Meeting My Father

I met my father again for the first time. I first met him when I was about 35, and I met him again yesterday.

My father was killed in a farm accident when I was three years old. I have only two possible memories of him; I call them “possible” because they are vague and lacking in detail, as if trying to recall a dream I might have had a week ago. I really can’t be sure if I remember them, but I need something of him to be real.

I also have wisps of images of him, but no matter how long or hard I study them, mostly what I see is empty space.

When I was a child, I would ask my mother to tell me about him, and she always responded, “He was a wonderful man,” nothing more. It was not enough! Once she pulled out of a trunk his only suit for me to wear for a school play. She held it close to her, and said, “I can still smell your father.” I wanted to smell him too, but all I could smell was dusty, old wool.

I felt unfinished, as if there were big holes in who I was. What part of me came from my father? People would say, “You have your mother’s nose,” but no one ever said to me, “You have your father’s eyes or ears.” I felt as if my Y chromosome had made absolutely no contribution to who I was.

Meeting my father was no accident. I searched for him for years, looking for pieces in the fathers of my friends, teachers, Boy Scout leaders, coaches. Even ministers. My sister and I once talked about how we observed how fathers functioned in other families, trying to imagine how ours would have been in ours.

The first time I met my father was when my cousin visited me. I was 35. My cousin’s father was my father’s brother and they had been close. I knew my cousin would know something. He told me the few things he did know, but I pressed him, “I need to know more! I need to know that he had some faults. I need to make him human, someone I might be.” The little he knew helped to lower the bar enough that I felt that finally I might have a chance of getting over it.

Yesterday, I met my father again. My two sisters and I visited with my uncle and his wife, now sixty years after my father’s death. As I drove to meet them, I began to think, “I need to ask them some questions. I want some answers.”

After visiting for a while, my sister, Marilyn, said, “Jan and I were talking as we drove over here, and I want to know, did our father have a sense of humor?” I was stunned to learn that they needed answers, too. How selfish of me to think that I was the only one with big holes that needed filling. Here we were, all in our sixth decade, still searching for answers.

My uncle responded with a laugh, “Oh, yes, he had a great sense of humor, a very dry one.” He described it as a lot like another of their sons. That was the blade of spackling compound, which began filling the holes. After we talked a while, my uncle said, “That’s not much,” but it was so much more than I’d had before, and I knew that after over 60 years, they still loved my father, too.

Through the years, as I struggled to understand myself, I had believed that the sense of difference I felt was because I had no one to teach me how to be a man. Long before I understood that issue instead as one of sexuality, I attributed those “differences” to a deficiency of fathering. I thought that had my father lived, I would never have worried about being a sissy. I had spent so much time struggling with my father’s abandoning me before I was finished, trying to explain and change the way I was.

I have a clearer image of my father now. I will not be who he was, but I can be in man in my own way, as he was in his. I have come to know that my father’s death and my sexuality, each separately, have had profound influences on my life. And I am still unfinished.

Companions for Medical Visits

Quality, access, and affordability. Everyone is concerned about health care, especially those past 60. The sicker you are, the less satisfied you are with the care you receive.

Now, a new study suggests that taking a companion to visits with your physician will improve satisfaction with the care you receive. Writing in the Archives of Internal Medicine (July 14, 2008), Wolff and Roter suggest that having a companion allows even the frailest and most vulnerable to have more confidence in their doctors’ skills, to feel better about the information they receive, and to have a better relationship with their doctor.

Companions facilitated communication, recorded physician’s instructions, provided medical history, asked questions, and explained instructions to patients. In addition they offered moral support, provided transportation and handled details like appointments and paperwork. This study also suggests that the more functions the companion performed, the higher the patients’ satisfaction for the services received.

Companions most frequently included spouses and adult children or other relatives, although much less commonly friends or care providers. This presents a challenge for some gay people.

Some findings from my survey of mature men over the age of 60 with same sex attraction:

• As expected, the number having fair to poor health increased with age from 11% between 60-69 years of age to 38% for those past 80 years of age; however, half of the men above 60 reported their health as very good to excellent.
• Those perceiving their health to be a major life stress increased from 28% in the 6th decade to 50% into their 8th decade.
• In this survey, 50-60% of gay men between 60-79 years of age live alone, although, unexpectedly, this percentage decreased with increasing age.
• The number reporting having a partner increased from 44% between ages 60-69 years of age, to 75% over the age of 80, although the number of men past 80 taking the survey was small.
• Of interest is the number of men having a partner but living alone. In the younger age group, 58% reported having a partner, but living alone. This dropped to 38% for those 70-79 years, and even lower for those past 80.
• Over half of the respondents are or were married, and between 1/2 -2/3 of those having been married had children.
• Many of the men who responded to this survey are quite healthy and active, and many of the respondents are or have been married and have children who might be available to accompany them to their medical appointments. (The survey did not address the degree of involvement of families). Although many have friends who have become a “family of choice,” a significant number are in poor health, live alone, and would seem to have no one to be a medical companion.

