Hello everyone. Some BetterMostians have suggested that I start a blog, so I'll give it a shot. It may be a bit more intense than you are used to, but I don't do small-talk very well. If you have read any of my postings, you know they range from the serious to the slutty. I hope to keep that up. And I hope to hear from you. SInce it is me, there will be an emphasis on things LGBT but ranging widely too. I may be wrong, but I think I am the oldest person in BetterMost At 76, this should allow me to be as eccentric and crazy as I want to be and not have to worry about being age-appropriate.. I don't want to wimp-out as I get older. I keep remembering the Dylan Thomas poem
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
A This first posting is the longest I will ever do—I promise. It is long because I want to tell the whole story.
TRANSGENDER FTHER, GAY SON
The situation my title is suggesting is my situation. At this point in my life I see no reason to make up anything like this. My story here is the way it used to be, but probably is not now. The time period I will talk about dates from 1946 to 2002 when my father died. In Canada the fight for LGB liberation is largely won; the focus has shifted to T, to trans people. So I post this here now to give you a look back at something that still is quite unusual. I asked a shrink not long ago if he had ever run into a case of a gay man with a transgender father. He said he never had, and that there was probably a paper to be written about it
Before I tell the story I have to tell you about my family's geography. My ancestors arrived in North Carolina in the 1600's. They immediately headed for the Appalachians, spreading north into Kentucky, then western Pennsylvania, then up to Ontario, and finally some reached BC .Up here we are very Canadian, but the family headquarters (like Hyannis Port for the Kennedys) is in western Pennsylvania. It is a huge house where one generation of the family always lived, a place family members no matter how distant they lived from PA could find sanctuary. All you needed to know was the address to tell the cabbie. On the other hand, the whole extended family was amazingly dysfunctional. My immediate family's wanderings took us from Ontario to Vancouver Island to San Francisco to Hawaii. I have to tell you all this because in what I want to say the scene keeps shifting around North America.
My father was a very strange man. He taught me to read long before I started school, but was a remote figure, disappearing for days at a time only to reappear without explanation He wasn't cruel and abusive like my mother was. He just wasn't there. When I caught on to his other life I realized where he probably had been spending his time. His behaviour was eccentric, but I had no idea it was unusual. But even at an early age I had thoughts that all was not as it seemed with him. Once when I was older my mother told me of a time before they married. They were in a bar, and she said to him, “That man is staring at me,” “He's not looking at you,” my father said, “he's looking at me” My mother thought this showed him to be very worldly. I thought, ”So he has gaydar, hmm.”
I knew I was gay by the time I was 8, although I didn't know that's what it was called. We had come down from Toronto to visit the family HQ. I was wandering around along the river bank and saw two boys about 15 or so, skinny dipping and chasing each other around the deserted buildings along the bank. They looked so fine! I was transfixed, and realized that what I was feeling as I watched them was not what most other boys would be feeling. Fast-forward to me at 17 when I was bringing home guys as guests to sleep over. My room had 2 doors, one to my sister;s room and the other to the guestroom through which I had to pass to get to the hall. When a guy stayed over we slept in the guestroom because if we had slept in my room I risked my sister opening the door and seeing us in bed together, which I did not want. Still, the guestroom was just across the hall from my parents' room and they must have heard us. Beds do make noise and so do horny young men in such situations.
My mother eventually confronted me about my “limp-wristed friends.” Nobody I ever hooked up with was limp-wristed. It was her critical and demeaning way of saying gay.. We argued violently and I moved out the next day—which I should have done long before. My father, however, was totally cool about it. He never said a word about what I am sure he knew was going on, and he never made homophobic remarks, unlike my mother who would hang up the washing in the back yard and scream “Queer! Queer!” at one of our dogs who was so stereotypically gay it embarrassed me. He was constantly trying to blow the other dog and crouching down to encourage the other dog to mount him. When the dog and I were alone I would cry out in exasperation, “For chrissake Kimo, butch it up, you're giving us a bad name!” But I always wondered if “Queer! Queer!”was meant for the dog or for me.
