Alysia Abbott’s moving memoir tells of her childhood and young adulthood being raised by her single gay father in 1970s and 80s San Francisco. Her father, Steve Abbott, was a poet, author, editor, and a leading figure in the New Narrative poetry movement. After he died of AIDS-related complications in 1992, Alysia began reading his journals, and eventually interwove them with her own memories to create a compelling tale that is part history, part memoir, and part coming-of-age story.
When she was three, Abbott’s mother died in a car accident. Alysia could have gone to live with her aunt, but her father insisted he wanted to raise her. A year later, in 1974, he moved with her from Atlanta to San Francisco, hoping for a fresh start in the “post-hippie,” gay-friendly Haight-Ashbury district.
This was the San Francisco of the burgeoning gay rights movement, Harvey Milk, food co-ops, and a nascent gay literary scene, which Steve Abbott helped grow as a poet, editor, and organizer, rubbing elbows with luminaries such as Judy Grahn and Allen Ginsberg.
Yet he struggled to support his daughter both financially and emotionally, to be there for her while also writing his poems, organizing community events, and seeking a partner for himself. She charts both his failings and his strengths with compassion. “If he was sometimes a failure as a parent, he was always a noble failure,” she writes. “He tried to do what he though was best even if he didn’t always know what ‘best’ was or how to achieve it.”
Some of his struggles were personal; but as Abbott notes, “It wasn’t easy being a single gay father in the 1970s. . . . There were no models. For better and for worse, my father was making up the rules as he went along.”
Abbott looks at herself just as honestly—her adolescent moods, rebellions, and struggles to fit in among classmates from one mom-one dad families. While she loved her father and his queer friends, she remained closeted about her family at school, and “learned to move between both worlds.”
When she went to college in New York in 1988, she relished the chance to “discover and create” herself, away from the tensions of living with a struggling gay writer in recovery. Throughout this time, however, she and her father continued to exchange letters, never severing their ties.
She shows us the denial she experienced about her father’s AIDS diagnosis and the resentment she felt at having to care for him while trying to finish college. Underneath that, however, was fear that she would lose him, he who had been the one constant presence in her life.
Abbott has given us the gift of insight into a little-documented time in gay parenting history and a little-seen perspective on the AIDS crisis, wrapped in a thoughtful and heartfelt personal memoir. Although she is straight, she rightly insists, “This queer history is my queer history. This queer history is our queer history.” Queers, and our children, should be thankful she has shared it with us.
