Two memoirs published this year by grown children of gay dads both start just a few years after the Stonewall Riots. In one, the author’s parents divorced after her dad came out; in the other, her parents stayed together for decades more. Each shows us the pervasive blight of homophobia and reminds us of the many ways that queer parents and our children have navigated what it means to be a family.
In 1974, when author Lisa Lucca was 13, her mom and dad had recently divorced and she learned that her dad was gay. At the time, there were no examples or support for children with queer parents. In Ashes to Ink: A Memoir (JuJu House), Lucca moves back and forth between the time after her dad came out and the time just after his death, showing us how her conflicted feelings about family and relationships, learned through the lens of her parents, impacted her own life and fraught romances.
“Finding out my father was gay had answered some questions about their divorce but challenged everything I knew about who my parents really were, and about marriage itself,” she writes. Her mother was of little help, “as ill-equipped to deal with a teenager who rejected her homosexual father as any Midwestern mom in the 1970s would have been.” Lucca realized that it was not her father’s being gay that upset her, but the fact that he married her mom and had a family anyway. Her mom and dad remained friends, but Lucca still carried resentment—and her dad’s narcissism and lack of empathy didn’t help.
Lucca does not pull any punches in revealing her own early biases, shaped by societal homophobia. She is willing to lay bare and admit her own mistakes and imperfections, but also to look inward at the inflection points that helped turn her towards a truer sense of both herself and her father. Ultimately, she realizes that it was his personality, not his sexual orientation, that caused the tension between them, and that “Dad was difficult for reasons that had nothing to do with being gay.” Over the course of the book, we watch her learn, slowly, what she really wants from her own life and her relationships. She shows us the power of family bonds and of what can happen if we open ourselves up to understanding and forgiveness. While this well-paced and thoughtful memoir is centered on one woman’s relationship with her gay father, there is also much here about the universal human desires for love and connection and about our capacity to change and grow.
Affliction: Growing Up with a Closeted Gay Dad, by Laura Hall (She Writes), opens in 1975, when Hall was 24 and her father came out to her. He and her mother had been married for over 30 years, and Laura had never suspected her father’s secret. Her mother, however, had known for 18 years, yet the two of them remained married until her death, a total of 64 years. Hall shows how her parents built a life together and raised four children, despite her father’s relationships with men, and what the impact of this double life was on all members of her family, especially on her as one of the few who knew his secret.
She paints detailed portraits of her dad, who loved fashion and design, and her mom, the caring organizer of family celebrations—as she shares her family history and her own stumbling through a teen pregnancy and several marriages. She also weaves in parts of the story that she only learned later, such as her dad’s initial coming out to his own mother in 1937, when he thought being gay was an “affliction,” and his early gay romance that was cut short by homophobia, sending him back into the closet for most of his life.
After her mom’s death, when her dad was in his 80s, he was able to express himself more fully and openly as a gay man. Yet readers should not judge him too harshly for staying with his wife, nor she for staying with him. It was their decision to make, which they did in large part to provide a loving home for their children at a time when being an openly gay parent could mean one was cut off from seeing one’s children. If there is anything to blame here, it is societal homophobia, which forced her dad into his double life. Hall explores the impact of these challenges (and others) on her family while also showing how they remained very much a family, imperfections and all.
Hall’s conversational tone and attention to the small details of home life as well as to larger issues and emotions make this a captivating and sympathetic family story. There are undoubtedly other families with queer parents who were out to their spouses but not to the outside world, but many such stories remain hidden. Thanks to Hall for sharing hers and reminding us not only of the long history of queer parents, but also of the many ways that queer parents and our children have existed and survived, by choice or circumstance.
Each of these memoirs offers a different look at the impact of society’s rejection of gay identities, not only on gay people themselves, but on their children, into adulthood. They are valuable not only as pieces of queer history, but also as reminders of why we need to continue workings towards acceptance, understanding, and justice.
Like memoirs of queer parents and their children from this era? Also check out: Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father, by Alysia Abbott (W.W. Norton); Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter: Growing Up with a Gay Dad, by Alison Wearing (Knopf Canada); and Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood, by Melissa Hart (Seal Press).