Oy Vey My Daughter's Gay (10 page)

“Go,
and never darken my towels again!” - Groucho Marx

Now that Lila had moved out, the g-word was no longer
taboo. Given the content of the film ‘Trembling before G-d’, this made me
especially grateful. In our eyes, Lila was now an adult living her own life and
making her own decisions. It was a great relief to us all − especially to
Lila, I’m sure − that the embargo had finally been lifted. We all breathed
much easier and went back to being relatively open and honest with each other.

Strangely, there didn’t seem to be much of a transition
phase. It was almost as if one day being gay was a taboo subject and the next
we were all planning a Valentine’s meal for Lila’s first serious girlfriend. I
know it’s hard to believe in such a pretty dramatic and fantastic turnaround,
but it’s true.

I suppose we had never, truly, accepted that Lila was gay
until she started dating girls. It just hadn’t seemed real. When she moved out,
we openly talked about it as a general subject, although still a sensitive one.
It took a while for us to be ready to discuss dating, so Lila sensibly
introduced me, little by little, to the idea by occasionally sharing amusing,
‘edited-for-mum’ dating anecdotes. Her dates, at that time, came through a
website called ‘Gaydargirls’. The anecdotes were edited even further for John
− I’m guessing there aren’t many dads who want to know the details about
their daughter’s love life, gay or straight.

I heard about the girl who spelled out the last word of
every s-e-n-t-e-n-c-e; the girl who was too fat to fit through the revolving
door of the restaurant and the girl who thought it would be fun to run out of
the restaurant without paying the bill. Some of her first dates might have been
disastrous, but the important thing for Lila was that she had entered the world
of dating and was asserting her place as a fully-fledged lesbian. The important
thing for both Lila and me was that we were finally adapting to our re-defined
mother-daughter relationship.

At the time when Lila began dating, mobile phones were fast
becoming the must-have item. John had acquired one of the earliest ‘bricks’
from a client a year or two earlier. It came with a charger pack the size of a
small suitcase. After duly charging it for the recommended twenty-four hours,
he proudly unveiled it to us on a car trip. Lila, Lee and I were suitably
impressed. He dialled his mum’s number. An expectant silence filled the car. 
Then, wonder of wonders, John spoke. “Hello, Mum?” he said, grinning at us,
“Guess what? I’m calling from the…”

“What happened?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I think I’ve been cut off,” John said,
stabbing the ‘call’ button again and again and repeating, “Hello…hello…hello?”

“Maybe the charge has run out,” Lee suggested. Indeed it
had. We all fell about laughing, and have since dined out on that story on many
occasions.

Mobile technology continued to develop apace. John and I
finally succumbed and tentatively took ownership of our very own phones. My
friend Evelyn and I, glass of wine in one hand and mobile phone in the other,
sat expectantly in her sitting room, determined to master the intricacies of
sending a text message. Her daughter had, rashly, volunteered to teach us
− a promise I’m sure she regrets to this day. Two and a half hours and
somewhat more than two and a half glasses of wine later, after many hilarious
and failed attempts, my phone beeped. As I gazed at it in fear and wonder, my
friend whooped and jumped up in the air. (Luckily she had put her wine glass
down first.) Her daughter shouted over the noise, “Read it, and answer it.”  I
did both − successfully! (Who says you can’t teach an old dog new
tricks?) As her daughter left to lie down in her darkened bedroom, she made a
parting comment: “You know, it’s more fun if you’re not actually in the same
room!” She was
so
wrong about that!

While we oldies were celebrating mastering the wonders of
mobile technology, across town in her flat, Lila’s mobile phone was about to
cause mayhem. When she and her latest date met, Lila was disappointed and
unimpressed yet again. She dutifully saw the evening out, but, when the time
came for her date to catch the train home, Lila was jubilant.

“Bye then, nice to meet you.” But it turned out her date
had ‘missed’ her last train, and it turned out, wouldn’t you know it, the last
bus had gone too... and a taxi was out of the question... and she couldn’t
possibly afford an hotel... and could Lila please, please, please let her stay
the night?

Now Lila hadn’t been dating for long, but she wasn’t
that
naïve! After some initial angst and berating of both herself and her date,
she grudgingly conceded, in her most disapproving voice, that her date could
stay on the couch. Lila marched into the sitting room, stared pointedly at the
couch, threw a sleeping bag at her date and went off on her own to her bedroom,
muttering, “That’s it. I’m giving up dating. I’ll live on my own perfectly
happily with some cats.”

She grudgingly acknowledged that her uninvited guest would
also need a towel. She stomped through, towel in hand, to find  her date posing
seductively in a negligee (or its modern equivalent). Lila threw in the towel,
in both senses of the word. She uttered a scathing, “Goodnight!” and slammed
out.  Once safely in her own bedroom, she sat on the bed, shaking. “Why, oh why
didn’t I buy a lock for my bedroom door?” she asked herself. She took a pause
from seething (I know how long Lila can seethe, and believe me, this wasn’t
over) to text her best friend, with whom she had arranged to maintain phone
contact.