In 1967 my father was living in San Francisco. He finally had enough of my mother, moved to SF, and studied law on his own because he wanted to take an active part in the divorce case. He also took to hanging out in a very tough black bar in the Fillmore District and acting as a sort of informal lawyer for the prostitutes who worked out of the bar. He loved to confront the police who would question him from time to time. I drove down to visit him. I had occasion to look for something in his clothes closet. I opened the closet door to be confronted by half the closet filled with women's clothing. At first I wondered if they were Celeste's clothes—she being my father's semi-girlfriend and the madam for a group of black and Asian prostitutes who frequently hung out in the apartment. They were fun, very colourful, and I enjoyed being around them. Continuing to look at the woman's clothing, it dawned on me what the scene actually was. I didn't know the word “transgender” then, just “transsexual” and “transvestite.”Some days before I had come upon him putting on a pair of nylons. They kept his legs warm, he assured me. He was very eccentric, and I believed him. After opening the closet, so to speak, I had to reevaluate. I was very much the G in LGBT, and knew nothing about the T, so I put it in the back of my mind and didn't mention anything to him. At that point I thought it was just cross-dressing.
In 1973 I went to Europe. I began sailing with the Dutch Merchant Fleet. I made a lot of money through my salary and by smuggling alcohol and cigarettes into Scandinavian countries where the prices for such items were far higher than they were in the European Community—and, since we were a ship, for us everything was duty-free. I made enough money that I didn't have to worry about it, and could backpack around the world a couple of times between catching another ship. On Dutch ships I was on, they figured out pretty quickly that I was gay. On my first ship we pulled into a Swedish port, and as soon as the phone was hooked up, the captain ordered out for women for the officers—like ordering pizza. The crew had to go get their own women to bring back to the ship. As he was ordering the women for the officers, the captain turned to me and said, “We can get you a boy if you like.” I paused for a moment thinking a hunky Swedish man might be nice, but decided against it, and told the captain not to bother. Looking back I am sorry I didn't go for it. Being gay in Europe—or parts of it—was even back then a lot easier than being gay in North America.
In 1976 I returned to Toronto for a vacation. My father by that time was staying at the family HQ in Pennsylvania. I hadn't seen him since 72. He was to meet me at a bus stop. I got off the bus, saw several people standing around, but not him. Suddenly I heard his voice and turned around to see him—with long blonde hair, and a very matronly figure with the suggestion of a bust line. Since he always looked different every time I saw him, I just chalked this up to his eccentricity and we went to get a beer. Then we went to the house trailer he was renting. While he was in the washroom, I opened the refrigerator to get a drink. On one shelf were several bottles of medicine. I didn't recognize the names of any of the drugs, but they were prescribed by a doctor in San Francisco. I intuitively knew that they were hormones, etc., preparing him for a sex change. I was quite stunned. Straight people think that gay men know all about the rest of the LGBT alphabet, but we don't—or at least I didn't.
I was caught up in two thoughts and emotions. First, I was very disturbed that people would think I was gay because my father was trans—like there was a link between being a woman and being gay, that gay meant feminine-- something I have always rejected very strongly, and take great offence to if I hear anyone talking like that. But then I still worried about what straight people thought of gay people. Now I don't care in the least as long as they stop oppressing us. At the same time I was horrified that anyone would want to be a woman. (Don't bother denouncing me as misogynist. It's gynephobia or horror feminae, fear of women not hatred, but still leaving me uncomprehending as to why he would possibly want to do that.) I was 38 by this time, and had consciously tried to live out my life in as an all-male environment as possible.
That night I slept on a cot in his office room. I discovered a manuscript he was working on, a story that was a fantasy very obvious biography about the transition of a man into a woman. I am embarrassed to say I was more upset by the poor quality of his writing than by what he was actually saying. I did not tell him I knew, but cut my visit short and headed back north.
In Toronto I called a help line to ask how I should proceed. I had never called a help line before, but I was really confused. The woman I spoke to initially wondered how well I was dealing with it. I explained that I was fine, that in the kind of family I had this was just episode 350, I was used to far more difficult scenes to handle. I just wanted to know how to proceed because I knew nothing about it. She emphasized that I had to talk to him about it directly, because very frequently the trans person would just disappear to start a new life in a new place. She said that there were strict guidelines by doctors about how to proceed—hormone treatment, psychotherapy, etc., a lengthy series of steps. That eased my mind that he wouldn't be doing anything he would soon regret.
