Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter Read online

  Advance praise for

  CONFESSIONS OF A FAIRY’S DAUGHTER

  “With great skill and tenderness and a gorgeously wicked sense of humor, Alison Wearing tells her family’s story from every angle, allowing all to speak with their own voices. This is an important historical document—a portrait of gay life in the 1980s with its bravely fought battles for equality—that doesn’t flinch from showing the collateral damage of homophobia, which still today affects and afflicts the families of so many who are struggling to come out. But it’s also a timeless memoir written by a loving daughter who is finding her own way in the world and learning about the need we all have not just for acceptance, but for true understanding.”

  Will Schwalbe, author of The End of Your Life Book Club

  “Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter had me in tears: first of laughter, then of sadness, then of wonder at life’s strange and marvelous fragility. It is a book both beautiful and true; about the longing for family and for home. Alison Wearing is a hugely talented writer.”

  Alison Pick, author of Far to Go, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize

  “This exquisitely written and deeply compassionate memoir tells the story of a family and a nation at a turning point in their sexual and political awakening. The scope of events and emotions may be operatic, but Alison Wearing captures them all in details that are intimate yet revealing, heartbreaking yet joyous. This is a book for every daughter who loves her father and for everyone who chooses to live (and love) openly and freely.”

  Kamal Al-Solaylee, author of Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes, finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction

  “Alison Wearing is blessed with the eye of a lyric poet, the ear of a comic novelist, and a heart capacious enough to tell a complicated love story. Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter caught me from the beginning and held me until its touching conclusion.”

  Katherine Ashenburg, author of The Dirt on Clean and The Mourner’s Dance

  “Part memoir, part history book, part diary and all parts heart. Alison Wearing weaves a tale that celebrates the complexities of who we are and the families we hold close. Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter is painful, tender, poignant and—most important—beautifully honest.”

  Brian Francis, author of Natural Order

  “Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter is a universally appealing memoir about everything that matters in a family and to a person. It will appeal to you if you have a gay parent or a straight parent or any parent. If you have a child or were once a child. If you are passionately interested in social history or all you really want is a compelling, beautifully written story with just the right mix of everything—compassion, discovery, recovery, the occasional (OK, on one occasion) accidental ingestion of hallucinogens on Christmas Day, music, humour, grace.”

  Jamie Zeppa, author of Every Time We Say Goodbye and Beyond the Sky and the Earth

  Also by Alison Wearing

  HONEYMOON IN PURDAH: AN IRANIAN JOURNEY

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2013 Alison Wearing

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2013 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Wearing, Alison, 1967–

  Confessions of a fairy’s daughter : growing up with a gay dad / Alison Wearing.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-80761-8

  1. Wearing, Alison, 1967–. 2. Wearing, Joe. 3. Children of gay parents—Canada—Biography. 4. Gay fathers—Canada—Biography. 5. Fathers and daughters. I. Title.

  HQ777.8.W43 2013 306.874′208664 C2012-907990-1

  Cover design by Kelly Hill

  Images: Courtesy of the author

  v3.1

  for my father

  because my father lived his soul

  love is the whole and more than all

  ee cummings

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prelude

  PART ONE: The Way I Saw It

  PART TWO: The Way He Saw It

  PART THREE: The Way She Saw It

  PART FOUR: The Way We See It Now

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Prelude

  Partway through the writing of this book, I called my father to ask if he and I could have a cup of tea together and talk about a few things.

  “Sure, that would be terrific!” he replied, his voice bouncing with enthusiasm, so I travelled into Toronto a few days later with a notebook in my bag.

  My dad knew I was writing a book about growing up with a gay father. I had sent him early drafts of the first chapters, and while he had squirmed initially, asking if I wouldn’t mind waiting until he had gone dotty before I published anything, he agreed that it was indeed an important story and would do well to be out in the world.

  He just wished it didn’t have to focus so much on him.

  I arranged for us to talk because I had reached a bit of an impasse, having written all the scenes that I knew were important to telling my side of the story and feeling the need to broaden the narrative’s perspective. I knew little about my father’s early adulthood, except what one gleans from passing mentions of university days and commentary on old photos, so I had questions about that period of his life. And I knew that he had come out during the vanguard of the gay revolution in Canada and I wondered if tying his story into that cultural and political history would give the book the wider vision I was seeking.

  So we had tea. Earl Grey, I believe, with milk. And toast with Marmite. Between sips and bites, I asked him about his childhood—when did he first have the hots for a boy?—about his years at university—did his time at Oxford, the stomping grounds of Oscar Wilde (among others), give him the freedom to consider the possibility that he might be gay?—and about the gay revolution in Canada—was he at the famous Toronto bathhouse raids protest and what was it like? We talked for hours, our conversation spilling over into all sorts of other topics along the way. I made a few pages of notes.

  “Ultimately, this is your story, Dad,” I said towards the end. “So is there anything else that you feel would be important to include?”

