Oy Vey My Daughter's Gay (9 page)

“If something about the human body
disgusts you, complain to the manufacturer.” - Lenny Bruce

Although Lila isn’t a TV fan (other than American
sitcoms), she loves cinema, especially art-house, for its wider and more
eclectic range of films. When she moved into her flat she was lucky to have an
art-house cinema right on her doorstep. With the lines of communication now
almost fully open between us, she invited me to a viewing of a film called
‘Trembling before G-d’
¹¹
, a documentary about homosexuality and
Judaism. (Orthodox Jews don’t believe His name should be uttered or written in
full.)

The gay Orthodox Jews featured in the film had been
ostracised by their families and communities for their sexuality. It was
heartbreaking. One girl was filmed phoning her Rabbi father on the eve of the
Sabbath. After the usual pleasantries, she asked permission to come and visit
him. He replied, “Not this week.” The daughter dissolved into tears and turned
to her lesbian partner for comfort. This conversation was apparently
repeated on a weekly basis.

In another conversation, a gay middle-aged man made his
weekly phone call to his ninety-three-year-old father. This conversation
elicited some quiet laughter as well as sighs of sympathy, as the father denied
his son permission to visit on the grounds that he was too busy. How busy can a
man of ninety-three be? Did he have a paper round? Was he going on a date?
On a more serious note, how much time was left for him and his son to ever be
reunited?

For me, the most moving footage had been shot two decades
previously. It featured a young, impressionable gay man seeking guidance
from his Rabbi as to how to reconcile being gay with remaining a member of his
Orthodox Jewish family and community. Although sympathetic to his plight, the
Rabbi conveyed his regret that his own religious beliefs rendered him unable to
sanction living a gay life.

To the best of my knowledge in three of the major
religions, namely Christianity, Judaism and Islam, admitting to being gay does
not automatically result in the person being isolated by their family or
community. The deal-breaker for many denominations is if they participate in
gay sex. In this spirit, the Rabbi suggested therapy to the young man, which
some people at that time believed could ‘realign’ sexual orientation. (Sadly it
is still in use despite criticism from medical authorities, although happily to
a much lesser degree.) The desperate young man duly submitted himself to the
therapy. 

The film then flipped to the present day. In this footage
the Rabbi met again with the now middle-aged man in a much-anticipated
encounter in a synagogue in the gay Castro district in San Francisco. The
synagogue was mobbed and emotions ran high as people waited to hear the Rabbi’s
updated thoughts on homosexuality. Young gay men were hugging each other. A few
lesbians quietly held hands with their partners and smiled reassuringly. Some
men and women were there alone, sitting quietly, just staring at the stage and
willing the ordeal over, one way or the other. Some audience members were
already in tears − whether in anticipation of good news or resignation to
yet another let-down, only they knew.

The Rabbi, dressed in black with his long (now white) beard
took to the stage to varying degrees of applause. The formerly young gay man,
hair thinning and slightly hunched, was greeted rapturously. It took several
minutes for the clapping and whistling to die down. The quiet, when it came,
was deafening. The Rabbi began by apologising to him for encouraging him to
subject himself to therapy, which he admittedly now knew to be cruel and
pointless. The crowd held its collective breath.

However the Rabbi then dropped the bombshell that living a
gay life still went against his religious convictions. The crowd erupted in
anger and sorrow. They were on their feet, shouting and booing. The man just
sat there, showing little reaction.

A spokesman came onto the stage. “Please,” he said. “Please
calm down.”  The audience slowly quietened. The spokesman pointed out that, in
the face of open hostility, the Rabbi had been brave enough to apologise in
public. He, the Rabbi, had gone as far as his beliefs would allow. The
spokesman finished by saying, “And now, it’s the Sabbath. Let’s all sit down
together and eat.”

