The Boy with a Crush on My Dad

When I was growing up, I was fascinated by a photo of my father sitting on a burro in Tijuana.

Dad is tanned, muscular, smiling, wearing a sombrero that invites us to "Kiss My Ass!"

The photo is dated September 8th, 1959, a little over a year before I was born. There are two names written on the back, "Frank" and "Jared."

Frank is my father, but who is Jared?  The burro?

And how did this grinning, bawdy, irreverent 21-year old turn into the Dad I knew, conservative, somber, serious, who rarely laughed and never joked or fooled around?  What changed?

Here is all I knew:

June 1956

Frank graduates from high school in Indiana, and joins the Navy.  He spends the next three years seeing the world, visiting Japan, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Philippines, learning to repair things deep down in the hulls of the big ships, and buddy-bonding.  He calls it the best time of his life.

June 1959

Frank returns to Indiana for a two-week long shore leave and reunites with his high school sweetheart, who is working at the A&W.  They impulsively get married, and drive with her sister and brother-in-law cross country to Long Beach, California.  They move into a tiny apartment.

The next year is a blank space in their lives.  They don't talk about it.  There are only a few mementos and photographs.  I know that they went to Knotts Berry Farm and Tijuana, that a couple of relatives flew out for a visit, and that Mom bought a set of encyclopedias from a fast-talking salesman, and that's all.

June 1960

Frank's four-year tour of duty ends.  His Captain asks him to stay on, with a promotion to Chief Petty Officer, but he refuses.  Instead, he and Mom return to Indiana and move into a house on South Randolph Street.  He goes to work in the factory, which he calls a "hell hole," even when he's not angry: "Well, I'm off to the goddam hell hole, back at 4:00."   and frequently evokes his Navy years as "the best time of my live."

Why did Dad abandon a Navy career he loved for a factory job he hated?  

I could have grow up in Long Beach!  I could have met Randall and Will the Bondage Boy early in my childhood.  I could learned about gay people and been part of the gay rights movement of the 1980s.  Instead I rumbled around Rock Island in utter silence, my same-sex loves ignored, my most casual friendship with a girl applauded as the meaning of life.

Why did they leave Long Beach?

Indianapolis,  May 2016

I'm visiting my parents on the way back from New York. My nephew is digitizing their old photos, and I see the "Kiss My Ass" burro photo again.  Emboldened, I decide to coax as much information out of them as possible.

Maybe the statute of limitations has passed, or maybe after nearly 60 years they don't care about their youthful transgressions anymore, but Mom and Dad both open up, describing their apartment, the corner grocery store, the movie theater where they saw Ben-Hur and Pillow Talk.

"You went to movies?" I ask, shocked.  Nazarenes are forbidden from setting foot inside movie theaters.


"That's not all!" Dad says with a laugh.  "We played cards.  We danced.  We even drank -- just beer, one time, but if the preacher or my parents found out, we'd be in big trouble!"

"We made friends with all sorts of people that would set my Mom and Dad off," Mom adds.  "Blacks.  Jews.  Catholics.  Mexicans.  And...well, you know..."

"Gays?" I suggest.

Suddenly Dad becomes somber.  "It was the Fifties.  We didn't know about things like that."

"Or if we did, we thought it was very rare," Mom adds, "You'd never meet anyone like that in a lifetime, which is good because it was the worst thing possible, like a sin and a crime and a sickness, all rolled up into one.  Then we met that boy, Jared"

"We were supposed to give him a copy of the photo," Dad says.  "That's why his name is on the back.  But we didn't get a chance."

More after the break

A Naked Man for Christmas

Dan in college

When I was a kid in Rock Island, Illinois, we had a number of local celebrities, like jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke, poet Carl Sandburg, and sculptor Isabel Bloom.

Born Isabel Scherer in 1908, she grew up in Davenport and studied at Grant Wood's Stone City Art Colony, where she met and married fellow artist John Bloom.  In the 1950s, she began producing distinctive sculptures carved out of Mississippi River stone or molded of mud mixed with concrete.  

They were absolutely atrocious. Angels, fairies, hugging children, mothers hugging babies, cats, doves, bridal couples, snowmen, Santa Clauses, the most maudlin, sentimental, and heteronormative dreck ever imagined.

But everyone in the Quad Cities loved them.  There were at least two or three in every living room; dozens more were forced upon out-of-town relatives as Christmas presents, or shoved into the hands of unsuspecting visitors as Quad Cities souvenirs.

So I should have anticipated what would happen.

I had just discovered Greek art -- rather, statues of muscular Greek gods, so for Christmas in 1974, when I was in 9th grade, I asked for "a statue."  

I meant a desk-sized statue of a naked Apollo from Greek mythology, but instead my Dad said, "Sure -- let's go down to Isabel Bloom's, and you can pick out the one you want."

