Post 60

Reviewed here are circumstances that were noted earlier in the lives of prominent gay men:

Claude Hartland, who wrote the first gay autobiography in America, had his fingers severely burned when he was four years old. For years, this prevented him from working with and learning from his father and brothers.

French writer and Nobel prizewinner, André Gide, wrote that he received very little of his father’s time.

Scientist, Simon LeVay, reported he always hated his father for criticizing his mother to whom he was deeply attached.

John Reid, the “best little boy in the world,” complained that he was not allowed to hammer, paint, or saw with his dad and had no male playmates within miles.

Football great, David Kopay, reported he never heard a kind word from his father.

Gold-medal Olympian, Greg Louganis, rejected his adoptive father because of his constant criticism and physical abuse.

Actor and writer, Alan Cumming, dreaded his father’s maniacal rage and feared he might die at his hands.

As a boy, William Aaron, Author of Straight, saw little of his salesman father and thought him inept and vastly inferior to his attractive, dynamic mother.

                  Some boys are fatherless or neglected and abused by them. Some either adore or resent their mothers, some of whom may be smothering or overshadow their fathers. And some boys condemn both parents. English poet, Sir Stephen Spender, penned his lament regarding his over-protective parents in his famous poem, quoted below. Had he been allowed to share growing up years with neighborhood youth, his life might have been entirely different.                   

MY PARENTS  By Stephen Spender

My parents kept me from children who were rough

Who threw words like stones and wore torn clothes

Their thighs showed through rags they ran in the street

And climbed cliffs and stripped by the country streams.

I feared more than tigers their muscles like iron

Their jerking hands and their knees tight on my arms

I feared the salt coarse pointing of those boys

Who copied my lisp behind me on the road.     

They were lithe they sprang out behind hedges

Like dogs to bark at my world. They threw mud

While I looked the other way, pretending to smile.

I longed to forgive them but they never smiled.

The list could go on, and the pattern should be apparent. None of these boys who grew up gay were warmly fellowshipped into the masculine world and enabled to solidify their male identity. The social-emotional dash between themselves and other men was damaged. They were different, outside their gender tribe, needing to be in. With homosexuality, it is fathering and brothering that needs to be repaired, a sharing of the heart, rather than the groin.