Oy Vey My Daughter's Gay (6 page)

“Life doesn’t imitate art,  it
imitates bad television.” - Woody Allen

After her first graduation, at the age of twenty, Lila
was presented with an opportunity to move out of the family home and we all
knew that the time had come to let her go. She had stoically made the hour-long
commute by bus to and from university for three years. These journeys home on
the late night bus were, by all accounts, no picnic for Lila as she endured the
crude chants from the local neds* who also frequented the late night buses−
a particular favourite being, ‘Don’t be shy − show us yer pie!’ She took
it all in good spirit, though, and, surprisingly, even managed to see the funny
side of it − which was pretty unlike Lila. She must have been in good
spirits, in more ways than one. Like most students, Lila had discovered drink
and we were glad when she moved into a city centre apartment. Aside from
getting a good night’s sleep, neither of us would have handled it well seeing
our little girl drunk.

Lila’s first flat belonged to Anna, one of her Rocky Horror
friends who had just moved in with her boyfriend and offered the ideal
arrangement: Lila would pay low rent in return for looking after Anna’s
suggestively-clothed mannequins in the sitting room; wheelchairs in the hall
and wardrobe full of costumes and wigs, to mention just a few of her motley
possessions. Added to Lila’s own papier-mâché projects and quirky furnishings,
it was like ‘Rocky Horror’ meets ‘Steptoe and Son’
¹⁵
. Lila loved her
flat, loved living alone and quickly became even more eccentric. For example,
she imposed a ‘one drink only’ rule in her flat.

“How about a cup of tea?” I suggested, after downing a
small glass of ‘water orange’ (a drink invented by Lila and her brother Lee,
consisting of one drop of diluting orange juice to a glass of water, contrived
to limit sugar intake and maintain their filling-free status).

“What?” Lila said, incredulous. “You’ve just had a drink!”

Unfortunately, our worries about her safety en route home
from clubbing were not over. If only she hadn’t told us about the needless and
dangerous walks home she regularly embarked on in an ill-advised attempt to
save time and money on a taxi. I couldn’t believe she could be so naïve. She
honestly never gave a thought to the dangers of walking home alone late at
night. Did she somehow think she was safe because she was a lesbian? Did she
think that because she wasn’t interested in men, they wouldn’t be interested in
her? And the worst part was that she regularly regaled us with the (thankfully
humorous) accounts of her adventures. Luckily, it always ended well.

Lila had her own quirky, arty style and it was hard for her
being in her first flat, desperate to showcase her own individual personality
and being limited by huge amounts of her hoarder friend’s ‘treasures’. Still,
the rent was cheap and it was in the centre of the city so she was happy to
make allowances. Her cooking skills left a lot to be desired. She had neither
interest nor talent in that department and her staple was pasta and pesto sauce.
I helped out by delivering a selection of meals in plastic ‘tub-its’ once a
week. All she had to do was pop them in the microwave. (I might have threatened
to throw her out, but I would have at least thrown her out with food. I am a
Jewish mother, after all.)

Reading remained Lila’s first love, and her own flat gave
her the freedom to fully enjoy it. I was amused to find books in varying stages
of completion in every room of her flat, including the bathroom.

“What’s with all the opened books?”

“Well, I finish them so quickly; it’s just not worth moving
the same book from room to room, so I keep a few on the go at the one time.”

“How do you keep track of what each book’s about?” I asked.
“It sounds a bit confusing.”

“Not in the least.”

After she moved out, Lila gave up watching TV. The
reception in her new flat was spectacularly bad; the TV was obscured by
leather- and velvet- clad mannequins and she just wasn’t that interested. (She
still doesn’t own a TV, but watches films and the occasional incongruously
trashy teenage series on her computer.)

Even when Lila was a little girl, I don’t remember her
being particularly enthused by television. ‘Bagpuss’ was her programme of
choice when she was very young. It featured a cloth cat that came to life and
had small adventures within the confines of the shop it shared with other lost
things collected by a little girl called Emily. I don’t know if she enjoyed it
or if she was just humouring me, but, in a moment of nostalgia, we recently
re-watched it together on YouTube and were quite charmed by it.

Lila and I shared a love of American sitcoms. I’m still
addicted to them. When we returned from Spain, ‘Roseanne’ quickly became
can’t-miss family viewing. Lila told me that she had secretly been in love with
Sara Gilbert, who played ‘Darlene’. The actress subsequently came out and
married her partner, so maybe that was Lila’s first successful experience of
‘gaydar’. The particular Roseanne episode that sticks in my mind is the one
where the eleven-year-old son DJ is spending a lot of time in the
bathroom, and his sister Darlene quips, “He’s finally found a friend who’s not imaginary.”
Lee, who was ten at the time, was baffled.

