Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father (10 page)

Is there such a thing as Gay poetry or a Gay aesthetic? Is any poem by a Gay poet a Gay poem (some certain unique un-straight consciousness informing it) or is it just certain subject matter & viewpoint field which makes poems Gay?

He told Shurin he wanted to create an intellectual “scene” where he could get feedback on ideas and work with like-minded writers. That February of 1978, Dad organized a Men’s Valentine’s Reading featuring Shurin and other noted gay writers including Dennis Cooper, Paul Mariah, and Harold Norse. He called the event “From Our Heart to Yours.” He illustrated two-color posters, which he printed up in the hundreds but because our old VW’s engine had died, Dad had to do all of his promotion via bus and BART, lugging heavy stacks of flyers and posters to bookstores around the Bay Area. The event was covered by both the
San Francisco
Sentinel
and the
Chronicle
. Though the reviews were mixed, Dad was delighted by the attention, cutting them out and pasting them in his journal.

Krista left home and moved in with her boyfriend. I later learned that she’d fallen in with a local Latino gang and started smoking angel dust and pot. Lynda couldn’t control her anymore. Tired of the constant battles, Lynda asked Krista to simply make up her mind where she wanted to live so that she could get another roommate. Dad tried to explain to me what was going on and I, having imbibed San Francisco’s collective spirit, suggested we all have a meeting with Krista to see what we could do to make her happy. The meeting never happened.

ON APRIL 25, 1978,
St. Paul, Minnesota, became the second American city to repeal its gay civil rights ordinance. Anita Bryant took her familiar position in front of the TV cameras: “Once again, as in Dade County nine months ago, the morally committed majority has gained a great victory. The message to the politicians is clear: no longer will God-respecting Americans submit to the oppressive yoke of militant, politically organized immorality.”

As news of the St. Paul loss spread, protesters took to the streets of San Francisco by the hundreds. A friend of my dad’s called to invite him to a massive demonstration under way in the Castro. Most nights Dad was too busy watching me to take part in the many rallies and protests organized by Harvey Milk and his circle, but on this night he left me with Lynda so he could go.

By the time Dad arrived, the protesters, many wearing “Squeeze a Fruit for Anita” t-shirts and “Anita Bryant Sucks Oranges” buttons, had scattered to various bars. He headed over to Toad Hall, which was teeming with young men in tight jeans and work boots. Dad quickly found some friends, downed several drinks, and started dancing with a cute kid named Stu.

On the crowded dance floor everyone pulsed to a loud disco beat. Previously just a “gay thing,” disco music was now everywhere. The Bee Gees’ “Night Fever” was that week’s number one song and its lyrics seemed to capture the spirit of the night:

Listen to the ground

There’s a movement all around

There is something going down

I can feel it.

After settling their tab at the bar, Dad and Stu shared a cab back to our place.

April 26, 1978: This morning Lynda and Krista are yelling at each other. I take Alysia to school late and when I return this kid Stu is gone as is a box of my antique jewelry and my tape-recorder. The little fool forgot the cord even! Lost my Jack Spicer tape too. Maybe he was desperate for money. I don’t know. Can anything really be stolen from me if I don’t “own” anything? Such a strange event. The phantom of Toad Hall – if he only steals your heart you will be lucky!

At first Dad tried to keep the theft secret, but then he discovered that some of Lynda’s camera equipment was also missing. She was, of course, very “pissed off.” She couldn’t believe that my father would bring a strange man into her house. Dad wanted to replace everything that was taken but Lynda said she’d been thinking about her needs and wanted to put together a women’s collective. “[She] feels she has too much male energy in her life,” Dad reported in his journals. Dad offered no argument. He was just as glad to find an out.

The search for a home was on again.

READING THROUGH
my father’s journals, it’s hard to not feel disappointed by some of his choices. Sending me out with Krista the runaway, keeping us at Lynda’s for months even after it was clear that hers was an unhappy home, leaving me alone. What was he thinking? How could he put his work and community ahead of my safety? Was he too stoned to see that this wasn’t a good situation in which to raise a young girl?

But then I see everywhere evidence of love. Dad considered overcoming his homosexuality for me. He moved in with Lynda and Krista for me. When we later found a one-bedroom in the Haight, he gave me the big room with the balcony, leaving for himself the living room, which only became his room at night. If he was sometimes a failure as a parent, he was always a noble failure. He tried to do what he thought was best even if he didn’t always know what “best” was or how to achieve it.

What’s perhaps more striking to me is that through it all he never gave up his passion for community. He was determined not only to advance the quality of his own work, but to organize and increase the visibility of gay writers and poets everywhere, to publish broadsides and later magazines on his own dime. My father did all of this while struggling to keep me in bilingual school and pursuing life as an openly gay man. He was a pioneer.