As the credits rolled, I was a seething mass of emotions.
Tears of anger and sadness rolled down my cheeks. My ego leapt in immediately
and demanded,
‘To hell with them! If these pathetic families and religious
leaders can’t find it in their hearts to accept gay people, well, let them live
their own sad lives. Who needs them? And frankly, why don’t these whinging gays
just tell their families to butt out and carry on living without their
approval?’
(Thankfully the Jewish Echo was long out of print, or I might
have dashed off an e-mail to the Editor, there and then.)

Lila and I fumbled for the remaining tissues and I breathed
a sigh of relief that the trauma was over. I was already thinking,
‘If I get
out quickly enough, we might get seats in the café downstairs. I hope it’s
still open.’

As I stood up, Lila said, “Where are you going, Mum?
There’s an open discussion with the director now, don’t you remember?”

With obvious reluctance, I sat back down. The comforting
latte would have to wait.

The gay American director came onto the stage and
introduced himself. After answering some initial questions, he invited members
of the audience to recount their own experiences. As a few brave men and women
bared their souls, quiet sobs and murmurs of recognition arose from similarly
hurt and abandoned audience members caught between their sexuality and their
religion. 

The story that moved me most was that of a man who had lost
his whole family and his community because he chose to live openly with his gay
partner. When he smilingly assured us that he had since found a new, loving
family within the gay community, we all nodded and smiled in relief. Then he
unexpectedly started sobbing and said in a wobbly voice, “But I just want my
own family back.”

That night I was briefly transported into a world where
religious belief could rip families apart. I caught Lila’s eye. We smiled
through our tears and shared a moment of joyous relief that our family was
still intact.

“Don’t dream it. Be it!” - Rocky
Horror Picture Show

When Lila was fifteen, she found her own new family: she
was adopted into The Rocky Horror Picture Show. For the uninitiated, The Rocky
Horror Picture Show is a musical comedy horror film. It was released in 1975,
based on the successful stage show two years before, and it has since become a
cult classic. Audience participation is the name of the game. This might
include dressing up as the film characters,  often  in corsets and fishnets;
throwing various items in the air (echoing the characters) and shouting witty
comments at the screen in response to dialogue. There may even be a shadow cast
who perform the whole show in front of, and synchronised with, the on-screen
action. It’s great fun, and although the content can be pretty suggestive, we
found it to be actually quite innocent. Rocky Horror is shown in cinemas and
theatres throughout the world and, as I mentioned earlier, Lila and I even
attended a viewing in Australia. Its popularity shows no signs of abating.

When fifteen-year-old Lila first saw Rocky Horror, she fell
under its spell. Constantly open to new projects in which to immerse herself,
she was ready to graduate from her Shakespearean chants.  Consequently, she
sprang into action and joined the official fan club, through which she tracked
down and joined the local Rocky Horror shadow cast. Lila was drawn to the
character ‘Magenta’, a slutty French maid who she chose to emulate on stage.
She was very lucky that Glasgow’s Rocky Horror shadow cast, Doctor Scott’s
Extra Forks, were in the market for a new Magenta. Sadly, Jim and Mark did not
take this opportunity to get on the Rocky Horror bandwagon, given that many of
the males involved were gay and it might have been a good opportunity for them
to come out. Instead, they helped produce the exacting costumes that were
required of any committed Rocky Horror shadow cast member; like two Cinderellas
sewing costumes for a ball they couldn’t attend themselves. Lila had finally
given up on my sewing, while she herself still can’t sew on a button.

Rocky became a vital part of Lila’s life. It fulfilled
multiple needs, providing her with an opportunity to be on stage and to create
a sexy and outrageous alter ego. (There was most assuredly no ‘old’ prefixing
Magenta’s character.) It also gave her the chance to spend time with other gay
people for the first time, in a safe and controlled environment. Unfortunately,
they were all male. It gave her a ‘tribe’ where she felt she belonged, even
though she didn’t yet dare to declare herself as a lesbian. Most of the cast
were older than Lila and became her second family. They travelled all over
Britain together to perform at cinemas. Lila impressed her cast by learning to
code, create and maintain a Scottish Rocky Horror website in the early days of
website design. She built up a fan base which ensured that, wherever they
performed, the theatres were full.

