Being a man - to my father

In 1986 I sat next to my father in a rental car parked beside the Seattle Center. We both sat screaming at each other. He had flown to Seattle to "straighten" me out. He had been silent during the separation from my wife and my divorce from his conservative religion.

"You are the only one that has ever talked back to me," he barked. Instinctively, he reared up in the driver's seat, flexing his well-developed arms. "Perhaps I should have been harder on you as a child."

"If you disciplined me any harder as a child," I replied, "I'd be crippled." My father did not spare the rod during my adolescence. He expected me to take my punishment "like a man." 

My father was Victorian. He saw things in black and white. A man was a man, and a woman was a woman. Men were masculine, and masculinity was defined according to the standards of gender and sexuality prevalent in the 1950's and 1960's. Homosexuals were men who were sick, men who didn't like being men. They were men who wanted to be women. They preferred dressing up in skirts and wearing wigs and make-up, affecting the mannerisms of Hollywood starlets. He was confused because I was not one of those men.

"Just because you have slept with a man does not make you a homosexual," he said to me. "You are a man; you are NOT like THAT!"

I realized that my father was struggling with the same thing that I struggled with years before. When I thought of the word "homosexual" as a teen, I usually thought of mincing men with limp wrists and feigned voices, men who fit the stereotype that grew out of the social discourse. I was not one of those.

By the summer of 1986, I had come out to everyone, and I had started engaging in Leatherplay with older men. I had gradually come to know that there were others like me, men who celebrated their gender in a hyper-masculine way. Gay men who did not fit the stereotype. Leathermen.

"Dad, being Gay does not mean I now dress in women's clothes," I explained. "In fact, I have met men who look and act just like you!" A statement meant more to hurt than to emphasize the veracity of my position.

Over the ensuing decade my father and I pushed each other away. We used our differences as validation for our distance. I resented him and vowed never to be like him. He, in turn,erased me from his social life, acknowledging me only when I spoke to other members of the family. During a visit in the mid nineties I discovered just how completely he had hiddenme from his friends. "Who are you?" I was asked upon answering the telephone. The woman was incredulous that my father had a third son. "I am calling the police. I know the familywell and your father has never spoken about you. He doesn't have a third son. What are you doing in that house?"

As my own children grew up, I began to see traits of my father in myself. I realized that, like me, he was an expression of his times. His values were common to those raised during the depression, especially to those poor folk from the back woods of Nova Scotia. And I began to re-examine my own understanding of masculinity based on values that I internalized during my adolescence. I realized that the expression of my gender and my sex had always been aligned with the notion of Gay Leather espoused by my generation. And even though Leather has expanded its confines to include Pansexual and Queer folk over the years, I acknowledge that I am a Gay Leatherman whose cock responds to the artifacts of classic masculinity.

A few years ago I went sailing in Maine on Penobscot Bay with my two older brothers and my father and mother. During the trip I caught my father watching me closely. We didn't saymuch when we were under sail. Nor did we say much during the trip from Rockland, Maine to Boston's Logan Airport. At the airport, I accompanied my parents to their gate and extended my hand to my father to wish him a safe trip home. Rather than the wooden response I had come to expect, he extended both his arms and hugged me. 

"I am so sorry for the way I have treated you all of these years," he said as fought back the tears. "I have misjudged you. You are quite a man!"

Holding him in my arms, I realized that I had worked through my resentment; that I felt only love for him. I knew that he longer saw me through the cloudy lens of prejudice. I knew that he saw me as a man, a Gay man who embraced values of masculinity similar to his own. And I gained a profound respect for him, a conservative Christian man who had the courage to deconstruct the comfortable stereotype that he inherited and on which he had based his morality.

"Dad, I have let all my animosity go." I responded as he cried openly in my arms. Such tears are the expression of strength, an outpouring of emotion aligned with honesty, a virtue that my father extolled during his lifetime.

As a Sir to Leatherboys, I sometimes am surprised to hear my father's words in my own voice. I encourage my boys to be strong, to face life's challenges with boldness.

During my stepdown speech as International LeatherSIR last July, I acknowledged that my mother taught me to be a Sir. Reflecting back on my father, I realize that he taught me to be a LeatherDad, a paternal friend to younger men. I am indebted to him for enduring years of difference, realizing that as father and son, we were very much the same.