It wasn’t easy being a single gay father in the 1970s. There were no books on gay parenting, no Listservs, as there would be decades later. There were no models. For better and for worse, my father was making up the rules as he went along. His only guide was a firm conviction that he didn’t want to raise me as he had been raised.

Because he hadn’t felt free to be his true self growing up in Lincoln, in our fairyland he raised me with fluid boundaries. In that household, kids were not to speak until they were spoken to and physical punishment was standard; in ours, Dad invited my opinion on everything, from his boyfriends to my punishments. After growing up in a house where he’d been spanked for running onto the lawn naked and displays of affection were uncommon, Dad raised me in a home where a naked man might parade down the hall, where I lived on his lap and called him my boyfriend. There was never a sense that “these matters are not appropriate for children.” My father took me everywhere, introduced me to everyone, and worked hard to treat me as an equal. And since I was a precocious child and Dad was a childish adult, in some ways we were equals.

Conservatives like Anita Bryant and California senator John Briggs feared that gay teachers would inculcate kids into a “gay lifestyle,” but Dad made no such efforts. In 1975, he wrote:

I’m not trying to get her to grow up gay. I’m not hiding my gayness to get her to grow up straight. But she can see that there are many orientations and many ways to be. Hopefully, by the time she grows up we will have a society where those dichotomies of whether you’re gay or straight, a man or a woman aren’t so important. Where people can just be as they feel most natural and comfortable in being.

I always and only saw that people spent time with the people they loved.

9.

D
AD’S FRIEND
and sometimes publisher, Ken Weichel, heard of all the trouble we were having with Lynda and Krista and offered to set us up temporarily in a pair of rooms in the house he shared with his girlfriend, Patti, in Merced Heights. In May 1978, we moved in.

It was a long drive out to the house—past San Francisco State, past the Stonestown Galleria, and then past a restaurant called the Doggie Diner that featured a fifteen-foot-high statue of a dachshund wearing a chef’s hat. But Ken’s two-story house was pretty, with wooden shingles and a small patch of grass in the back, and it was quiet. You could hear birds outside the window, and from the kitchen you could see a narrow strip of ocean. When Dad told me we were going to move into the “Doggie Diner house,” I exclaimed, “Goody goody gumdrops!”

Despite my initial excitement, I was lonely. I had few friends to play with and spent most of my time after school by myself, since Dad was always writing. Determined to make my room feel more mine, Dad asked Ken if we could paint a mural on the walls. With Dad’s help I painted a magic island with palm trees and galloping unicorns and a rainbow that stretched across the sky. It was a place I called Ecnarf—France spelled backward—and I wrote the name in small green letters. I decided to add some water to the paint on the tops of the palm trees, to give the impression that the trees were blowing in the wind. It looked good. Hoping to replicate the effect with the herd of white unicorns, I applied water to their legs, but it just turned them into a large gray smudge. Still, I loved my mural, my room, my own safe place.

Meanwhile, Dad worked on his verse, eventually pulling together the writing that would form his third book of poetry,
Stretching the Agape Bra
. Through his readings at Cloud House and the events he organized around the city, including a reading for the 1978 Gay Pride parade, he was starting to make a name for himself. When a friend asked if he’d like to take over editing the calendar of
Poetry Flash
, a well-known West Coast poetry newsletter, Dad jumped in. When they arrived at the staff meeting at the paper’s East Bay headquarters a few days later, they discovered that the old staff, overworked and exhausted, had decided to quit en masse.

Richard Hoover of Hoover Printing Co., to whom seventy-five dollars was owed, offered to take over as publisher, but he needed a managing editor. After a lengthy interview, he asked my dad to take the job and organize a new staff. Dad was initially hesitant but agreed after he was promised he could also write a monthly column—more work, but one that would put forth his own voice.

Just after the meeting, my father walked to the nearby house of Joyce Jenkins. She was a local poet who’d directed the 1978 San Francisco Poetry Festival. Dad knew her by reputation as an excellent worker and as someone strong in areas where he was weak—notably, attention to detail. He invited her to join him as an associate editor and she accepted.

Together Dad and Joyce turned the monthly around. When they started,
Poetry Flash
was in debt. It was also criticized for being conservative and elitist. Over the next five years they would quadruple the monthly’s circulation (from 1,500 to 8,000) and expand its size and scope. They worked to avoid favoring any single poetry clique, instead seeking coverage of the best writers in all poetry groups. Sometimes Dad would attend seven or more readings a week, including at Cloud House and North Beach, where he’d been a regular, but also women’s readings, gay readings, African American readings, and Asian readings.