  My father mentioned a few books I might read—academic treatises on gay social and political movements, the odd novel—and I jotted them down. Then he looked away pensively, inhaled sharply and opened his mouth, as if to add something. But instead of speaking, he simply held both posture and breath. Without explanation, he then got up and disappeared to his basement, reappearing a few minutes later with a small box, which he placed on the kitchen table.

  “You might want to look through this,” he said, and walked over to the counter to begin preparing dinner.

  I asked the obvious.

  “Oh, just a few papers,” he replied. Casual as could be.

  I peered inside: newspapers, magazine clippings, notebooks and loose papers. The first page I pulled out was filled with my father’s inimitable scrawl. It was a diary entry dated January 31, 1980. I read the opening sentence aloud: “ ‘Last night I ma
de it with a Roman Catholic priest.’ ”

  My dad shrieked and turned around. But instead of running over and tearing the page from my hands, he melted into a coy posture and cooed, “Oooh, I remember him. He was so cute …” Then he giggled and returned to the task of making dinner. Duck à l’orange.

  I looked back at the collection of yellowing pages and realized what it was: a writer’s dream. The Mythical Box, the treasure trove containing priceless original documents, the journals, the letters, clues and confessions. Everything necessary to inspire and inform a literary portrait.

  Or, in this case, finish one.

  After years of denial, introspection, reluctant suspicions and eventual surrender, my father came out in the 1980s. While it was difficult for a plethora of reasons, stepping into the truth of who he was brought with it such immense relief that my father must have flung the proverbial closet door right off its hinges, for he went from living a life of secrets and (for a time) deceptions to being open, forthcoming and exuberantly transparent about everything.

  So while it was well within his character to share personal details, it was still a bit of a shock to be handed his diaries. Doubly extraordinary, however, was that he chose to share everything with me knowing that I was writing a memoir—one that he already wished did not have to focus so much on him.

  At my father’s kitchen table I began to sift through the papers: drafts of letters he had written to friends in the early days of his coming out, letters he had received, newspaper clippings about “Faggots as Fathers,” his diaries, and various drafts—furiously handwritten, then typed on a manual typewriter, then on an electric one—of something he called “My Story,” his attempts to understand and articulate what he was discovering about himself, who he had been, and who, to his combined relief, distress and amazement, he was becoming.

  As my dad julienned orange peels and trussed the duck and I sifted through the treasures in The Box, I asked him the odd question—“Who was Tom? You sure wrote a lot about him …”—and occasionally I read some of the steamier passages aloud. Dad cooked nonchalantly throughout, interjecting and laughing periodically. The only troubling moment came when I lifted the box off the table and prepared to carry it upstairs.

  Looking alarmed for the first time that day, he said, “I think it’s wonderful that you’ve decided to focus on writing about the broader gay movement and its political history and so forth. That’s far better than just doing a personal story.”

  Perhaps it was the voice of regret. Terror at what he had just done. What he knew I was likely to do with it all. But any ideas I might have had about weaving my memories into a brief history of the gay revolution had been summarily eclipsed by the words, Last night I made it with a Roman Catholic priest.

  Write about political history? Was he kidding? With that kind of material batting its eyelashes at me?

  Over the next few months, I pored over the contents of The Box, sometimes so rapt that I would pull up from the middle of a page as though surfacing from an engrossing dream. Certain realizations prompted a reordering of my inner world as pieces of my sometimes puzzling childhood fell into place—oh, that’s who that guy was; or, so that’s what Dad was doing there—and a few memories that had had a hazy quality slid into focus.

  The Box was a time capsule, a cardboard safe where, during the two years when he was actively “coming out of the closet,” my father stuffed and stored everything that related to his private search for the truth about himself. As I read and transcribed the diaries, articles and letters, I found myself with an ever-deepening understanding of the man behind those words, the complexities and agonies he had lived as he struggled to admit to himself, to his family and to an unsympathetic world that he was gay. If there was value in the material, I realized, it lay in the possibility that reading such a story “from the inside” might help those on the outside to find a similar compassion. For these were not my father’s reflections as he is now, a person so comfortable in his life as a gay man that it is difficult to imagine him any other way. These were his words and emotions at the time, when even he had trouble understanding what was happening to him and why.

  Although the events (and escapades) recounted in The Box all took place while my parents were still married, at no point during the reading did I feel angry. In fact, it was only after someone asked if it was “infuriating” to read about my father’s “infidelity” that I realized it had the potential to be upsetting. But it wasn’t, not at all. I was simply fascinated, and curious, and while at times I felt freshly heartbroken for both my parents, it was a beautiful sensation: the kind of heart-opening that leads us to love and understand people more deeply.

  It might have been different had The Box disclosed a secret life, an unresolved past, a trail of lies, brutalities or shame. But when my father came out, his secrets were all set free. Through the alchemy of honesty, they had transmuted into truth. And ultimately, truth is a gift of liberation, however painful it might be at the time.

