I am working with a young Mexican American to tell his story on this site. He said that he was very touched by this essay I’d posted earlier on this web site. Many of us who are gay have had difficult relationships with our fathers. Although a discredited theory, in the past, being gay was attributed to a distant relationship with one’s father.

In response to having read this post, he sent me this Cat Stevens video. I thought it would be useful to re-print the essay with this video as an introduction to his story.

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.

Meeting My Father

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.

I just received a note from my ex-wife who said this essay brought tears to her eyes. I decided it was worth re-posting.

Disney's "Princess and the Frog"

I was returning home from the movies with my three granddaughters, when the oldest, who is one day short of being ten, asked me, “How come all boys like football?”

We had just been to see “The Princess and the Frog” and had been discussing the best and the worst parts of that movie. I was pleased that they seemed to understand the movie’s depiction of the differences between growing up rich and growing up poor, and the point made of how girls “from a background like yours” – poor and African American — must be careful not to dream too large.

They loved the song, “Dig a Little Deeper,” and seemed to understand that we all must dig deep within ourselves to understand who we are and what values are important to us.

More than just a story about a handsome prince and a beautiful prince, the story also suggested that success was really about hard work and loving other people. I particularly enjoyed the subtext about the social benefits of sharing meals with family and friends, and it was fun to experience the music, cuisine and atmosphere of New Orleans.

Then came the question about football, “How come all boys like football?” Their father had gone with a group of his friends to see the Cleveland Browns play, in one of the most traditional of all male bonding experiences.

Having always preferred a movie to a football game, I responded to my granddaughter in generic fashion, “They don’t. Not all boys do like football.”

“But Grandpa, if they don’t like football, they have to pretend they do. Otherwise the other boys make fun of them.”

“Yes, that’s true,” I responded, remembering how I have tried to have a few key sports phrases available to insert into conversations with other men so that I didn’t feel completely marginalized.

Then she said, “It seems to me that boys get teased more if they don’t like football, or if they do things other boys don’t like. Boys are afraid they will be left out or won’t be that important. They don’t do that to girls as much. I like to play football and kick ball and they don’t tease me. But if a boy wants to play with dolls, they treat them awful.”

I love the return from overly-digitalized animation to the 2D hand-drawn, which was beautifully done. In the movie, the voodoo man Dr. Facilier attempts to use Prince Naveen as his puppet in order to take over New Orleans, but the Prince and Tiana stay true to themselves. It is a well-told even if well-worn story.

I asked my granddaughter how her comment about boys having to pretend to like football was like the movie. She replied, “Sometimes it’s very important to remain true to who you really are, even when it’s very, very hard to do it.”

Sometimes we congratulate ourselves on how far we’ve come with acceptance of differences in sexual orientation. But my granddaughter has reminded me that there are still little boys growing up with the same pain that haunted me as a little boy who didn’t like football, boys who are afraid to dream because their dreams don’t match with their background.

Habibi is perhaps the only opportunity in New York for gay people of Middle Eastern descent to interact openly in an organized setting.

To see the rest of the New York Times article by Chadwick Moore, click here.