‘OMG, my date is a nymphomaniac psychoslut. She’s staying
overnight−not my choice: How can I get her to leave? Eek!’

As soon as she’d pressed ‘send’, Lila heard a loud and
hollow ‘beep-beep’ from next door. It was coming from her date’s phone! Slowly
it dawned on her.
She had sent the text to her date instead of to her friend!

As Lila sat paralysed on her bed, staring at her phone,
willing it to turn back time and retrieve the message, she heard footsteps, and
then the front door slammed. Lila didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or do a
dance. Another dating failure, but thanks to her mobile phone and her Freudian
slip, she had well and truly washed that girl right out of her hair.

“A
lot of people say to me, ‘Why did you kill Christ?’
 I dunno… It was one of those parties,
got out of hand,
 
you
know?” - Lenny Bruce

A year before Lila came out, I was thrilled to have been
accepted on a Fulbright teacher exchange programme to America.
New York,
here we come!
We dreamed of skyscrapers, of cocktails, of living in one of
our beloved American sitcoms. Then reality hit, in the form of Minnesota: The
American Mid-West. Oh well! We convinced ourselves it would still be an
adventure, albeit of a different kind. Lila was now sixteen. As promised, we
had grounded ourselves during her high school years so she could finish her
education in one school. Lee, on the other hand, didn’t care.  Pending a row of
straight-As in her exams, Lila had now been granted deferred entry into Medical
School and a year-long window of opportunity had opened up. It was time to
scratch our itchy feet again.

The initial briefing week spent at
the American University in Washington, DC was one of the highlights of our time
in America. Two hundred teachers somehow discovered that Lila’s final exam
results were imminent and, when she took the call, the stakes were high. Had
she got into medical school? Were we going to have to change our plans for
America? Luckily her results were worthy of display on the American University
communal whiteboard; but, even so, the American teachers maintained a healthy scepticism
about the whole medical school story. They refused to believe that Lila could
potentially be a doctor by the age of twenty-two, as it takes much longer in
the USA. However, it was true: a year from now, Lila was going to medical
school.

But first we settled in for our year in small town
Minnesota. My exchange partner and I had swapped jobs, houses, cars and
husbands. Okay, I made the last part up. I wouldn’t really swap John. Besides,
my exchange partner’s husband was twenty years older than him and sported
either a really bad wig or a spectacularly bad haircut and dye job.

Lila’s plan was to get a job, but first she wanted to try
out high school, where she confirmed that it was exactly as portrayed on TV:
cheerleaders, jocks and all.  She spent her first day helping make a football
banner with the cheerleaders, but day two  saw a turnaround. Maintaining her
quirkiness and difference theme, she soon found herself befriended, instead, by
some weird and scary classmates.

Inevitably, she tracked down a cinema showing ‘Rocky
Horror’, and immediately became secretly besotted with one of the girls she met
there − unfortunately for her, the girl had a boyfriend. It must have
been depressing for Lila, having endless crushes on straight girls,
increasingly convinced that she was the only lesbian out there. But that’s just
the point: She wasn’t ‘out’ there yet and it was unlikely that many other gay
teenage girls were either. For all she knew, other girls might have had a
secret crush on
her
. I suppose worshipping from afar was better than
nothing. Gay or straight, we’ve all been there! But for gay people in the closet,
it certainly adds a level of challenge in high school romantic endeavours.

Lee enjoyed middle school. However, his new friend, Dan,
who was a mere six months older than him, appeared to be a fully-fledged man of
six feet plus with a full beard. When Lee first met him he was terrified.
Perhaps all his classmates would be six-feet-tall thirteen-year-olds with
beards−and not just the boys. (This
was
Minnesota, after all.)
Thankfully, his fears were unfounded.

Excited by his first American sleep-over at Dan’s, he
carefully packed his overnight bag with PJs, toothbrush, etc and headed out. 
The boys spent several exciting hours in front of the TV in the den, with Lee
trying to hide his increasing anxiety at being up so much past his usual
bedtime.  Finally, around 2am, Dan declared, “I think it’s time to go to
sleep.”  And, while Lee was excitedly picking up his bag, that’s exactly what
he did.  When he looked around, Dan was already fast asleep in his chair.  And
there was no alternative but for an incredulous Lee to follow suit.

Meanwhile, John continued with the trend he’d started when
he’d lived in Mallorca, travelling back to Scotland on a regular basis to
service his accountancy practice. As for me, I settled down at the local
elementary school where my exchange teacher had worked. My American pupils were
great fun to teach, although they harboured some interesting notions about
Scotland. I asked a pupil who wore glasses if it was feasible for him to remove
them for gym, as that’s what the kids in Scotland usually did. He was stunned.
“Do kids in Scotland have glasses?” he gasped. The next day, he spotted me
wearing sunglasses in the playground. “I guess you even have
sunglasses
in Scotland,” he quipped.

