Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father

The truth is: I did want to be my dad's poem. I wanted to be his drawing, his novella, his most refined work of art. I wanted him to shape me with his love and intelligence. I wanted him to edit out my mistakes and many indulgences, with a sharp red pencil or a clean eraser.

The heavy warlike losses of the AIDS years were relegated to queer studies classrooms, taught as gay history and not American history.

Through meditation or reflection or whatever, find out how to go to that place in yourself that can observe without judging. If you feel jealous, or depressed, or guilty – just try to pay attention to how your body feels. Where does the physical feeling start? Does a tightness go up or down your stomach for instance. If you notice that you’re being critical of yourself – then try to observe yourself doing this without judging it as good or bad. This observer self is the deepest part of you – deeper than your fearful self, guilty self, emotional self, or intellectual self. By observing what’s happening to your body when you go into these head states, you can learn little tricks to alter your body & mood. Like if you catch it early, try countering the negative physical feeling or emotion by doing something nurturing for yourself (exercise or pleasant bath, calling a friend, going to a movie, or whatever). Anyway, this is something I started doing at a time in my life when I was wracked by jealousy, loneliness, self-doubt, excessive self-criticism. And overall it worked.

What seems most outlandish in our autobiography is what really happened.

The disaster, as Dad and others saw it, was the emerging AIDS crisis and the cultural attacks instigated by conservative against gay men and women in the early 1980s. It was found in the cruel indifference of President Ronald Reagan, who wouldn’t publicly address the epidemic until the end of his second term, after twenty thousand Americans had died, and the hostile rhetoric of conservatives close to Reagan like Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, and Pat Buchanan, Reagan’s future speechwriter. In 1983, Buchanan wrote of AIDS, “The poor homosexuals–they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution.

Researching Dad’s life, I’ve made contact with his old colleagues and friends and others we knew—people like Joyce Jenkins of Poetry Flash; and Jimmy Siegel, who owns Distractions; and Sean, the smiling Southerner who worked at Coffee Tea & Spice. Speaking with them, I got to hear three powerful words, three words I didn’t know I so badly needed to hear: “I remember you.” With these words, the lights switch on. The music plays. The carousel starts up again and those glittery and colorful horses move up and down and around, delighting my every sense. For a moment, I get to be a child again. I feel wholly me.

If he once failed as a father, it was a noble fail.

My days of torment were over, but the damage was done. I conflated the bullies and my bathroom accidents with an inchoate sense that something was wrong with me. I broadcast my sense of otherness through my slumped posture, downcast expression, and extreme timidity. Kids at school called weird so often that after a while I believed them. I hid myself behind a curtain of tangled hair.

In late 1985, the Reagan White House blocked the use of CDC money for education, leaving the US behind other Western nations in telling its citizens how to avoid contracting the virus. Many Americans still thought you could get AIDS from a toilet seat or a glass of water. According to one poll, the majority of Americans supported quarantining AIDS patients. This heightened awareness set off waves of anxiety across the country, which was often express through jokes (Q: What do you call Rock Hudson in a wheelchair? A: Roll-AIDS!) and violence. Between the years 1985 and 1986, anti-gay violence increased by 42 percent in the US. Even in San Francisco, where Greyhound buses still dropped off gay men and women taking refuge from the prejudice of their hometowns, carloads of teenagers would drive through the Castro looking for targets. In December 1985, a group of teenagers, shouting “diseased faggot” and “you’re killing us all,” dragged a man named David Johnson from his car in a San Francisco parking lot. While his lover looked on in horror, the teenagers kicked and beat Johnson with their skateboards, breaking three of his ribs, bruising his kidneys, an gashing his face and neck with deep fingernail scratches.

Of course, it’s now obvious why he was so angry that day. People don’t move into hospice to live but to die. And that half an egg sandwich I ended up making him–that sandwich was the last meal he ate in our Haight-Ashbury apartment, our one true home.