How to Kill a Tender Moment

Pop!

So Pop/Daddy/The Old Man, was driving me to Pittsburgh after my final college class had ended. I was now a graduate with a fine arts degree and could look forward to a promising career in ...waitressing. Pop was taking me to the Greyhound station where I’d hop a bus to Chicago and another season with the carnival (staving off the inevitable waitressing for a few months longer). After that I would be off on my own, a free bird, never to live at my parent’s house again.

Being 21, and never terribly intuitive anyway, I didn’t get that this trip to the bus station had big meaning for my father. His little girl was taking wing. Nope, I did NOT get that. I’m slow like that.

Daddy seemed more serious than usual—normally we joked and bantered. Instead he, with some gravity, began telling me the story of his freshman roommate in college. His roomie and he shared a great friendship—better than one could expect with someone you’d just met. They became quite close, inseparable even. At the end of that freshman year Joe came out to him. He was gay (did people even phrase it that way in 1954?) and he was warm for my father’s form (though that’s most certainly NOT how Daddy relayed this—Pop being a total big romantic and all).

That my father, an 18 year old, het football player from a very small upstate NY town, reacted calmly, maturely, warmly and wonderfully even, is and was amazing to me. How many football jocks in the mid 50s, or now for that matter, would react like this? He told his roommate that he valued their friendship greatly but he wasn’t interested in that kind of relationship with him.

mia madre

Remember, this was 1954—15 years before Stonewall, 6 years before Illinois became the first state in the U.S. to decriminalize homosexuality and 49 years before Massachusetts established marriage equality.

My father rocked. Big time. He still does.

So he’s telling me all this—believe me I did NOT get it until he spelled it out in 72 point Arial Black—so that I would understand that he and mia madre both loved me and wanted me to be happy. That and they wanted me to bring home the girlfriend so mother could feed her (what Italian mothers do. of course).

At this point I got what a big horking deal this was and truly wished that I was gay because, well, how many gay folk get such awesome understanding parents? I hated to waste such an incredible, enlightened, mature parental act.

How did I respond though? Keeping in mind that I went to college in the mid/late ‘70s. Studio 54 wasn’t just a club in NYC, it was a mindset. Keep in mind that I was a music and then a fine arts major. You know, we artsy types just couldn’t keep our duds on, even in a January Maine snowstorm at dawn.

You just didn’t bring one night stands home to meet the folks. Bad form. And One Night Stand-ism was the religion of the day.

I don’t recall how I elided the issue but, knowing me and my utter lack of civilized, delicate people skills, I probably said “oh, thanks Pop but I don’t swing that way.”  (And then patted myself on the back,  thinking “hey, at least I didn’t tell him about all the notches on my belt”)

Yet...and yet, they still love me. Go figure.