  This story would have been incomplete without an honouring of my mother’s place in it all, but I chose to treat it with something I knew she would appreciate: brevity. In deference to her private nature, I have kept the details of her life to a minimum. In honour of her musicianship, the structure of her section, Part Three: The Way She Saw It, was inspired by that of a choral requiem.

  Names have been changed in most cases for the simple reason that I felt people might appreciate the slight remove, not necessarily from this story but from my take on it. I will never pretend to re-create people as they see themselves and no doubt every person’s version of the same events is as different as it is valid. In cases where names were relevant to a larger picture, I have kept them intact. To everyone else, I offer a pseudonymous masque and do hope you all enjoy the ball.

  Finally, a few words need to be said on the subject of stereotypes, for they are, in this case as in every other, unfair caricatures of unique individuals, often highly inappropriate and/or inapplicable, and a subtle, maddeningly acceptable form of bigotry.

  Gay men do not, of course, all prance, sing show tunes, bake puff pastry or perform mock ballet moves on patios. Of course they do not. It might be fair, however, to say that if one were to walk into a party where men were engaged in the aforementioned activities, one might be less inclined to assume those men to be heterosexual. Although they might well be. Just last Christmas, my (male) partner and my brother—both staunch heterosexuals—celebrated their gifts of long underwear by donning them immediately and performing a leaping and twirling version of The Nutcracker Suite—“The Nutscratcher Sweets,” I believe they called it—for the rest of the family. So anything’s possible.

  To state the grossly obvious, gay men, like all men, come in every possible shape, size and style; ditto for lesbians and, for that matter, everyone else. Gay men do not talk, move or dance in a particular way, nor do they all share the same tastes or habits. Of course there are millions of examples, but the gay-stereotype-smasher that comes to mind at this instant is the friend of my father’s who once devoted several years of his life not to becoming a fashion designer, but to building an airplane—from scratch. So let us be clear: an individual is an individual, be they straight, gay, bi, transgender, queer, black, white, dwarf, tall or in all ways absolutely average.

  I do not believe in the propagation of stereotypes, although my father may be, at times, a prancing, show-tune-spouting, pastry-baking, ballet-loving example of the stereotypical fairy. (Some people have problems with that word, fairy, but I’ve never felt or used it in anything but the most endearing terms, so have only affectionate associations, as does my father. My apologies to those who equate the word with anything but playful acceptance.)

  “I thought gay men were supposed to be tidy,” a former boyfriend once remarked upon walking into my father’s house, a roving memorial to every paper, book, letter, present, Christmas card, kitchen appliance and rock that has ever come into his possession.
<
br />   “Some gay men are tidy,” I replied, a bit peeved by the comment. “But they don’t all fit the stereotype, you know.”

  My boyfriend leapt to apologize, the operatic warble of Maria Callas blaring around us. “I don’t know why I said that. I can’t stand stereotypes,” he continued. We put our bags down on the counter next to Nigella Lawson’s cookbook How to Be a Domestic Goddess. My boyfriend chuckled. “I mean, my dad’s probably reading that too.”

  I swatted him playfully and we looked outside, where my father was hunched over bare-backed in the garden, his T-shirt flung over his head so that the effect was that of a bonnet. My father smiled and stood up when he saw us, his hands flittering around in the air like manic butterflies as he cried, “Ooooh, helloooo! I’ve got some bubbly chilling in the fridge!”

  “That’s not a stereotype,” I said, smiling proudly. “That’s my dad.”

  Throughout the life of this project, I have been newly moved by my father’s quest for his most authentic self and for the fullest, most joyful expression of his love.

  The story that follows is my attempt at the same.

  CROISSANTS AND CHOIRS

  My childhood was dimly normal: an ordinary red-brick house on an unremarkable street in small-town Ontario. Mother, father, two brothers, a black Labrador named Ida who used to hump the legs of visitors so furiously that she’d leak diarrhea onto the oriental carpet, and a deaf “cleaning lady” (as she was known), who came once a week and ate ketchup sandwiches for lunch. Mrs. Preston had a distended vein that bubbled out from under her eye and loved to sing loud tuneless love songs while dusting with long pfffts of Lemon Pledge, so on Tuesdays our house took on an other-planetary feel that I preferred to avoid by going over to Mary Smithey’s house to play.

  I spent no more time contemplating the concept of home than I thought of ripping up the flooring to see what lay underneath. Home was simply the sound of the front door’s creak; the taste of a breeze as it funnelled through my bedroom window and across my cheek; the comforting clang of kitchen pots against classical music and the magic of groceries being transformed into meals; my mother’s being there virtually always—Maaaawm? … Yes, in here; the predictable to-ing and fro-ing of the neighbourhood; the sound of the stones flipping up from the driveway when my father’s car pulled in; the fields of tall grasses at the end of the road and their sketch of soft dry gold on my eyes; and the sensation of my teeth as enamelled ice cubes when I played under an evening’s snowfall, the crystals falling out of the darkness onto the camber of my tongue.