I couldn't tell him "No, no...I wanted a naked Greek god, not some stupid boy holding a frog!", so Dan and I had to fake-grin our way through a mid-December visit to the crowded studio in the Village of West Davenport, as we sorted through Angel with Wreath, Unconditional Love, Lovebirds, Boy with Flag...

Eventually Dan wandered off, but my torture continued: Girl with Pumpkin, Newlyweds, Boy Offering Girl Flowers, Baby in Crib, Sleeping Cat...  

Then Dan came running excitedly from a side studio.  "Hey, what about this one?"  It was a nude male figure, seated, his arms around his knees.   Stylized, not muscular, but a heck of a lot better than the other stuff.

John's Thinker,  he read from the bottom. 

"Must be a statue of her husband," I said, carefully taking it from his hands.  It felt warm to the touch.  It was thrilling to think that I might be holding an exact likeness of a real naked man.

John and Isabel Bloom

"No, she didn't do this statue, her husband did," Dad said, frowning.  "It's not a real Isabel Bloom."

"Well, I want it anyway."

He looked at me oddly.  "There's lots nicer ones.  How about First Kiss?"  He held out a statue of a little boy kissing an embarrassed little girl on the cheek.

"I don't want any statues of girls."

"It's a boy and a girl.  That's like two statues for the price of one!"

Was he objecting to the price of John's Thinker?  No, First Kiss cost twice as much.  "This one's cheaper."  

"But..you could use it as a kind of model, you know.  When you want a girl to let you kiss her, just show her the statue."

"Gross!" Dan exclaimed.

"When you discover girls, I mean."

"John's Thinker, please," I said firmly.

Dad shrugged.  "Well, if you're sure that's the one you want.  But I don't know what you're going to do with it, Skeezix."  Later I figured out that he always called me Skeezix, after a character in the old Gasoline Alley comic strip, when I expressed same-sex desire, something bizarre and beyond imagining at the time.

I still have the statue.

Recently I did some research into the work of John Bloom.  He was apparently heterosexual, married to Isabel from 1938 until his death in 2002 (but then, he lived for several years in a converted ice truck with the gay artist Grant Wood).

His paintings and drawings return again and again to images of male friendship and camaraderie. 

There aren't many male nudes, but one was enough on that long-ago winter day.

Bill and I Become a Mama and a Papa

Rock Island

When I was a kid, my boyfriend Bill and I were constantly on the lookout for evidence that sometimes men like men, and marry them, and live with them in a house.  But the adults talked in riddles, or pretended not to know what we were talking about, or downright lied.  So one day, I think when I was nine years old, we took matters into our own hands and became Papas.

Bill was spending the night, and as a special treat Dad took us out to eat at A&W.

It was a drive in: you parked your car, ordered through a radio thing, and a girl in a short skirt (called a car-hop) brought your food on a tray that attached to the car window.

We actually preferred Sandy's, a few blocks away, where cute college boys in Scottish kilts sold Edin-burgers.  

A&W had good chili dogs, french fries, and root beer, and sometimes little toys came with the meal, but the hamburgers were heterosexist.  Selection was based on your role in the heterosexual nuclear family:

Papa Burger
Mama Burger
Teen (boy) Burger
Baby (girl) Burger

My brother and I always ordered the Teen Burger.  No one wanted to be a Baby, and we were too young to be Papas.

Even as a kid, I knew that there was something wrong with this scenario.  What about baby boys and teen girls?  Or young adults, like my Uncle Paul, who were married but didn't have kids yet?

Or boys who liked boys?

Bill and I looked at each other and grinned, tacitly agreeing.  When Dad asked what we wanted, we said "Papa Burger" in unison.  "And fries and root beer," I added.

He stared at us in the rear view mirror, perplexed. "Are you sure?  They're pretty big."

"We're hungry," I said.  "Being Papas is hard work."

"You can't both be Papas!"  my brother Ken exclaimed. "Where are the Mamas?"

"We adopted our kids," Bill said, playing along.

"Single men can't adopt kids," Mom pointed out. "You'll have to have Mamas sooner or later."

"Ok, so I'm the Papa and Bill's the Mama." Strangely, no one thought of the musical group.

"No way!" Bill protested.  "I'm not changing any diapers!"

"If you're a Papa and a Mama," Ken said, "You got to kiss."

"Ok."  I leaned over and tried to kiss Bill on the mouth, but he turned away, and I got his cheek.

"Ok, Skeezix, that's enough!" Dad yelled, suddenly angry.  "You're both getting Teen Burgers, and that's that!" (He always called me Skeezix when I failed to demonstrate heterosexual interest.)

We cringed in the back seat.  What was he so upset about?  We were just playing!

But sometimes even a hamburger can be a form of resistance.

Coincidentally, that was about the time Dad and Mom began insisting that I play a sport.   Sports as a remedy to gayness?