Introvert Lila looked on in awe as extrovert Lila strutted
her stuff onstage in her provocative French maid costume, full make-up and
fishnet tights. She suddenly became a music fan, spending all her pocket money
on multiple copies of what appeared to us to be the same Rocky CD. “Mum,” she’d
sigh in a pitying voice when I dared to question the validity of her purchases,
“You just don’t understand. This one’s got an extra six seconds of encore on
it.” She spent hours rehearsing the part of Magenta, winding and rewinding the
Rocky video to get her character’s body language and actions just right.
Scheduled cast rehearsals also took up a lot of her time.

Rocky rapidly morphed into a family project, as John and I
were happy to go along for the ride with most of Lila or Lee’s activities. It
saved us the bother of getting our own interests. The ‘Rocky Horror’ soundtrack
now provided the backdrop to our family car outings. The four of us rolled
along happily in the car, belting out ‘There’s a light, over at the
Frankenstein place. There’s a li-i-i-ight, burning in the fireplace…’ and other
Rocky favourites, which we quickly learned off by heart.

Also, there were the film viewings to keep us occupied.
John and I queued outside the cinema with Lee (who was resplendent in a
tailcoat and fishnet tights −de rigueur for males attending Rocky Horror)
at midnight to watch her perform. We didn’t dress up. We drew the line at that,
which I’m sure Lila appreciated. I was both proud and a little embarrassed
watching Lila in action. She looked very grownup and scarily sexy. It didn’t
seem to bother John, though. One of his favourite photos of Lila was a black
and white Rocky shot of her sporting a black rubber dress, a beehive hairdo,
thick black eyeliner, and a seductive pout. He didn’t over think it, bless him.
Still puzzled by her former ‘Amish’ phase, and now resigned to her current
uniform of long, black, high-necked dresses and Doc Martin boots, he just
thought it was a nice change of pace. The photo took pride of place in our
sitting room, where everyone could admire it.

“Dad, surely you are not serious about displaying that
photo,” Lila said.

”Why not?” John said. “I think you look lovely in it.
You’re my wee pussy cat.”

“Yeah, but have you seen what I’m wearing? I look like a
prostitute.”

John laughed as he studied it more closely. “Well I don’t
see it. I think you look lovely.”

“Oh well, as long as you’re happy, Dad!” Lila laughed, as
he hugged her.

My friend and I felt old and prudish and tried to pretend
we weren’t shocked or embarrassed at the blatant sexuality of the ‘Rocky
Horror’ pre-show warm-up on our first viewing together. We crouched down ever
lower in our seats when Rocky ‘virgins’ were invited on stage. Lila and I were
close, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t want to see her wee middle-aged mother
flaunting her stuff on stage with her. I remained firmly in the background −
not an easy task for me, as Lila will testify.

John did the 2am pickups from venues. Lila was under strict
orders to wear a long coat over her costume. He might have been naïve enough to
admire the photo, but he was wise enough to know that cruising in his car and
subsequently picking up a young girl dressed in fishnets, mini-skirt and killer
heels was not a good idea. ‘Honestly Officer, she’s my daughter,’ was not a
sentence he wished to utter.

Lila’s bedroom became a shrine to ‘Rocky’ as the theatre posters
met with the same fate as Phillip Schofield. Her loyal and talented school
friends now buckled down to the new task of spray painting a giant mural of
Rocky characters onto her bedroom wall, with our full permission. When he later
inherited the room from Lila, it took Lee two weeks of wall scraping
(interspersed with dirty looks and head-shaking) to remove it.

When Lila had just turned seventeen, her cast was set to
attend a Rocky convention to be held in New York. Convinced it was too
outrageous, Lila hadn’t even sought our permission to go, though she
desperately wanted to. But we were still in the ‘cool parents’ category at that
time. When we found out about the convention, not only did we convince Lila to
go, but we even helped her create a fake ID on the computer, making her old
enough to go clubbing in Greenwich Village with her friends.

“Look, are you sure you guys are okay with me going to New
York?” Lila said. “I don’t have to go to this one. I can always go to the next
convention.”