Lessons learned:

• As your health declines, take someone with you to your appointments with your physician.
• As you become older or experience failing health, maintain relationships with family or those whom you have made your family of choice.

Other research has established that those who have the greatest life satisfaction are those who assertively advocate for themselves. We must however, support our community by being aware of those with great needs and limited financial and social resources.

We cannot assume from any survey that it is representative of all men who experience sexual attraction to other men, and in order to keep the scope of the project within manageable bounds, women were not asked to participate.

Dirty Old Men

In the popular culture, mature gay men are characterized as anxious and depressed, lonely and isolated, over-sexed, and predatory of the young but rejected by them. These stereotypes persist even though repeatedly shown to be inaccurate.

Several models for “coming out” have been described. Most start with an early sense of “difference.” Next is experimentation with man on man sex, although initially considered “just sex,” not homosexual sex. The next step is coming out, i.e. public acknowledgment of being gay. This stage has become politicized so that some consider remaining closeted as ignorant, morally weak and shameful.

Where these models become problematic, is that they suggest that the final stage of “stabilization/commitment” can not occur with out public acknowledgment of one’s homosexuality. On the contrary, I have found that many men who are “passing” in the heterosexual world have made strong commitments in same sex relationships and do not wish to be part of “the gay scene.”

For many mature men, the process of coming out, when it occurs at all, is much different. For example, men who have been married often begin to come out on average 10 years later than men who have never been married.

Gay men have been described as:

• Stereotypical – closeted
• Passing – partitioning off their homosexual and heterosexual lives
• Affirmative – strong self-identification as gay

This suggests that the only acceptable solution is to have a strong and public self-identification as being gay.

Many mature men have careers and families in which oppression and threat of loss are considerable. Passing is adaptive and critical to avoid great loss, often real, sometimes imagined. Many have found that their sexual orientation was not central to their core self-identification.

Although men as they grow older often have stronger self-identification as homosexual, they may prefer not to be referred to as gay. One man said to me, “I can’t be gay! I love my family and sports too much.” Research that focuses on “gay” men has excluded many men who have same sex attractions and sexual behaviors.

Although the sense of difference and experimentation with homosexual behaviors appear to be a part of most gay men’s lives, it seems to me that the next stage in development is to de-construct the internal myths about homosexuality by a conscious re-evaluation of those values given to us by family, religion and society. Then one can re-construct a value system, internally based, on a much more personal choice of what it means, as Erickson described, to have an inherent sense of goodness and a life which is perceived as meaningful.

Once that process is complete, a man can open himself to a committed relationship with another man. Gay society and society at large must recognize that there is not one normative life course. What is true about all mature men who experience a sexual attraction toward other men, is that there is nothing true about all of them.

Politics and Patriotism

Over July 4th, we sang, “Oh, beautiful, for spacious skies.” Those familiar words, “purple mountains majesty” and “amber waves of grain,” awakened proud feelings about America. The words “heroes proved in liberating strife” and “more than self their country loved” brought tears to many eyes.

One phrase, however, stuck in my mind, “God mend thine every flaw.” America is beautiful. Flawless? Hardly. I was relieved that we didn’t sing, “God Bless America.” I’ve been struggling with that one because it often feels as if God is being asked to take sides.

One of the more interesting recent political strategies is to take a position and label it in such a way that the alternative position is decidedly negative. Consider, “Choose Life.” It is nearly impossible to support the implied, singular alternative, “Choose death.” This strategy suggests that only two alternatives exist, mine and the wrong one. Now “patriotism” is being politicized.

At the end of the Viet Nam war, signs were paraded which said, “My country, right or wrong” and “America, love it or leave it.” At that time in my life I had not learned to question authority, but I was an early opponent to the War in Iraq. It was difficult to speak out against it because either you supported the war or you were accused of supporting terrorism.

I recently met a retired Marine, who had served two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. During his deployments, he risked his life on a daily basis and his separation from family contributed to two failed marriages. It was after meeting him that I began to clarify my own definition for patriotism: Sacrifice in service for love of country. Wearing a flag pin does not prove patriotism any more than dissent proves a lack of it.

In the survey of mature gay men I conducted, over 1/3 of the respondents had served in the U. S. military, and 85% received honorable discharges. Stereotypes of gay men suggest that it is not safe to shower with them, much less, share a fox hole, and that gay men cannot be trusted with secret information. Gay men, such as the Marine I mentioned, have proven themselves in the military through service and heroism, loving this country’s values more than life itself.