Dad’s involvement in
Poetry Flash
soon became all-consuming. I would often accompany him on his monthly trips to the East Bay for meetings at Hoover Printing. I remember the loud “ja-
junk,
ja-
junk”
of the press as we descended into the basement offices, the heady smell of ink, and the barren industrial landscape of downtown Oakland. There was absolutely nothing for an eight-year-old to do on these visits, and I felt besieged by boredom. I preferred the meetings held at Joyce’s big house in Berkeley. She and my dad would stretch layouts across the big driftwood table in her living room, talking details, while I played with Joyce’s refrigerator magnets and a fluffy cat named Jessica.

Joyce had wavy brown hair, large-framed glasses, and a generous smile. She was pretty and sweet, and always feeding me snacks. I liked her immediately. If Dad was spending so much time with her, I reasoned, maybe something romantic would develop. I imagined their marrying and our moving into her big house with its grand views of the Berkeley Hills. When my cousins, Judson and Jeremy, grilled me about Dad’s romantic life that summer while I was at my grandparents’ in Kewanee, Illinois, I even turned her into his girlfriend.

Most often, if anyone (usually teachers or parents of friends) asked why Dad had never remarried, I’d lower my chin and talk about my mother’s death, suggesting that Dad was still too grief-stricken to remarry. I hoped to convince my listener, and maybe even myself, that my dad loved my mom too much to replace her. This strategy, I later learned, worked doubly well with curious strangers. Not only did it throw them off the scent of my dad’s sexuality, but it refocused the conversation on my mother’s death.

“How did she die?”

“A car accident. A car hit her car and she flew into the street.”

This story was so unpleasant that it deterred further prying. But with my preteen cousins, I knew this tactic wouldn’t work.

We were sitting in my grandparents’ wood-paneled den. I could hear the heavy summer rain drumming the back porch, prohibiting our daily swim. The three of us were snacking while watching TV on my grandparents’ massive set. As usual, the brothers were teasing each other, as boys did at that age: “You’re gay.” “No,
you’re
gay.” Then Judson turned to me, sitting on the recliner across from him: “Your
dad’s
gay.” They looked at each other and laughed. I was gnawing on a frozen Milky Way, one of scores of candy bars Grumpa kept stocked in the garage freezer for us.

“No, he’s not.”

“Oh yeah? He doesn’t have a girlfriend.”

“Yeah, he does. He
does
have a girlfriend.”

“What’s her name, then?”

“Joyce.”

In truth, as much as I liked to fantasize about Joyce and my dad’s coupling, I came to accept that no romance existed between them. In fact, when she did walk down the aisle with her actual fiancé, I was her flower girl. But I had a name and a portrait to go with the name. I knew that, armed with details, my lie would be stronger, and I stuck to it vigorously. “Her name is Joyce and she has brown hair and glasses!” My cousins never asked about my dad again.

MY FATHER
wrote a monthly column in
Poetry Flash
called “Up into the Aether,” a reference to Jack Spicer’s “Heads of the Town Up to the Aether.” The column, full of historical and contemporary literary gossip, alternately delighted and outraged San Francisco’s poetry community. The poet and playwright Ishmael Reed called Dad the “Hedda Hopper of the poetry world” because of items like these:

Gregory Corso’s back from Europe. I know because he came to my reading with Jack Mueller at the Grand Piano & tried his best to disrupt it. Didn’t succeed of course. “Well, Jack,” I said afterwards, “When the big guns come after us it must show we’re starting to get somewhere.”

About a Modern Language Association convention, he wrote
,
“Academic critics continue to get fat spinning webs of Confucian pedantry while the real movers and shakers of poetry live at the edge of poverty.”

According to my father, even the most well-intentioned of these remarks could cause umbrage. Soon he was publicly confronted by snarling poets who felt themselves to be unjustly used. On one occasion, a disgruntled poet named Leon Miller decided to stage a sit-in at
Poetry Flash
. Unfortunately, he barged into a real estate office several doors away.

Better-known poets, however, realized that
Poetry Flash
now had one of the widest circulations of any literary journal in the area, and started to treat my dad with the respect that had previously eluded him. Dad was amused to find himself referred to in magazines in faraway cities and countries as “a leading force in San Francisco poetry.” He was amused because, since he’d taken over as editor of
Poetry Flash
, he had little time for his own poetry. He was inundated with offers to read and with requests to contribute to special issues of magazines that had previously scorned his unsolicited manuscripts with the curtest of replies. “How ironic,” he wrote in his journal, “that fame should pursue me when once again I am doing nothing and plagued with self-doubts about where I want to go from here.”