“Mum, why is that funny?” he said. I flashed a meaningful
‘you’re up!’ glance at John. Emulating Dan, the father on the sitcom, John
produced an evil stare of ‘not on your life!’ Dan later told DJ, “Everybody
does it, but nobody ever talks about it.”

So with John refusing, I did it. I stepped up, and had
that
conversation with Lee. He didn’t seem that interested or embarrassed (or
maybe he was and thought not responding would make me go away quicker!) It’s
strange to look back and know that I was capable of that conversation yet
incapable of talking to Lila about being gay.

The sitcom ‘Friends’ was another family favourite. Friends
introduced a gay character, albeit a minor one, as part of a central plot in
the very first episode, with Ross getting divorced from his wife because she’s
a lesbian. The theme is followed up in greater depth later in the series, where
his ex-wife marries her lesbian lover. Ross is adamant that he won’t attend
their wedding. Following Lila’s graduation meal fiasco, John emulated Ross by
telling me, “I’ve accepted that Lila’s gay, but don’t ever ask me to go to a
gay wedding!”

However, Lila’s and my true love was the sitcom ‘Ellen’. We
watched it religiously together. We found Ellen’s clever, self-effacing humour
irresistible. Ellen’s style was largely androgynous and I wondered if Lila’s
newly acquired gaydar had alerted her to the possibility that Ellen might be
gay, but, strangely, she says she never really considered it.

Ellen’s coming out on the show created a precedent and
caused a huge furore. The press went wild with speculation about which episode
would contain the bombshell. With typical wit, she named the pertinent show,
‘The Puppy Episode’ to throw them off. Sadly, when she later came out in her
own persona on the Oprah Winfrey show, Oprah received hate mail for allowing
Ellen to use her show as a platform.

“Lila, did Ellen’s coming out influence your timing?” I
asked her recently, pleased to have discovered this link.

“No,” she said. “Don’t you remember? I came out first, then
a few months later ‘The Puppy Episode’ aired and we all sat round the TV
squirming with embarrassment and fake laughing, pretending it had nothing to do
with our own lives?”

“Are you sure? Wikipedia says it aired in the autumn of
1998, and you came out that Christmas.”

“Yes. But it aired in America first. It didn’t air in
Britain until the next year.”

Given the situation at the time, I have to concede that
Lila’s memory is probably accurate. Lila and I often have conflicting memories,
like the time she insists I wouldn’t let her buy deodorant.

“Why on earth would I care whether you bought deodorant?” I
said.

“You said I didn’t need it, as I hadn’t reached puberty
yet. I think I was in primary school.”

“Come on, Lila. You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“I’m not. I remember it quite clearly,” she said.

“Well, even if it’s true, which I highly doubt, why the
hell wouldn’t you just have bought it anyway?” I said.

“Because I always listened to you,” she said.

I’m convinced Lila has False Memory Syndrome, while she
smiles sweetly and reminds me that, as a psychiatrist, she only needs one more
doctor’s signature to have me committed.

Lila told me that TV shows like Friends and Ellen were
precious to her. There were very few depictions of lesbians on television at
that time and, understandably, she longed for a window into the lives of
females who shared her own secret identity. Apparently, there
was
a late
night Scottish talk show with a gay theme on at the time. Lila’s desire to
watch it prompted her to lobby for a TV in her bedroom. She would sit up late
into the night, nose pressed to the screen and with the sound set to the lowest
level lest we be alerted to her nocturnal viewing and come to investigate.

She grew accustomed to listening to things at low volume.
Once when I made it past the CD and papier-mâché littered floor from her
numerous art projects and into her bedroom, I heard a tiny buzzing noise in the
background. Fearing I’d developed tinnitus, I enquired, “Lila, what’s the sound
in the background?”

“What do you mean?”

“Shhh! Listen: that tiny buzzing sound. Can you hear it?”

She concentrated for a moment, looking confused. “Oh, you
mean
that
?” she said, pointing to her music centre and laughing. “Of
course I can hear it. I’m listening to my music.”

