Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter (18 page)

When the ACO conference ended, I attempted to find out where the gay conference was taking place. I wandered around the university without seeing any signs of it, though I passed a couple of men defiantly arm in arm, wearing
Body Politic
T-shirts—a rather unsavoury pair, I thought. Not knowing where to look next, I returned towards the downtown and, in the Public Gardens, caught sight of the B.P. pair again. Tailing them at a discreet distance finally produced utter frustration when they were picked up by friends in a car! I again called a gay-line number at which there had been no answer earlier in the evening and was informed that the social activities were taking place above a German restaurant and at the Turret, a kind of disco club. The German restaurant didn't look very promising, so I ate in one of the Historic Properties restaurants … running into some of the people who had stayed on to tidy up loose ends from the ACO conference.

By the time I could tear myself away from them, I was so impatient that I strode straight into the Turret without my usual indecisiveness. But I was nervous as I had my hand stamped and signed a fictitious name in the guestbook. Once
inside, my head spun as I saw men dancing romantically with other men. An unattractive, stupid (or drunk) looking young man asked me to dance and the next couple of minutes almost turned me into a confirmed heterosexual! However, building up courage, I asked a rather attractive man to dance and decided that this sort of thing might be pleasant after all. After one dance he told me he “couldn't get it together with me.” Whether that referred to my dancing or my body, I didn't know, but I stayed until the end, thoroughly fascinated and “turned on.”

29.6.78

I was back again the next night and saw a man whom I immediately recognized as Michael Lynch. I introduced myself, told him how the
Globe
article had made such an impact on me and asked him if I could talk with him sometime in Toronto. For the first time in eighteen years, I blurted out to another human being that I thought I might be gay, though I added that it would be an awful lot easier if I wasn't. I asked him to dance, with the nervous confession that I didn't know how to dance with a man. It was short, but I kept saying to myself, “I'm dancing with Michael Lynch,” and that blew my mind.

30.6.78

Michael had suggested that I come to some of the conference and after a day interviewing Liberal politicians, I [went and] listened (at the back of the room!) to a session on the problems of older gays. I was terrified I would see someone I knew
and for a second, thought I saw someone from Trent, but it turned out to be Michael Lynch. The talk was all so strange to me, though a lot of it pertained to the problems of volunteer organizations—political parties and orchestras all over again! Michael's carefully considered, questioning intervention was, to me, reassuringly professional.

I went back to the Turret again that evening and talked with Michael a bit about the sabbatical which he had just completed and some research that he was going to be doing next month, but he seemed very tired and I left early because I had to catch a 6 a.m. plane the next morning.

1.7.78

Michael had told me where to write him and on the trip home I carefully composed a guarded but (so I hoped) affectionate letter, asking him to send me his telephone number.

July/78

I spent the month impatiently looking for Michael's reply in every mail delivery to the university. Bit by bit, I found out that he was out of town for the month. I got his number from B.P. and, after a couple of telephone encounters with his roommate, found him home at last. We arranged an afternoon when I could see him at his house.

August 1978

I must be mad, I kept saying to myself on the bus to Toronto. I am going to tell someone whom I hardly know things about
myself that I have never discussed with anyone. Michael greeted me in a friendly way, though taken aback by the moustache of my new persona. My expectations of a promising friendship rose when I saw a Steinway grand in his living room and was informed that, yes, he did play. I calmed myself down with a couple of Bach preludes while he got lunch for his son and another youngster.

In the garden we had desultory conversation for a minute or two and then I launched forth. I told him about the various male friends to whom I had felt physically attracted, my consuming but unconsummated passion for Stephen [at Oxford]. My disappointment with him, my decision to opt for marriage with the expectation that my homosexual drives would fade (how many men have been misled by that wildly propagated myth?), my affection for Anne and our children, but the disappointment and ultimate sterility of the sexual side of our marriage. (His experience was strikingly similar, even to his wife often having been sick during the first years of their marriage.
^*
) I told him about how all the subjects of my homosexual infatuations invariably turned out to be heterosexual and how I had finally been driven to the point where I had to know, before I was too old for an active gay life, whether sex with a man was really what I thought it might be.

We talked for four hours, walking to a swimming pool, standing under an apartment building out of the rain, at the
pool, in his bank. I was disturbed by the developments in his own life—the dissolution of his marriage, his increasing disinclination to associate with people outside his gay world. I said I was very contented with my straight milieu and hoped I could preserve it. I said, “Do you think I look gay?” and he answered, “Yes, definitely—you're good looking, you're loose and that moustache is very trendy.” I felt strangely reassured, even though that appellation was one which I had done everything to avoid for twenty years. In fact, I had believed my “straight” image to have been so successfully nurtured that it explained why I had never been approached by anyone (apart from New Year's Eve 1958
^*
).

It became clear that Michael had no intention of initiating me, but he said, stay at the Carriage House, eat at the Grapes on College, go to the Duke (behind the Park Plaza) and then try the Quest. Again, with fear and trembling, I did everything he suggested and missed (in retrospect through ignorance) a pretty clear lead from an actuary in the Duke. (“Are you cruising?” “No,” said I.)

Finally, upstairs at the Quest, I got into conversation with a nice, but not especially good-looking fellow. I told him how all this was new to me. He asked how I liked it. “I do.” Then he said, “I like you as a person and I'd like to
spend the night with you.” “Okay,” and he leaned across the table and kissed me. I warned him that I was a neophyte but he wouldn't believe me. Finally I had to lie and he seemed reassured.

