Sometimes I dream about my father–that he is alive again. These dreams are unwelcome. Some of my earliest dreams after his death were that I had caused his own death, and in some ways, I am not completely irresponsible. But that is not why I hate the dreams where this figure from my past reappears and comes once again to extinguish me.
I would say that my father and I were never close, but perhaps this is incorrect. I was born in 1980. My mother said that I was like a gift from heaven. She and I bonded at a young age, and we were mostly inseparable throughout my childhood. As a child, I had no idea what kind of life my mother was living. My father was a psychiatrist, and for the most part he was not home. Yes, I was a casebook “problem” child: absent father, “overbearing” mother. My father at the time was training to become an analyst. A psychoanalyst is something other than a psychiatrist. The psychoanalytic institute relies primarily on Freudian thought and the discursive stream-of-consciousness of the patient, free to speak forbidden thoughts that in this supine position in a chaise lounge slip by the gatekeepers posted by the super-ego. Becoming an analyst at the time was not something that was well defined from what I have been told. My mother told me that they would attend parties with other candidates and wonder why certain candidates had been selected and others were passed over. As a candidate, one would provide sessions for patients without charge, and the fees would go directly to the psychoanalytic institute. Additionally, candidates would undergo analysis at their own expense. My mother told me that those candidates who had been selected were not good mormons; however, I think there is more to the story. At this point in time, psychoanalysis still believed that homosexuality was a block in the psyche’s progression, (this was not changed until mid/late 1990’s, and there are still few openly homosexual psychoanalysts, and the analytic institute is constantly under scrutiny for being a vestige of homophobia) and candidates who had not progressed past this “problem” did not become analysts. But why should this be an impediment for my father?
Although I rarely saw my father, I certainly felt his presence throughout my life. At a young age, I was told that I was going to play sports. Football, soccer, swim team, basketball and baseball were not pursuits to which my young self aspired. I was signed up without being asked. If I didn’t like it, I was nonetheless taken to practice and dropped off. My father didn’t attend any of these events (too busy? Honestly, I cannot remember his being in attendance at a single one of these events), but my mother always came and supported my clumsy efforts/sitting on the bench. I would fear the days that I had practice. Every practice I realized that I was different, and I had no friends or skills in these areas. Every year I would express my desire to not participate in these activities, but every year, I was returned.
My true interests were in my living room at the piano. I would sit at the piano, and pass hours sight-reading, practicing, making up new songs and trying to learn the pieces that my older siblings were playing. My older sister and brothers had been fortunate enough to have had many lessons. At this point in time, money was too tight to afford such luxuries.
I would always ask why I had to participate in these sports, and my mother would tell me, “Your father wants you to be like the other boys. As a child, he moved around nearly every year, and he felt as if he had few friends. He loved the piano too, but he felt that he was isolated from the other boys and left out. He doesn’t want you to feel the same way.” At the time, I thought this was incredibly stupid. I had friends, but I had no friends from any of these sporting activities.
There is a single conversation (at this moment I can’t recall any others in my life that we truly had) that I vaguely remember with my father. I was around six years old, and in a tantrum I had hit my mother. When my father came home, he took me to Dairy Queen. He told me that hitting women was a terrible thing to do. However, I remember feeling like he was proud of me. I remember this as the one experience where I felt happy with my father.
My father seems more like an image to me. His voice is almost completely gone from my memory. However, there are a few other phrases where I can hear my father’s voice. The threat of imminent punishment, “You will write twenty-five times, I will not…” or “I will now demonstrate pain.” The line that everyone in the house knew best was “wreck and destroy, wreck and destroy, that’s all you do is wreck and destroy.” The house was full of strange objects for me as a child. Oriental screens, Inuit art, African tribal masks, oil paintings, Native American artifacts decorated the house. I remember things being broken, and my mother and the guilty child would collude to try and repair the object so as to make its damage unnoticeable. My father also spent hours every morning in the garden. He would map out his flower beds, enlist the children for hours of weeding on weekends. Seed catalogues were on the backs of toilets in the house. There was a large constructed set of shelves with grow lights for small plants. I believe he was quite successful in his gardening. People would stop by the house and inquire if it were for sale and make offers based on the garden.
The only other memories I have of my father’s voice were from puppet shows that he performed for children when we had guests. He had constructed an ad hoc theater out of large panels of wood and a curtain made of black velvet. The star of these stories was Peter Rabbit. Each show was introduced by the emcee Clarence the Clown. Prominent characters were Schreke Hexe (german for screaming witch) and the wolf Lupus Horribolus. The plot often took place as the characters descended into the “schwarzen wald” (the black forest). Later on my mother told me how my father had been heavily involved in drama, and how he tried to use Freudian/Shakespearian concepts of going into the forest (dark places) and other literary techniques in his shows.