*
Neds: Non-educated
delinquents (Glasgow colloquialism)

“Don’t ask your child what he feels
like doing.  I assure you that what he feels like doing,  you won’t feel like
watching.”  - Fran Lebowitz

There is nothing unusual about the fantasy of leaving
one’s rainy hometown for sun, sea and sand. Most people on holiday fantasise
about throwing it all in and becoming permanent beachcombers. The crazy thing
was that we actually did it. Our move to Spain was mainly due to ill health: we
were sick of the Scottish weather. Crazy and irresponsible as it sounds, there
was some method in our madness. It was 1986 and Spain had just joined the
European Union, enabling our free movement to European countries. John reckoned
it would be the perfect time to open his own accountancy practice... and I
reckoned it would be the perfect time to sit in the sun and sip sangria. The
idea of moving to Mallorca had come to us while we were on holiday there the
previous summer, engaged in the latter of these activities.

“You know it really is great here,” I shouted from the
balcony in our rented apartment to John, who was holed up in front of the TV.
Ironically, he hates sitting in the sun and has absolutely no interest in going
to the beach. “I can imagine living here,” I said.

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” John said. “Maybe we should
try it for a while.”

I can’t imagine what I’d say to my son if he said, “Mum.
I’ve something to tell you. I’m packing in my job and we’re going off to live
in Spain with the (five and two-year-old) kids.” Most of my response would have
to be bleeped out for profanity. And yet, at the time, neither my family nor
John’s had much to say about it, which, in retrospect, was actually quite sad.
Surely they could have pretended they’d miss us, or at least miss the kids. On
reflection, they were probably just too busy daydreaming about the sun-soaked
holidays that lay ahead.  In fact, the photo below shows how much my mother came
to enjoy her sunny days with the grandchildren.

We arrived in Mallorca a few short months later with eight
suitcases and my guitar. We rented an apartment in the capital, Palma City,
determined to do this properly. No idyllic beachfront properties or ex-pat life
for us. We soon ran into problems. There were no places at our local Spanish
school, so we were forced into enrolling Lila in an expensive international school.
Lee meanwhile, true to his word, kicked every child in his
guarderia
(nursery school) in protest at being sent there.

“You’ll find your kids learn Spanish so easily, they’ll be
able to teach you,” friends assured us. Sadly it didn’t work out like that.
Probably as a protest against being sent to the
guarderia,
Lee refused
to speak one word of Spanish. I reckon if he was hypnotised it would all be in
there somewhere. Lila blames
her
lack of Spanish fluency on us not
finding a way to send her to the local Spanish school. We, in turn, blame our
lack of money on having to pay her private school fees.

I found a part-time job proofreading for the local English
newspaper and John set about finding new English-speaking accountancy clients.
Our Spanish communication skills were limited, to say the least, but we had a
laugh at our mistakes, as well as tearing our hair out on occasions. We
particularly enjoyed wearing our individually-wrapped pristine clothes that
we’d taken to a dry cleaner, mistaking it for a laundry. When it all got too
much, we took a trip to the beach with the kids and later downed a fifty pence
box of ‘Don Simon’ wine.

Our big move had happened in November, but Lila wanted to
spend Christmas with her grandparents. So we arranged for our five-year-old
daughter to fly from Spain to Scotland and back on her own. Nowadays, I’m sure
it wouldn’t even be allowed and the thought of parents even contemplating such
a thing seems ludicrous. Five-year-old Lila was like a scaled-down adult.  We
had meaningful discussions; she made her own decisions about most things and
the trip just didn’t seem like a big deal. She was looked after by an air
steward on the flight and her grandmother met her at the other end. The air
steward calmly informed us that the plane to Scotland had been delayed on the
runway and Lila had sung ‘Jingle Bells’ over the Tannoy to entertain the other
passengers. On her return, we got caught in traffic trying to pick her up from
Palma Airport, so she took out her book and calmly awaited our arrival. She was
that sort of girl.

Happily, Lila loved her school and her teacher, who
apparently was her first lesbian crush. Lila had been desperate to impress Miss
Chadwick, which, in retrospect, explains some of her strange behaviour.  She
became so stressed at the prospect of playing the lead in the class play that
she wouldn’t rehearse it, resulting in the part being given to another child.
She suspects that losing that part was responsible for her fruitless attempts
to secure another main role during the rest of her school career.

