidence of love. Dad considered overcoming his homosexuality for me. He moved in with Lynda and Krista for me. When we later found a one-bedroom in the Haight, he gave me the big room with the balcony, leaving for himself the living room, which only became his room at night. If he was sometimes a failure as a parent, he was always a noble failure. He tried to do what he thought was best even if he didn’t always know what “best” was or how to achieve it.

  What’s perhaps more striking to me is that through it all he never gave up his passion for community. He was determined not only to advance the quality of his own work, but to organize and increase the visibility of gay writers and poets everywhere, to publish broadsides and later magazines on his own dime. My father did all of this while struggling to keep me in bilingual school and pursuing life as an openly gay man. He was a pioneer.

  It wasn’t easy being a single gay father in the 1970s. There were no books on gay parenting, no Listservs, as there would be decades later. There were no models. For better and for worse, my father was making up the rules as he went along. His only guide was a firm conviction that he didn’t want to raise me as he had been raised.

  Because he hadn’t felt free to be his true self growing up in Lincoln, in our fairyland he raised me with fluid boundaries. In that household, kids were not to speak until they were spoken to and physical punishment was standard; in ours, Dad invited my opinion on everything, from his boyfriends to my punishments. After growing up in a house where he’d been spanked for running onto the lawn naked and displays of affection were uncommon, Dad raised me in a home where a naked man might parade down the hall, where I lived on his lap and called him my boyfriend. There was never a sense that “these matters are not appropriate for children.” My father took me everywhere, introduced me to everyone, and worked hard to treat me as an equal. And since I was a precocious child and Dad was a childish adult, in some ways we were equals.