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

Unfortunately, he soon reveals himself to be the father I know so well, the father with confused boundaries and overwrought identifications. He tells me that my father loved to hold me as a baby, that I was a particularly warm and responsive infant, a source of physical and emotional sustenance for him. How am I, a young gay man who has experienced short crushes on peers but already fallen deeply in love with two older men, one a father of a young child himself, to make sense of Dr. M’s confidence? Is he telling me that he knows from my early life that I have the makings of a responsive partner, someone capable of providing great satisfactions to another man? Is he telling me that my father is the source of my erotic longings and the later desire to reexperience early pleasures?

In part, I know Dr. M speaks the truth about my relationship with my father. After all, I have my own deep reservoir of bodily memories

—riding atop my father’s shoulders to watch soldiers coming home from World War II, sitting on his lap as he ate dinner long after we children had finished, lying in bed with him at night when I couldn’t sleep. Nonetheless, I am unready to hear Dr. M’s report from the past.

News of my father’s sensuality contaminates my blossoming sexuality.

Filled with my own complex and ambivalent emotions, I do not want to hear about my father’s desires and my role in their fulfillment. I certainly do not want to think of my father’s connection to me as erotically charged, nor am I experienced enough to understand that the sensual enjoyment he received in holding me might be distinct from a specifically sexual one.

Now I imagine that my father, against the male stereotype of the 1940s, may have permitted himself some of the same pleasures that m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 135

women report who breastfeed their children and are otherwise physically bonded with them. Indeed, it is hard to imagine otherwise. I recall the discomfort of my undergraduate students, especially the males, when I suggest the sensuous pleasures, tinged with incestuous and potentially homoerotically charged desires, that might be enjoyed by parent and young child. Were my own feelings of discomfort any different from those of my students? It is easier for them, I imagine, to deny these possibilities or to entertain them as theoretically interesting ideas in a classroom than it was for me, trapped as I was in a therapist’s office with someone who could validate the specificity of my father’s feelings. Experiencing great difficulty breaking away from my parents, I did not need to be reminded of the ties that bound me to them. Dr. M insisted on speaking the language of attachment and connection while I tried to speak the language of separation and divorce. How could I ever trust him to keep my own confidences when he willingly revealed my father’s?

Dr. M made what I still consider to be a daring therapeutic move by revealing my father’s sensuous attachment to me. It is also one that failed, if judged only by my immediate decision not to return for further help. In the succeeding years, however, I managed to transform the discomfort caused by Dr. M’s maneuver into a guiding set of questions that I continue to explore in my work as an early childhood educator: What kind of knowledge can children tolerate about their teachers, teachers about their students, children about their parents?

How does this tolerance change over time? I am drawn to teach what is most personally difficult for me. In the end, I believe that good teachers, like effective researchers, use the classroom to explore that which confounds and troubles them. How boring it would be to do otherwise.

Through most of my adult life, I maintain a carefully modulated distance from my parents. This seems the best way to protect myself from their emotional intrusiveness and the porous boundaries that make separation so difficult. Like many gay people, this means that I live in a glass closet for a very long time. My parents and I simply 136 n jonathan g. silin

agree not to acknowledge that I am gay. Then in the mid-1970s, with my increasing political activity, I decide to shatter this closet with an official announcement about my sexual orientation.

The dining room—in which our later conversations about their care and my father’s tirades about his loss of control will take place

—is thick with emotion. There are no raised voices, however, or obvious shock expressed by my parents. This interview is about transforming unarticulated into articulated knowing. My parents are far from stupid. They know their children well. Besides, I am too old, and too much the black sheep, for them to think that being gay is a temporary stage in my life. For my parents, the moment seems to be about sadness and loss. My father expresses fears for my safety, for the potential prejudice that I may experience. Perhaps he is remembering the anti-Semitism he endured in his own childhood.

My mother’s most potent protest is to decry the fact that I will not have children. Although I am not sure if they feel bereft for me or for themselves, this disappointment is understandable. After all, they have built their own lives around their children. At that moment, my parents cannot seem to separate what they know about me as an individual from the way that gay people are so often characterized—as selfish and self-absorbed because of the absence of children in their lives. I remind my parents of my work as a nursery school teacher. At best, they see this vocation as an inadequate substitute for raising children of one’s own. They counter with embarrassing comments about the genes that will be lost if I decide not to reproduce. I am left speechless by their hubris, and the conversation ends.

In retrospect what