But it wasn't until recently meeting Barbara on the occasion of my tour that I learned of their divorce and how that teenage daughter I met is now transitioning, on her way to becoming a man. On the last night of my visit, John pulled from the closet a beat-up paper bag of love letters my father had sent him, which he gave to me and which I used to write my book. I was introduced as a "friend of the family," quietly wondering what, if anything, of their father's queer past they'd ever learn. The last time I saw her they were married, living in a beautiful Victorian home with a teenage son and daughter. He's even "come out" to his adult son about his gay past.Īnd there's Barbara, the ex-wife of my father's ex-lover, John. I found the corresponding entries in my father's journals.
He's since sent me half a dozen emails about his life, including scans of letters he wrote about my father. He didn't know what had happened to my dad, let alone that he had died of AIDS, until he heard me on public radio two months ago. Mark married a woman and had two children.
After breaking up they fell out of touch. Mark was fresh out of school when they met my father was one of his first relationships. There's Mark, a former boyfriend of my dad's from the late '70s in San Francisco. He had damp eyes when he said goodbye: "Your parents were very important in my life." After hearing me on the radio, he sent me a disc of 20 never-before-seen pictures of my parents and recently drove six hours to see me read at a Southern literary festival. There's Bill, the photographer who lived with my parents in a small commune they set up in a dilapidated Atlanta mansion in 1971. Men and women whom I knew only as first names in my father's journals stepped forward at my readings and appeared in my inbox, revealing the parts they played in his life. The story of Bonnie is just one of many that have emerged since I published Fairyland. But after meeting Bonnie, I now have to consider the possibility that my mother encouraged his interest in men because she wanted the same freedoms he enjoyed. I believed that because she couldn't get from him the love she craved, she started looking outside of the relationship. He told her that, though he loved her, he could only experience "cosmic love" with men. Writing my book, I saw my mother as something of a victim of my father's sexual awakening.
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