A few days later I was back in PA for a second visit. We went to the same bar, After a little small-talk I could stand it no longer and said, “I know about the operation.” “What operation?” he asked. “What operation! The sex-change operation!” “Oh that,” he said as if it were completely unimportant. With the cat out of the bag we could discuss it easily. I asked him what he thought the family would think. He said they didn't necessarily need to know—he could live as a man during the day and be a woman at night. I said I doubted that would work. “Look, you're even developing breasts.” “And what did you think I would think?” I added. He gave me a sly look and said, :You're a man of the world—I figured you could handle it.” I started laughing because he was, of course saying that because I was gay I could deal with such things. I appreciated the compliment, but it may have been misplaced because I had never run into anything like this.
We then had a lively conversation about what it was like being a cross-dresser in Sn Francisco. He told some very funny stories about cruising Van Less Avenue in drag and being picked up by mistake by lesbians. I was alternately laughing and wincing because this was my own father. Gradually the laughing won out over my apprehension. I did ask him why he couldn't not have the operation and just “dress up,” He said it didn't work that way. I also pointed out that he would be a 64-year old woman, not Raquel Welsh. That didn't matter. Finally I told him that if he did it the right way, like the doctors wanted, I would support him no matter what the rest of the family thought. Back at the trailer I carefully noted the name of the prescribing physician for the medicines he was taking.
Back in /Toronto. I phoned the gender reassignment clinic at the University of California medical centre in San Francisco. Then I got some bad news. The prescribing doctor, they told me, was infamous. He did not follow any of the steps they were supposed to. There was no therapy , no follow-up just prescriptions and the operation. “Should I consider legal action? I asked. “That would be the place to start,” I was told.
My next call was to the offending doctor. I spoke to his nurse, and laid out what I had learned. She said, “Which would you rather he had—us doing it right, or a quickie visit to a dirty clinic in Tijuana? I said there were more alternatives than that, and that if they continued with his case they would be facing the biggest lawsuit they had ever seen. I then started a campaign to get him to think it over again. I got the idea that what he really wanted was to start over because he thought his life had been a failure. I told him he had done a lot of good things, that my sister and I were happy even though our lives were not playing out as he might have wanted. (Actually he was a terrible father, never around but probably off visiting his cross-dressing friends, and worst of all by far, standing by and allowing my mother to savagely abuse both my sister and me.) He also said that in a way with a sex- change just the old person dies while the new one continues. The logic escaped me, but it did speak to his being rather crazy—not because he was transgender, but along with it.
Not long after this he returned to San Francisco where he took in my niece who was so much trouble my sister could not handle it. It was my niece who was the first in the family besides me to know of his gender bending. My father took to going out in drag accompanied by her. They got along very well. He soon decided not to have the surgery. At the time I thought my words had made him change his mind. Later I realized he always did what he wanted, and what I said changed nothing. That realization made me feel good. I had no business trying to influence his life; I was having enough trouble living out my own. Eventually my niece married and my father lived with them for several years, but now he was able to live the way he wanted to. He loosened up a lot, got drunk occasionally (he seldom drank before), and often told those close to him that he should have had the operation. He died in 2002 at the age of 92. He was cremated, and I always wondered if he wore a dress in his coffin. I hope he did.
Now I have great respect for my father. He was dealt a difficult hand, and he tried to play it out as best he could. Consider that his youth was the 1920's and 30's—not a good time to be sexually marginalized. It is hard to imagine the stress he must have been under. It was difficult enough being gay in the 50's and 60's. It was great that he broke free of my mother's corrosive influence and came out so bravely. In my mind he changed from being a difficult person to be around to being a kind of hero because of his courage.
25 April 2015
I hope you all have had the chance to see the Bruce Jenner interview (link below) I said in my posting above that I was talking about the way it used to be for transgender people, but probably is not now. The Jenner interview reinforces my belief that it has indeed changed. I only wish my father had had a chance to see it.
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/bruce-jenner-im-woman/story?id=30570350 .
