I need to pause the story for a brief moment to clear up any assumptions readers may be currently forming about me. Jose and I ended up stumbling into a back room of the party and were beginning to get hot and heavy when I mentioned that I thought it would be in both of our best interests to practice safe sex, so Jose suggested we head back to the dorms, where he had condoms for just that very reason! Blearily, I followed him into a cab. Also, my dad has both his nipples pierced. I chugged some lukewarm vodka on that fateful night and then proceeded to be frisked by a cheerful and forward gay man dressed as a green fairy. My dad once suggested we go to a gay club together because gay guys love hitting on him. The first time I had sex was on the Halloween weekend of my freshman year of college. Also, I think my dad might be gay, and I felt the need to give a few reasons why as I tell my big gay sexual saga. Their Kickstarter campaign to build will remain live until Wednesday, April 16.I lost my virginity in a simultaneously horrifying and hilarious manner. Along with Alysia Abbott, author of Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father, she is launching The Recollectors, a storytelling forum and digital community for people who have lost parents to AIDS. Whitney Joiner is a senior editor at Marie Claire magazine. And all he would’ve had to say in return was: I am. “I asked Mom once if you were gay,” I would have said. I wish I could have known that some part of him accepted-and was proud of-who he was. I’m not angry about it I just wish it had gone differently. It was probably one of the hardest conversations he’d had in his 38 years. He sent me a starstruck postcard from London exclaiming, “Guess what? You know Jimmy Somerville from Erasure? I met him at a club here!!” (Never mind that Somerville was actually in Bronski Beat, another of Dad’s favorites.) But to actually let me in-to sit on that blue blanket, look me in the eye and tell me he was gay-was something he couldn’t do. When he went to see Truth or Dare with his hairdresser, Mickey, he told me about it. In some ways I think Dad was on the verge of coming out to me back then. “Something like that,” he answered.Įvery once in a while, my brother and I talk about the what-ifs: What if Dad had held out a little longer, if the drugs had been approved a little earlier, if time and the eventual softening of our culture would have softened him? Would he be meeting me for dinner in New York? Would I be flying to visit him in Louisville or Lexington with his middle-aged partner? “Like leukemia?” I once asked, as we drove away from the doctor’s office, thinking of the hokey Lurlene McDaniels books scattered around my middle school classrooms, in which innocent cheerleaders bravely fought some sort of cancer or another, hoping to get one kiss before they died. I knew he’d had some kind of “blood problem” for a while he’d explained that much when we accompanied him to get his blood drawn during our summers together. Since my brother and I spent most of our time with my mother and stepfather, two hours from Dad in a small town south of Louisville, his life seemed far away when we weren’t with him. Dad taught business law at Eastern Kentucky University and served as a deacon at our church. I didn’t want to know.įor the previous four months, my father had been in and out of the hospital in Lexington, Ky., half an hour from this rented duplex in Richmond, where he’d lived since he and my mother divorced three years earlier.
I didn’t know what he was going to tell me. We sat on the itchy baby-blue blanket on my bed in the room I shared with my 8-year-old brother.
On a Saturday afternoon in April 1992, when I was 13, my father told me we needed to talk.