My father died suddenly. One of my better friends, my father and I were on a winter boy scout campout known as the Klonderee. We went with a mormon church group; however, we chose to make our camp out of sight an hearing distance of other groups and the church group. We started gathering snow to build a snow shelter to sleep in. I was not being particularly helpful. The snow was grainy like sand, and wasn’t packing well. Eventually the time came to hollow out the inside of the shelter. My father began digging. After a while, he was able to crawl in and was lying on his back hollowing out the shelter. The shelter collapsed. My friend and I immediately laughed and ran over. My father yelled help, and in a couple seconds we found his hand. After a few moments of struggling, the hand ceased to move. My friend and I dug and tried to find him. The snow slid back in like sand in a pit. After thirty seconds or so, I became frantic. I began yelling for help, and no one came. I began to repeat over and over, “My dad is dying. My dad is dying.” After a couple minutes, we decided to run for help. I found the main camp and immediately told them what had happened. The leaders called emergency help, and I ran to the church group camp. A family friend ran back with me to the site. Upon arrival, he took the shovel and pointed it downward and pulled the shovel towards him like a hungry child hoarding his toys. He was out in seconds. I was aghast. Why was I so incapable? Why couldn’t I pull him out? The adults immediately began CPR and trying to resuscitate my father. After an hour or so, these efforts continued and eventually emergency medical assistance arrived. An EMT came over and told me they were giving my father an IV, “that’s good medicine.” I remember resenting the EMT for thinking that I didn’t know what an IV was. Another boy came over and told me that they were praying for my father, and sharply inquired why I wasn’t.
The next day, my father was breathing on a respirator, and his brain was dead. After a meeting that so many families have in hospital conference rooms, we decided to suspend life support.
Life went on, and in some ways, I thought life was the same. I went to “grief therapy” and would insist to my therapist that nothing seemed different in my life. My father was never around before, and now he wasn’t either. Session after session would continue, and the therapist would express his disbelief. Eventually, I would start throwing pillows at him speaking loudly telling him, “I am not lying. Everything is the same!” One day he asked me if I loved my father. I paused for several moments and told him that I didn’t. He told me that was very sad. He told me that he had many patients who couldn’t forgive their parents for what they had done, but these patients still loved their parents. He asked me how my father would feel if he were in the room right there. I told him I had no idea. He told me that he would probably be crying. I left the appointment feeling guilty. Other children had been physically abused by their parents, and yet they still loved them, why didn’t I? I got home and started watching Yentyl. Barbara continually asked if her father could hear her, and she felt so connected to him and loved her now absent father. I felt even guiltier.
Years passed, and the dreams that I had surrounding my father would usually surround around feeling responsible for his death. Not so much that I had purposefully let him asphyxiate under the snow, but I knew that I had often wished for his death.
The insurance money put us in a better place financially. My mother didn’t make me participate in sports anymore with the exception of football. And there was finally money for piano lessons. My mother would later tell me that I didn’t need to be ashamed of loving the piano or the things I liked. She told me that people had always accused my father of being gay, and it was silly. She would tell me the best musicians were men, the best chefs were men, the best writers were men. She thought it was terrible that people would say such things.
As time went on, she told me more. She told me how my father believed he was gay. She told me how when I was born, my father had been seeing a gay patient. My father would even go over to this patient’s house and spend time with him. She felt abandoned; she felt afraid. She told me that she would have worried a great deal more if she had known about things like HIV/AIDS.
My father kept most of his books in the basement. One of my favorites was a book called “Working Out”, and if you have ever seen it, it has to be the gayest workout book ever created. I found books that I cherished, and I learned so had my father: Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, Ibsen, etc. The piece de resistance was a book bearing a title that makes me sad to even type. The book was hidden, and I laughed when I saw it. “You don’t have to be Gay.” I kept this book on the back of my toilet for about a year or so. I’d chuckle whenever I saw it.
I wonder what my relationship would be like with my father if he were alive today. People always said we were so similar, and I actually resented this. My father was obsessed with the mormon faith. He listened to the Book of Mormon on tape every morning while gardening, in his car, on his walks. I later learned that he had told one of his friends that his major concern with me was that “He doesn’t like going to church.” There is so much of me that wants to blame my father for what he did. I want to lash out and shame him for denying who he was. Surrounded by a consuming religion, being told that his personality was a defect by his profession, having a wife with five children, maybe it is no surprise that he never came out. But why do I feel so afraid, indeed terrified, of seeing him in my dreams. Would he tell me, “I did it, I married a woman and did what God wanted me to do, and if I can do it, why can’t you?” In some ways this is what I fear, but not so much as what it represents. My father wanted to extinguish me. My mother told me that he feared I would turn out like he did. He didn’t want something different; he wanted anything but that. I still feel this from society. It’s not that they want me to be different. They want my identity, my self, to vanish. Problematic, anti-patriarchal, anti-sexist, homoqueerness is a threat to the structure of society. This same pressure of extinction is echoed in the ex-gays, my own internalized homophobia, and those who value conformity above people. The recent brutal bashing of Aviance whom I once saw in Washington DC reminds me that people don’t want gays to be different, they want to rub them out. The ways may be different: make them seem just like us, make them celibate, make them straight, make them know they are wrong. I struggle, and in the late hours of last night, these phantoms appeared before me once more. But I resist. And I know who I am. And I will not be silenced.