Perhaps the best part of growing older is recognizing that most issues are more grey than black and white. Patriotism means love of country, duty and service, but it also means loving it too much to leave it as it is.

May God bless all humanity and help us as Americans to mend all of our flaws.

Willful Ignorance

“How could you not know that you were gay until you were 40!” I’m asked this question frequently, particularly by disbelieving men who have “always known.” But I was totally ignorant.

James P. Carse, in The Religious Case against Belief, describes three kinds of ignorance:

• Ordinary Ignorance
• Willful Ignorance
• Higher Ignorance

Ordinary Ignorance

Ordinary ignorance is a lack of knowledge, and is common to all of us. It is knowledge about something which could be known, but may be of little use or interest. For example, “Where was the hottest recorded temperature in the world?” If I wanted to know that I could, and I would probably Google it to find the answer. So far, though, I just don’t care.

Sometimes we are asked, “What do gay men do when they have sex?” If you really want to know, you can; it is know-able.

Willful Ignorance

Willful ignorance is the attempt to avoid clear and available knowledge, especially when that knowledge might lead to undesirable consequences. Examples would include questions about global warming and evolution. That’s why I didn’t know I was gay until I was 40.

Carse says “beliefs” are based upon willful ignorance. Often, one voice speaks for all with dogmatic certainty, alleging to have definitive answers. It restricts thought to narrow boundaries and discourages discourse.

I once went to a church where the preacher was speaking about the story of Jonah and the fish. (He had already established with dogmatic certainty that it was a fish, not a whale.) He then said, “And, if you do not believe that Jonah could reach out and touch the insides of the belly of that fish, you are not a Christian.” No room for questioning or invitation to discussion.

Carse says that beliefs are fervently held and encourage hostility toward non-believers. Think: Crusades. Think: George Bush, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” If you do not agree with us, you are our enemy.

“Homosexuality is an abomination” is another example. Believers construct an identity, erect boundaries, become locked into conflict rather than dialogue, and foster aggression toward those who think differently.

To be balanced and fair, to say that anyone who does not support gay rights is “homophobic” does precisely the same thing. It is a label used by self-identified gay people which sets a boundary and fosters conflict. It labels “the others” as suffering from a neurosis. Isn’t that the same thing that gay people objected to when they were called sick and perverted?

Before I accepted being gay, I partitioned off any same sex attractions. Like me, many who come out as older men use willful ignorance as a way of avoiding both the perceived and real consequences of accepting this knowledge.

Higher Ignorance

Higher ignorance is seeking knowledge while at the same time recognizing that some truths are unknowable. It promotes contemplation, dialogue and interpretation.

The research project in which I have been engaged has led to knew understandings, but it falls infinitely short of the whole truth about mature men with same sex attraction. As knowledge evolves, it raises more questions; it promotes opportunities for further discourse.

Your comments are welcomed to expand our knowledge as we seek the unknowable truths.

Intergenerational Gay Men's Relationships

Different, but not deficient.

I recently had an opportunity to discuss with several men the issue of the relationships of younger gay men with older gay men. Although a rather small group of men, some of their insights were quite interesting, and their experiences were quite similar.

These younger men expressed they had always had an attraction to men who are significantly older than they are. One said, that even as a teen, he not only knew that he was gay, but he also recognized that the men he was attracted to were much older.

He said that his gay friends could not understand this attraction. He not only felt “different” because he was gay, but different from his gay friends as well. He felt a sense of isolation, even within the gay community.

He also experienced a sense of rejection from the older men, who felt that he must be a “hustler,” someone who could only be interested in them for what they might give him. They doubted that his attraction was sincere. Even when older, more successful and independent, his motivations were questioned. He said that much of his joy in the relationship was caring for the older man, in sexual and other ways, and not the reverse; he felt quite comfortable with his ability to take care of himself.

As he got older, he continued to be interested in older men. Now past 60, he continues to be attracted to men much older. Another man of 65 expressed the same thing, saying with a laugh he’s attracted to men “just on the edge of entering the nursing home.”

Several of the younger men said that they only began to feel “normal” when they realized there were lots of other gay men who experienced this same inter-generational attraction.

Some of the older men found these young men attractive, but doubted the interest of the younger man because they believed that at their age they could no longer be attractive to anyone.

How easily we buy into stereotypes and resist letting go of them. We believe that what is true for one must be true of all.

We don’t choose whom we fall in love with, nor can we ever explain it. What is true of some is only true for some, not all. Feeling normal often begins by finding others who are like us, and that we’re different, but not deficient.