Skip told me that he was a silversmith and shared a room with a woman, so we went to my hotel. In the elevator, I had my first thrilling experience of kissing a stubbly face passionately. Once inside, we made love wildly and without inhibition. It was as if a veil of misunderstanding about my own self had been ripped away. Stripped and without his glasses, Skip was very attractive. When we had finished, he showered and left, saying that he often went to Dudes. Alone, I was surprised to discover that I wasn't afflicted with the guilt feelings which I had always feared would follow my first sex with a man. Instead, it was as if a huge oppressive load had been lifted from me.

10.8.78

I called Michael, thanked him and told him I had done everything he had suggested and had had a marvellous time. Back in Peterborough, I had a cello lesson, but could barely take in what J was saying.

11.8.78

Attended orchestras' meeting in Kingston; had a glorious swim with JG in Lake Ontario; longed to tell him about what happened on Wednesday, but didn't dare!

24.8.78

Not having much success in the bars in Toronto, I plucked up my courage to try the baths on Mutual Street. It was mind-boggling to see the endless parade of naked men with towels around their middles, circulating back and forth with hardly a word, looking at each other and peering into the little rooms with opened doors. I was not getting very far until I went into the top-floor room with the bunk beds and sat beside a trim blond from Buffalo. His body and especially his tongue were exquisite and delicious. How rude of me afterwards to have to dash off and catch my bus—and we never even exchanged first names. The delights of that experience haunted me for weeks afterwards.

28.8.78 to 2.9.78

I take Alison and Flip to September Camp.
^*
What a powerful reinforcement of my existing lifestyle seeing all those old friends, especially the Snells.
^†
But is this really me? Was it ever? I don't know.

Clipping: “A Homosexual Father: many consider him unfit, but ‘I love my son,' ”
The Globe and Mail,
March 30, 1978

“I'm a gay father,” Michael Lynch said. “And there are more of us around than you realize.”

Mr. Lynch shares custody of his 6-year-old son with his estranged wife, whom he married eight years ago to “follow the mob.”

Today, the University of Toronto English professor is an “out-of-the-closet gay.” He separated from his wife nearly a year ago and lives with his boyfriend and his son.

Mr. Lynch and his boyfriend don't hesitate to show their fondness for each other in front of the little boy, who has been told that “daddy is a faggot.”

Mr. Lynch, a youthful 37, knows that many consider him unfit to be a parent because he is homosexual. “But I love my son … it seems so simple to me,” he said.

He spoke with frustration about his reaction to a recent county court decision giving a Montreal father, a self-professed homosexual, custody of his two children.

Mr. Lynch scoffed at County Court Judge Elmer Smith's stress in his Jan. 16 judgment that the Montreal father is worthy of having his children live with him, in part, because he is “discreet … has never exhibited any missionary attitude or inclination towards militancy in this difficult area … disclaims ownership in any
homosexual club … doesn't indulge in exhibitionistic behaviour in the presence of the children.”

“These things are not at all relevant,” Mr. Lynch said. He and his lover hold hands, kiss and hug just as heterosexual couples do. Yet he has the same concern that many partners have about “being too intimate in front of the children.”

“I am completely open with my son. Children should know from the beginning. He hears the word ‘gay' all the time and he has questioned.… I explain to him it means wanting to be with boys and having especially close relationships with boys.”

Mr. Lynch is politically active in the homosexual rights movement, writing occasional articles for the homosexual rights publication
Body Politic
; acting as chairman of the committee to defend John Damien (a race steward dismissed in 1975 by the Ontario Jockey Club because he is a homosexual); and doing research on issues affecting homosexuals at the university. He taught the university's first homosexual studies course and is on sabbatical to write a book about homosexual poets.

Although these activities might be considered militant, Mr. Lynch is convinced that they will not harm his son or turn him into a homosexual.

“Look, I was exposed to aggressively heterosexual parents for 18 years of my life. They did everything they could to turn me into a heterosexual. Nothing I do can turn my son into a homosexual.”

The father acknowledges his sexuality will have some effect on his son.

The boy won't suffer because of his father's homosexuality, but he will suffer as a result of society's distaste for it, Mr. Lynch said.

“I think a gay parent, like a Pakistani or black parent, has an obligation to prepare the child for the hate that he'll be taught at school. Schools, churches, society, newspapers teach this hate and one has to say, ‘Look, be ready—your daddy is a faggot.'

“He knows I suffer and have fears about all kinds of social hate. I tell him. I don't know how much he understands fully. He may have some tough moments growing up, but so does a Pakistani child, and you wouldn't take that child from a loving parent because a swastika has been painted on his door.”

Mr. Lynch said he hopes to transmit to his son “a bitterness against a society which is sexist. I want him to have a kind of bitterness or strong rejection of those standards.”

He also wants his son to understand that men, whatever their sexual orientation, can be affectionate, tender and loving with men and women. “He is not going to be a super-macho male. He's not going to feel because he's male he has to be rigid and distant or authoritarian.”

Mr. Lynch laughs at curiosity about how a homosexual can be a parent. He says the public would be
surprised at how many homosexual parents there are if every homosexual stood up and told the truth.

He has organized a discussion group of eight homosexual parents of varied marital statuses and custody situations and knows of three Toronto homosexuals involved in custody cases.… In his own case, Mr. Lynch and his wife will divorce and are planning to arrange joint custody of their son.

14.9.78

Michael had told me about various discussion groups including one called Married Gays. Its extreme confidentiality appealed to me and so I found myself, very nervously, ringing a (coded) doorbell in a smart new apartment block not far from the C.N. Tower and the Royal Alex. The host was Stan Wild, a fiftyish, grammar-school Englishman who is very devoted to the gay social service system.

This is my first introduction to the incredible array of situations one finds in talking with gay men. Warren and Jim didn't look gay
in the least
. Warren in his late fifties has a kind of sexy self-assuredness. He has teenaged children and claims he never had
any
gay inclinations until two years ago. He is sure his wife doesn't know about his affairs, but says their sex life has really fallen off.