“Look, you’ll regret it if you don’t go. We trust you and
know you’ll be sensible.”

“Well…” she paused, not sure we understood the enormity of
what we were agreeing to. “If  you’re absolutely sure… Thank you, thank you,
thank you. You’re the best!”

And indeed we were. Either that or just plain stupid. We
knew our daughter − or thought we did. We still had no clue about her
sexuality and were completely unaware that within a few short months of
returning from New York she would have come out. We did know that Lila refused
to even touch a drop of alcohol back then. Lee, on the other hand, had happily
taken a few sips of wine in Spain when he was five, but Lila was oddly
puritanical on that point. She didn’t plan to use her fake ID to buy alcohol;
she just didn’t want to find herself alone in the city when her friends wanted
to go to a bar.

So Lila went to the Rocky convention in New York armed with
a fake ID and our credit card. Apparently there was no limit to our trust, but
there
was
a limit to our credit card. It was strictly for emergencies,
should the accommodation or the guys in the group, or both, prove to be a bit
dodgy. We didn’t know that all the guys were gay, or that Lila was too.
Ironically, that former piece of information would have reassured us.

These were the days before Skype and Face Time. However,
there was a fixed webcam in Times Square. Every day at 1 o’clock New York time,
Lila and her friends rendezvoused there and waved furiously up at the camera,
thus assuring us for another day that she was still alive.

The convention took place during the Easter holidays, so we
went on holiday with Lee to Malta. “Yeah, we also have a seventeen-year-old
daughter,” we said in answer to our fellow hotel guest’s query.

“Oh, where is she?” he asked.

“Well, she’s off to New York, to a Rocky Horror Convention
with her friends.” Okay that time I heard it myself, and it didn’t sound good.
“Are we bad parents?” I asked John.

“No,” he assured me. But he, too, seemed lost in thought.

Happily, both Lila and our credit card returned intact. No
one we knew was really all that surprised we’d let her go. Lila was the most
sensible seventeen-year-old any of us had ever encountered. On the other hand,
three years later, when Lee asked our permission to attend a rock festival in
England, we reeled in shock.

“Mum, some friends and I are planning to go to the rock
festival in Reading in June.”

“No way, Lee. It’s not gonna happen. You’re only
seventeen.”

“So? Lila went to the Rocky Convention in New York when she
was seventeen.”

“That’s different. We know Lila. And more importantly, we
know
you
!”

When Lila came out to us later that same year, John was
anxious to blame anything and anybody for this completely unprecedented turn of
events. He directed most of his anger at the Rocky Horror Show. “That bloody
Rocky Horror. We should never have let her become involved in it,” he said.
“I’ve got a good mind to go into her room and rip those bloody posters off her
wall.”

“Look, John, you know Rocky’s  got nothing to do with it,”
I said, trying to calm him down.

”Oh, hasn’t it? Half the bloody people in it are gay.
That’s probably where she got the idea.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll admit that a lot of the people
involved in it are gay, but they’re all guys. How many girls have you heard of
who’re gay in her cast?”

“…Well I still wish she hadn’t started with it,” John said.

He took a lot more convincing before he grudgingly conceded
that, as far as we knew, there weren’t any lesbians in Lila’s Rocky cast.
Disappointing for Lila though, as she’d got into Rocky with the hope of finding
romance. In fact, she later told me that when she joined the cast, she’d
originally planned to present herself as a lesbian from day one. She chickened
out − partly because she hadn’t come out to us yet and was terrified
someone would tell us and partly because she just didn’t know how to throw what
felt like a momentous announcement into casual conversation with her new
friends.

“There’s a relatively small window of opportunity for
coming out to people. If I haven’t done it by the first or second meeting, the
moment’s passed, assumptions are made and it, then, becomes difficult to
backtrack,” she told us. During the entire four years doing Rocky Horror, she
tried unsuccessfully to come out to any of her Rocky family. Sadly, she didn’t
manage to embrace the Rocky Horror motto, ‘Don’t dream it! Be it’.