Lila has told us that, growing up, she had deliberately
cultivated a kind of quirkiness, not to mask her difference but to specifically
draw attention to it. She wanted people to accept that she was different, even
though she wasn’t ready mentally or emotionally to reveal in what way. Happily,
in Spain she found the ideal platform. Her school had seventeen nationalities
of kids, a laid-back vibe and swimming lessons in the Med. These were halcyon
days. Lila thrived. She quickly amassed a group of quirky and cool new friends.
It was a source of relief to us that the popular girls wanted her to be their
friend. Being two years younger than her classmates also won her respect for
her intelligence. She was endlessly amazed by her popularity. She bounced up
and down with joy as she mused out loud, “I don’t get it. Why do these girls
even like me?”

We looked on happily as her new friendships thrived.
Socially there’s a big gap between eight and ten-year-olds, but she and
her friends made it work. While they turned up to a party wearing jeans
and cute tops, Lila, deaf to my pleading, insisted on wearing a pink party
dress and matching pumps. Lila’s literal nature told her that this was a party;
ergo party clothes. End of discussion. Her friends indulged her because
each of them had their own quirkiness. These girls nurtured and celebrated
Lila’s eccentricity and I could have hugged them for that. Lila’s best friend,
Julia watched ‘West Side Story’ every single day. One of the reasons Lila loved
Julia so much was that, being used to much older siblings, Julia effortlessly
controlled Lee − something Lila struggled with during her entire
childhood and teenage years. Lila treasured these moments of respite from Lee’s
various sibling tortures as she tried (unsuccessfully) to learn from Julia how
to get the better of a younger brother. I remember the two girls happily
ensconced in the branch of a huge old almond tree in Julia’s garden,
delightedly pelting poor Lee with almonds whenever he tried to join them.

When Lila was forced into spending time with her brother by
herself, or was feeling altruistic or just really bored, she would overlook the
schemes he routinely concocted to annoy her and entertain him with her aptitude
for storytelling and games.  She often combined these into long, complicated
role play scenarios to which she ascribed some disconcerting names.

It was with a healthy amount of trepidation that I asked
the now eight-year-old Lila to explain their current favourite game, ‘Who Cares
about Sex?’. Apparently when they referred to ‘sex’, they meant ‘gender’. Phew
− crisis averted! The game was set in a girls’ orphanage.  Lila
played the orphan who didn’t fit in with the stereotypical ‘girly’ girls and
would sneak away from ballet classes to play stereotypically boyish games with
the wild boy (Lee). I later wondered if there had been any deeper meaning for
Lila in this particular game, even although Lila was such a ‘girly’ girl in
real life and not at all a tomboy.

Playing with her friends was more complicated. When Lila
told me she needed a costume for her school Carnival, I conjured up an image of
Halloween costumes. I forgot all about it until she reminded me the night
before. Searching around desperately for inspiration, Lee’s oversized
inflatable banana water toy caught my eye. I hastily constructed a gorilla
costume consisting of a homemade cardboard mask; my old fur jacket and her
Brownies hat. I was pretty pleased with my efforts− until she arrived
home after the Carnival. Through gritted teeth she relayed her embarrassment as
she had walked next to her friends in the Carnival parade.

I witnessed it for myself a few weeks later at her
theatre-themed party. Her friends floated in, trailing professional-looking
zip-up bags and boxes containing outfits that wouldn’t have looked out of place
in a London West End production. They were, in fact, the same fabulous outfits
that the girls had previously worn for Carnival and on which their mothers had
spent months lovingly and skilfully crafting and bedecking with feathers and
spangles. Sadly, I didn’t realise the significance of Spanish Carnival back
then. (Think Rio, but on a slightly smaller scale.) Oops! I can see now why the
gorilla costume didn’t quite cut it. That episode is high on her ‘Bad Mum’
list, ahead of the one where I failed miserably to construct a successful bun
(hair, not food) for ballet class.

Sadly I didn’t learn from my mistakes.  After another
last-minute dash the following year, Lila found herself heading off to school
wearing a beach outfit and a witch’s hat, earnestly trying to explain to
everyone that she was in fact a ‘sandwich’.

I redeemed myself with her Tooth Party. For months Lila had
had only one adult front tooth and an unsightly gap where its partner should
have been. She was so happy when it finally grew in that I decided it called
for a celebration. I hastily (there’s that key word again) constructed a
face-shaped cake with Chiclets chewing gum pieces for teeth. Happily, tooth
parties weren’t a general celebration in Spain, so I had no competition this
time. Lila and her friends were duly impressed.

These were formative years for Lila. I’m so glad she
experienced them in a setting where she found that being different could be
okay: a setting of sun, sea, sand and ‘Who Cares about Sex?’ before we decided
to move back to Scotland for her high school years.