The minutiae of exactly how things developed from us being together in that room to us having slightly unsuccessful sex in a bathroom in a different corridor have since escaped me. He was clearly intoxicated, but it was a party after all and who was I, quite drunk myself, to judge. It was late (or early, depending on your outlook on the world) when I was joined by the boy who was living in the room next to mine, way back on the other side of the building. I can remember, although I'd had some drinks, sitting alone in my friend’s room on a single bed, the mattress overly springy and with a coarse plastic coating, attempting to stream a song over our dorm’s spotty Internet connection. The whole thing went down near the end of my freshman year at a party, at which people from the whole dorm floor were drunk and celebrating, carelessly streaming in and out of each other’s rooms, following the various different pop songs until one room took their fancy. I was at college, living in dorms, and the experience-aside from the usual horrifying awkwardness and somewhat spontaneity of the occasion-was completely and utterly unremarkable aside from one thing: the guy I slept with identified as straight. Their Kickstarter campaign to build will remain live until Wednesday, April 16.I was 19 when I first had full-on sex with another man. 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.