My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents Jonathan Silin (pocket ebook reader .txt) 📖

Unwittingly, his negative reply reveals everything he wished to keep hidden. My brother’s denial is the exact moment Anne understands that I am gay. Now she understands the visit to our house several years before in a new way: the domestic routines that she participated in—the shopping, cooking and cleaning-up, the bedroom and double bed, the rituals of rainy-day card games, and trips to the summer beach that filled the sunny days. Bob was an elementary school teacher before becoming a photographer and had all the instincts to make such a potentially awkward family visit relaxing and fun. Although he taught slightly older children, sixth, seventh, and eighth graders, his sense of humor, so right for early adolescents, is appreciated by everyone.

None of the meaning of the events that Anne had participated in does she discuss with her mother; there are no difficult questions nor fumbled replies. Since she lives in a culture where sex is a private matter, and public displays of affection in bad taste, this is not surprising.

Now, however, her mother’s question functions as a statement. There is indeed something to tell. My brother’s response affirms the need to hide that something, that family scandal.

For my part, I don’t believe that the naming of sexual orientation, just like a declaration of marital status, reveals anything of a private, let alone scandalous, nature. What is private is how we choose to live out our identities. In this instance, the scandal is constituted by the silence of Anne’s parents, not my sexual orientation. They behave as 116 n jonathan g. silin

if they can protect her from experiences she has already had, from truths she already knows. It is their own passion for ignorance that provokes my niece’s recognition.

As we draw close to home that Thanksgiving afternoon, I wonder aloud about the kind of knowing that led to Anne’s untroubled dinner table insight. She tells me that she did not have negative attitudes about homosexuality. It is simply never discussed in Chinese culture.

I believe it was the ongoing experience of hearing Bob and me spoken about, of seeing us do the things that people do as they live together, when the word “roommate” did not suffice to name the history, caring, and desire that bound our two lives together that laid the groundwork for Anne’s understanding.

At first blush, remaining silent, holding a secret, may appear to be, indeed may feel like, an isolating act, something that we do alone. Yet in reality, secrets are always relational. When we keep ideas to ourselves, we often keep others at a distance. When we decide to share secrets, they connect us to particular people in a more intimate manner. Nor do secrets occur in a social vacuum. Their existence is predicated on a social system that defines private and public, shame and honor. Secrets structure the boundaries between self and other, between individual and society. Learning to keep secrets is part of healthy development, a sign that children understand how their particular social world works.

The poet J. D. McClatchy, in his essay “My Fountain Pen,”

describes the complexity and creative potential of the in-between spaces where queer people like me so often find ourselves. Aware of his homosexuality from a very early age, he learns, through writing, to make a distinction between hiding something, keeping a secret from others, and disguising it so as to make it difficult but not impossible for others to see.

Long before I was given the fountain pen, of course, I had learned to hide things. Childhood’s true polymorphous perversity, its constant source of both pleasure and power, is lying. But that pen helped me to discover m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 117

something better than the lie. Almost as soon as it was given to me, I learned to hide inside the pen. Or rather, the pen allowed me to learn the difference between hiding and disguising something—that is to say, making it difficult but not impossible to see. Even when I knew the difference, I couldn’t always keep myself from confusing them.

McClatchy tells us that children are exquisitely attuned to the adult social world. My niece, for one, is an insightful reader of her parents’ silence. McClatchy also tells us that early in life we develop identity by remaining silent. When we begin to withhold information or feelings from others, we begin to experience ourselves as separate from rather than merged with those around us. As interior dialogue develops, we are aware of ourselves in a new way. McClatchy knows himself as someone who struggles with the difference between hiding and disguising his feelings. I know myself as someone filled with desires for other boys and men. Anne knows herself as someone with a gay uncle. We are all busy on the inside coming to understand ourselves and quiet on the outside, allowing our self-knowledge to seep into the silences, to be read between the lines by those we trust to contain the secrets that help to shape our identities.

I do not remember any dramatic moments from my own childhood when an explicit silencing leads to a more articulated knowing about the world. What I do remember, however, is my ongoing interest in people who have differently organized lives from the one I know and my suspicions that there are meaningful worlds beyond our family that I might be connected to and implicated in. During the post–

World War II years of conformity and celebration of the nuclear family, I value every opportunity to encounter people who live outside the mainstream. Developmentally appropriate curiosity, or protogay stir-rings about nontraditional families?

The same year during which my father was mourning the death of his mother, my brother, then nine, receives special instruction from his third-grade teacher for a reading problem that would now probably be called dyslexia. Every Saturday morning I accompany him and 118 n jonathan g. silin

my mother on