Way back in the 70's, my mom broke down and told me Dad was a "homosexual." [View all]
Last edited Sat Apr 13, 2019, 01:56 AM - Edit history (4)
Dad never told me, just Mom, and she swore me to secrecy. She was explaining to me, her oldest, why she was so miserable. They stayed married for years -- till the youngest was in college. If you ever saw the movie, Far From Heaven, that's the closest on-screen depiction I've seen of a family like ours. But my parents stayed together much longer than the couple in the movie (neither feeling they had any choice) and my mother didn't have an almost-boyfriend on the side.
It's hard to describe to someone who wasn't alive then how publicly invisible gay people were while I was growing up. I didn't know a single other person with a gay parent. How could I? There was no internet back then. If there was anyone else in my school with a gay parent, they weren't talking about it.
And then it was the 80's, and the "AIDS crisis," -- the so-called "gay man's disease" that had no known cause, treatment, or cure -- and my parents split up and my father moved in with a partner. During the next decade, almost all of my dad's gay friends ended up dying of AIDS, but Dad and his partner managed to live together more than twenty years. Dad didn't live long enough to see marriage equality, but he would have been so proud.
The beautiful photos in this NY Times story, all dated after Mom told me about Dad, reminded me of how different it must be to grow up in a world where gay people AREN'T invisible.
And now one of them might be running for President!
A salute to Pete Buttigieg, for being the first openly gay candidate but surely not the last!
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/lens/lesbian-lives-movement-jeb.html?fbclid=IwAR31Hc2zvEshJveknsXA1OZxKJht6XxshJKFrgt1HbJprGZmU74pTUUq0I8
Photos of Lesbian Lives Meant to Inspire a Movement
Joan E. Biren began to photograph at a time when it was almost impossible to find authentic images of lesbians and aimed to help build a movement for their liberation.
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