Hanging Out My Flag

A story of pride

Yesterday was an important day in American history. No president has ever been arrested and charged with felonies — much less crimes that fall under the Espionage Act. There is significant threat of political unrest. I urge everyone to pray and work for domestic peace. I will write more about these events shortly.

But today, no Trump.

I marked this day to recognize Pride Month. I’m deeply grateful for the enlargement of the rights of Black Americans, women, and LGBTQ people over recent decades. Not only has it been a privilege to participate in these justice movements, but it has been an honor to hear previously untold personal stories and to be challenged to understand Christian tradition and theology with a wider sense of God’s loving embrace of all humankind. That Pride Month has become a source of contention and cultural backlash is ugly — and unacceptable — in every possible way.

So, I’m hanging out the rainbow flag here at the Cottage in two ways:

First: Live Zoom

On THIRD THURSDAY, June 15 at 3PM Eastern, I’ll host Paul Raushenbush, President of the Interfaith Alliance, in a live conversation about Pride Month, interfaith work, cultural backlash, and the law (more details below). This will be a PAID SUBSCRIBER event. To receive the link to the livestream, you can UPGRADE by clicking on the button below:

If you want to attend but can’t afford a paid subscription, just email us at the.cottage.email@gmail.com. No one is ever turned away for lack of funds.

Second: A Very Personal Essay

The essay below is one of the most vulnerable and beautiful things I’ve ever written. It originally appeared in June 2021, when many fewer people read The Cottage. We’re a larger community now — and I wanted to share this tender story, “Dad Pride,” with all of you. Some of you may have a similar story. Some may be surprised. Some may find it hard.

Whatever your reaction, I hope you will receive my story with grace.

In it, I bear witness. And, in this time of fear and scapegoating, bearing witness is both personal and political.

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Dad Pride: It Wasn't “Leave It to Beaver,” But It Was Family
June 20, 2021

When cleaning out my late parents’ house, I found my father’s wallet. The dark brown leather Amity trifold was smooth, still gently curved from the years it resided in the back pocket of my dad’s snug jeans. I opened it, surprised to discover the contents – old credit cards, a ten-dollar bill, membership cards, and family pictures. 

My dad had died a dozen years before my mother and it appeared she’d put the wallet in the back of a dresser drawer without looking at what remained inside. 

The collection of photographs were all from the 1950s and 1960s – a small black and white of my parents on their wedding day, a snapshot of my mother in surprisingly sexy shorts, a family picture from Christmas 1961, and a number of elementary school photos of me, my brother, and sister. A small, worn image was stashed between them. 

It was a single frame cut from one of those photo booth strips of two men, one of whom was my father. I didn’t recognize the other. But he appeared in two additional wallet pictures sitting close to dad, smiling with that warm possessive smile of an intimate. My father had carried those pictures, hidden amid the photographs of grinning, toothless first-graders, for more than forty years. 

And it dawned on me that the man in the pictures, whose name I will never know, was my father’s first love. 

* * * * *

My parents were married in 1958, and celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary shortly before my father died. Marriage is always complicated, but theirs more complicated than most. 

I have no idea when my mother knew that my father was either bisexual or gay. Before Stonewall. Before same-sex love was spoken of openly, before political and social movements for human rights for LGBTQ people. Before the acronyms.

But I remember when I did. I was fourteen. It was a Tuesday. My father was a florist and he worked every Saturday. Tuesday was his day off. On this particular Tuesday - a hot autumn day in Scottsdale, Arizona - I had cramps and the high school nurse sent me home midday. My mother was at work, and my father didn’t answer the phone. So, I walked to our house. I opened the door of our 1970s split-level. When you walked in the front, the opposite wall of the foyer was glass, with a full view of the backyard pool. Dad was in the pool. But he wasn’t alone. His co-worker Gary* (*not his real name), another floral designer, a much-younger man who had just arrived in Arizona from the midwest, was lounging on a raft. My father was applying tanning oil to Gary’s back. Gary looked up at dad - with the sort of look which, until then, I had only seen pass between men and women.

I ran into my bedroom, hoping they hadn’t seen me. My dad was gay.

* * * * *

Eventually, I told my brother and sister. They both knew, having discovered the family “secret” in different ways. In those days, that’s what familial gayness was - a secret, something to be hidden or problem to be fixed, something sinful and shameful. We children were good soldiers in the task of keeping the secret. We never spoke of it as a group with my mother until after my father died.

While it was confusing growing up, knowing my father’s sexuality also helped me eventually understand the things that happened around me. We moved a lot. There were times that my father went to the “hospital” and we children weren’t allowed to visit. He was “sick,” but the illness had no name. Once, the police brought him home covered with bruises. My mother said that he’d argued with his father, had walked home from work (about 10 miles!), and had fallen in a ditch. At least part of the story was true - as I had witnessed my grandfather’s cruel treatment of his son.

Now I understand much better. We moved to evade detection. My dad probably went to some sort of anti-gay therapy. He was most likely the victim of gay bashing. When we finally went to Arizona, my parents cut ties with my grandfather. For good reason. And good riddance.