“Yes,” I shot back. “But with our weather, we don’t get
much opportunity to wear them!”

The teachers were a very welcoming and eclectic bunch. One
joked to me, “I love your Scottish accent. I could listen to you talk all day.”

I replied, “That’s good, because I can talk all day.”

I found that in this school, most of the female teachers
presented a reserved professional persona to their classes. In contrast, the
male teachers indulged their classes and themselves in all kinds of craziness.
One had a giant iguana in a tank in his classroom. Lee was crazy about iguanas
at the time, so I began an enthusiastic discussion with the teacher when I met
him in the staffroom.

“Are you the guy with the big iguana?” I innocently
inquired.

“I’m glad to see my fame has spread to Scotland!” he
replied with a grin.

Adults and kids alike enjoyed terrifying us with tales of
extreme Minnesotan winters. Thus, when the first flutter of snow began in
November, we were petrified. Within five minutes, cabin fever had set in and we
feared we’d be snowbound until spring. In the event, the snow lasted all of
five minutes, just long enough for us to phone the neighbours and enquire
hysterically if it was safe to drive and whether we should break out the dried
stockpiled in the house for emergencies. On hearing a rustling noise, we glanced
round to see Lila already feasting on the emergency chocolate chip cookies.
“What?” she demanded. “You said it was too snowy to go out for dinner.”

When Christmas rolled around − ironically, the first
in a decade without snow − a colleague invited us to a traditional
Christmas Day lunch at her beautiful, old country house. It had belonged to her
father and was in ‘Doctor Road’, named after him. I couldn’t wait for Lila to
become a doctor and have a road named after
her
.

We joined her large family in enjoying a traditional, giant
cooked ham – kosher, of course − and all the trimmings. As Chanukah fell
on Christmas Day that year, we then dashed off to join one of the, maybe, two
Jewish families in town for their celebration. I had, previously, rooted out
the lone Jewish pupil in my school. Cue immediate bonding session with her
parents and an invite to said Chanukah party. Their house wasn’t hard to find:
it was the one with a discreetly lit-up Star of David on the door. That is, if
a neon item can be described as discreet. The rest of the street’s decorations
were most definitely indiscreet - giant, plastic, flashing, moving Santas,
snowmen and reindeer.

We were warmly received. I should say
I
was warmly
received and, by association, Lila and Lee. John said he felt about as welcome
as a pork pie at a Bar Mitzvah. (Talking of pork, I hoped they couldn’t smell
it on my breath.) The company was made up of a small group of Jewish
intellectuals who worked at the local University. They were anxious to hear if
I had experienced any anti-Semitism, as they apparently all had. I was both
surprised and dismayed by their disclosures.

We ate some Jewish food. Not being Passover, no alcoholic
beverages were proffered. Lila was granted the honour of lighting the Chanukah
candles, after which we bolted for the door as fast as was decently possible.
Once safely out of earshot, we cracked up with laughter at our surreal
Christmas/Chanukah day.

Our next social engagement was a neighbour’s fancy-schmancy
New Year’s party. The food was impressive, especially the whole smoked salmon
flown in from Alaska. I was in Jewish heaven. When I finally tore myself away
from the salmon, I was surprised to find Lila engaged in a lengthy and,
apparently, serious conversation with someone. She later revealed that she had
been subjected to an hour-long diatribe by the guest, who had been on a mission
to convert her to Christianity. How did they know I was Jewish? Was the smoked
salmon a decoy? Maybe the Jewish minority hadn’t been over sensitive in their
disclosures. As the saying goes, ‘Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean
they’re not out to get you!’ That blatant attempt to convert Lila really upset
me. It’s a pity she still hadn’t come out. That could really have enlivened the
conversation.

I hadn’t thought about Scotland being a particularly multicultural
place until I experienced living in Minnesota. The discrimination wasn’t
confined to religion. During my first American parent-pupil interview, my sole
black pupil revealed that his wish for the coming year was that he wouldn’t be
racially abused. Both he and his mother claimed this had been a regular
occurrence and, according to them, the head teacher had been dismissive of the
problem.

When a fellow teacher on the exchange programme told me
that she had been bullied and ostracised, I was puzzled. She wasn’t black,
Jewish, or gay. It turned out she was a secular Christian and had refused
repeated invitations to attend church. I suppose intolerance of difference is
part of our human psyche, but I found the blatancy of some mid-Western
Americans hard to accept. In my experience, racism, anti-Semitism and
homophobia go hand in hand. The teachers didn’t initially know I was Jewish.
Would they have treated me differently if they had known? Did they treat me
differently after they found out and was I simply too naïve to realise it?