In the pages of
Poetry Flash
, my father was also the first to seriously consider a new poetry movement, which would come to dominate the Bay Area scene over the next several years. Language Poetry, or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry as it came to be known from the magazine bearing that name, evolved in response to the “raw” performance-oriented poetry that the Beat poets and their descendants were doing.

At first, my father found the Language poets appealing for their intellectual disputes. “Our concern’s for what’s on the page, not on the stage,” the poet Ron Silliman told him. This was clearly true, for unlike other poets in town, most Language poets read in a flat, rapid-fire monotone. Even on the page, what most interested them was a language so deconstructed as to be almost totally removed from ordinary discourse. Unlike Dad’s North Beach and Cloud House friends, these writers criticized each other’s work relentlessly and saw themselves as advancing the Modernist project, in the tradition of George Oppen and Gertrude Stein. If nothing else, this was a great foil for Dad’s own writing, especially in the years to come.

WHEN OUR OLD
VW bug broke down again, Dad thought I could ride the bus from school back to Ken’s place on my own. I was almost eight years old and very tall. He sat me down at our dining room table with the Muni map, carefully drawing out my route. Delivering myself from school to home would take nearly one hour on two buses and a streetcar.

I remember a great stretching openness, a nothing of space that yawned between French American and our home at Ken’s. The last leg of the ride, on the M Oceanview, was the most tedious. I’d doodle in my notebooks and seek whatever entertainment I could find. The streets in west San Francisco are named alphabetically—Anza, Balboa, Cabrillo—and as the streetcar wound south I loved to hear the conductor call out the stops in his nasal voice, especially “Wa-
wo
-na, Wa-
wo
-na.” I perked up each time we passed Larsen Park at the corner of Ulloa and 19th Avenue, where a decommissioned US Navy F-8 fighter jet sat on a wide expanse of green as a play structure. From the window I’d watch kids climb all over and even inside the plane while their parents sat on nearby benches. Each day I’d pass that plane, and each day I wanted to get off the bus and ride it.

Then one afternoon as we approached Larsen Park, the sunlight flashed on the jet’s platinum nose. Just as the conductor was about to close the doors, I jumped off. A thrill of transgression passed through me as I made my way toward the plane, which looked so much larger from the vantage point of the ground. I set my pack down on the soft grass, climbed one of the two ladders leading into the plane, and explored its interior tunnel and many knobs. Climbing onto the silver wing, I lay down, imagining what it would be like to fly above the city. When I first arrived crowds of kids had swarmed around me, but after a short while the sky began to darken and mothers and fathers started to call names and grab hands.

I headed to the bus bench to wait for my train home. An L Taravel and two K Inglesides passed without any sign of the M Oceanview. When a second L pulled up, I decided to board. The L wouldn’t take me home, but I knew it traveled some of the same stops as the M and figured it’d be worth getting closer to home. When the L turned toward the zoo I quickly got off, knowing that was the wrong way.

I had to find my way back to the M Oceanview, but was daunted by the prospect of walking back to my original stop, especially as it was now getting dark. When the San Francisco dampness sets in, it chills you to the bone. You can button your sweater, zip your jacket, and still not shake the cold. Just then, a car pulled up to the curb. From the window, a man motioned me over.

“Are you lost?”

“Yes.”

“Where do you live?”

“Shields and Beverly.”

“That’s not very far. I can drive you. Get in.”

I considered his offer. I didn’t know this man, but he had a nice smile. I just wanted to be home. As I was about to open the door to his car, a woman swept in beside me. “Excuse me, little girl, can you come over here with me?”

She led me by the hand back toward the bus stop and called over her shoulder, “I’ve got her, thanks!” I turned my head and watched the car drive away. “I didn’t want you to get in that car with a strange man,” she told me. She wore a pantsuit and purse and had curly hair and large urgent eyes. I didn’t know her but I felt like I did.

“Are you okay? Are you lost?” she asked me.

“I got on the wrong bus.”

“Where do you live? What’s your name? Do you know your phone number?”

I told her what I could but I couldn’t remember my phone number. I felt odd, a mixture of embarrassment and guilt. I’d made a mistake and was now tied to this strange woman, whom I needed to make everything better.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

The lady walked me across the street to a nearby gas station where she managed to find Ken’s number in a phone book. He and Patti came to pick me up. I got into the backseat and watched as the lady exchanged some words with Ken and then waved goodbye to me as the car pulled off.

“Alysia’s too young to ride the bus alone,” Patti told Ken on the drive back. He just shrugged his shoulders, keeping his eyes on the road. Then Patti turned around in her seat so that she could face me and said, “I know it’s not my place to say so, but I think it’s irresponsible of your dad.”