My father was remarkable. He was artistic and accepting, with a keen sense of beauty and appreciation of nature. He was funny, drove a Jeep, listened to the latest rock and popular music. He loved the desert, loved to dance, loved movies and Broadway shows. He was unbeatable at bowling and miniature golf, and held several weight-lifting records at the local gym. My friends adored him - he was the coolest dad ever. His deep spirituality manifested itself in serving the sick (he always reached out toward those who were ill and dying), filling the world with flowers, reading the Bible, and leading the altar guild at his church. Unlike my mother (who leaned toward theological skepticism), my dad was a true believer, an adult-baptized Methodist who dedicated himself to loving God and others.

The “secret” didn’t negate all these things. Moving to Arizona didn’t “fix” being gay (as I suspect my mother thought it might). But it gave us all a chance to breathe, to start over, to see things differently, to be free. My always-closeted dad whose family kept his not-so-secret secret navigated rejection and shame toward a great capacity for love and friendship. The story started in the 1950s, stretched through the silent 1960s, was shaped by political and social changes of the 1970s, and worried about AIDS in the 1980s. It wasn’t your typical mid-century family - no Leave It to Beaver for us - but it was our family. My family.

I thought my parents might divorce. Instead, they grew closer as they got older. They laughed more than I remembered from childhood. I don’t know how they made their relationship work. After my dad died, I asked my mother. She said it was “complicated.” I told her she could date again. She said, “No. I don’t want to. I loved your dad. He was my best friend. My very best friend.”

And then I asked, “Can I write about dad being gay? About our family?” She replied, “After I die. Tell the story as you see it. Tell the truth.” She never spoke of it again.

* * * * *

Father’s Day. Pride Month.

The truth is whenever I see a rainbow, I think of my father. “Bob, B-O-B” he’d say. “The same forward and backward.” And he’d laugh as if he’d invented the joke and was the cleverest Bob in history. Bob, the same man, “straight” and gay, married and with lovers, florist and desert-dweller, churchman and secret-keeper. Forward and backward. What was seen and unseen.

The first person to whom I told this story - in its fullness and complications - was the Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson, the first out gay bishop in the Episcopal Church. We’d become friends through work, and one night, after teaching clergy in his diocese, I cried and cried and shared the story of my dad.

“You know, Diana,” he responded, “yours is a story that will be increasing rare.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“As LGBT people gain acceptance, as the laws change, gay and lesbian people will marry and have children,” he said, “there will be fewer and fewer marriages like your parents’. Stories like yours - stories of the last days before gay rights - will become history.”

He added: “You bear witness, you hold an important part of gay history. I hope you are proud of your dad - and your mother. They were part of our community. Their story matters. I hope you’ll hold that history with pride.”

I’ve learned. And I am proud.

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INSPIRATION

Without pause, grabbing and cutting, placing and jabbing, he put all the flowers into the vase. . . He would sometimes produce a surprisingly seductive arrangement using only white flowers, by turns flimsy and then juicy, moving from the barest edge of peach to cream and then sheering off to the green of pooled water. The whole composition filled your eye with the unexpected ardor of that virginal color.

He was caught in opposing values, On the one hand, he held the belief, amounting to a religious faith, that there is an underlying something - a law, a rule, an innate recognition of rightness - that exists within matter itself and is understood as elegance. . . On the other hand, he stands at the ready with his pocket-knife, just gazing at the welter of cut stems. Then slashing and cutting, jabbing in a perfectly wild, even dangerous way, shaking whatever is at hand, finding a place for all of it. This is spontaneity; trust in the face of choice, buoyancy at the edge of chaos. Here, alone in the design room, he appears to be on the side of the demons of originality, not the angels of order.

He was by nature a quiet man. He brought this silence, an aura of quiet, to the flowers he arranged. But he didn’t arrange them. It was himself he arranged.
— Patricia Hampl, The Florist’s Daughter

When all Americans are treated as equal,
no matter who they are or whom they love,
we are all more free.

— Barack Obama

For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive. . .

So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.
— Audre Lorde, from “A Litany for Survival,” please read the entire poem HERE

there are some things too meaningful for talking
and even feeling leaves us full of grief
at all we touch and need and
can never speak of

we are living lives that we can‘t state the name of
we are loving things that
we can never bear
we attempt belief in things that we can not explain
and we rest uneasy in this
sometimes seeming cruel game

and we rest with tension so
beautiful
its heartaching
— Pádraig Ó Tuama, from “A Reading from the Book of Exiles” please read the entire poem HERE

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MORE ABOUT THIRD THURSDAY AT THE COTTAGE

Paul Raushenbush, President of the Interfaith Alliance, joins me on June 15 at 3PM EASTERN for the monthly paid subscriber live gathering.

If you’d like to join the paid community, click the button below to upgrade:

Paul is the great-grandson of both theologian Walter Rauschenbusch and Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. He’s an ordained Baptist minister, married to Brad, and is dad to two beautiful sons. We’ll be talking about LGBTQ issues and social justice, Pride Month, and the super majority on the Supreme Court.

We’ve been friends for a long time — first as blogging partners at Beliefnet and then he was my editor at Huffington Post.

If you want to attend but can’t afford a paid subscription, just email us at the.cottage.email@gmail.com. No one is ever turned away for lack of funds.

Links will be sent out about two hours before the conversation on June 15. If you can’t attend live, don’t worry. The recording will be sent to all paid subscribers after the live conversation.

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We should indeed keep calm in the face of difference, and live our lives in a state of inclusion and wonder at the diversity of humanity.

— George Takei