Read Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter Online
Authors: Alison Wearing
“You look great!” people said to me in greeting.
And as happy as I was for the stamp of approval, the comment filled me with rage and contempt. I looked
great
? Was everyone so deluded? Could they not
see
?
Actually, a few people could, but the moment they expressed concernâ“How
are
you?” “Is everything
okay
?ӉI would distance myself, because no one could find out what I was doing, what was really happening, what a disaster I was. The mortification would have killed me. Or so I felt.
I had to get out, get away, start fresh, find my place. Wherever that was. I decided I needed to leave the country. Better still, the continent. To finish school as quickly as possible and move to Europeâto my mind, a mythical paradise.
In the meantime, I tried to stay sane. Stop going to parties. Pass my classes. Save money. Spend time with people like Mary Smithey, my friend from sweeter, more innocent days. And play the piano, which nourished and moved me when little else could.
When we were kids, my brothers and I used to joke that we were the victims of auricular torture: awoken on Saturday mornings to the sound of my mother's students mutilating Mozart à la Suzuki Method. The upside of the torture was that after sixteen years of repetitive listening, I was able to work through
the entire series of piano books in a matter of a few months, practising three to four hours a day; on weekends, as much as eight. The music was already there, deep in my cell tissue, so it was just a matter of strengthening my fingers and learning how to move them in the right way to get the music out.
Soon, my mother felt that I was playing well enough to take on some of the students she couldn't accommodate, so carloads of obligated children began to arrive on a weekly basis, music books in hand. I couldn't bear to put even the advanced ones through the tedium of scales and sight-reading (besides, I didn't know how to do either), so I focused instead on getting music into their skin, turning phrases into stories or dances. My students and I all enjoyed each other, we had some good laughs and the odd virtuosic moment, but after a year of lessons, they could no more have passed a conservatory exam than have ridden a camel. I hoped to be out of the country, cash in hand, before any of their parents really noticed.
On weekends, I moonlighted at a country club. As balls went pinging across the rolling, poison-soaked lawns, I served food, some of which was spat upon by the cook or dropped deliberately on the floor before being placed on a plate for the customer who had had the gall to make a special order. We catered an exorbitant number of weddings, all of them so similar I sometimes wondered if the same people were back again. My private goal was to have every plate of dessert hurled onto the tables before the
hardy-har-har
speech about the groom's embarrassing past and the inevitable gush about love and the glories of marriage.
Real love, real life, lay elsewhere. In Europe somewhere. I was convinced of it.
A friend of my mother's knew of a university in France that offered a language program for foreign students, and my mother helped me to apply. My dad thought it was a wonderful ideaâsure to be very stimulatingâand he pored over maps of France with me, plotting possible weekend getaways, while Lance sat beside us excitedly reading excerpts aloud from the Michelin Guide: France.
The day my letter of acceptance came in the mailâthat strange cursive writing and all of those foreign stamps!âI felt a surge of true excitement for the first time in years. I remember my mother sitting at the piano, lifting her hands from the middle of a Rachmaninoff prelude, smiling as I read the letter aloud.
A few months later, at seventeen, having crammed two semesters of high school into oneâtwo dead frogs in one jar, as it wereâI packed two suitcases, climbed onto a taut emotional slingshot, and pinged myself to France.
The Plan: I would learn French, find the meaning of life, never go back!
Specifically: I would do the language course. Speak fluently in no time. Then, wander the French countryside until I came to a cobblestone village with terra-cotta tiled roofs, herbs growing wild out of stone walls and a village of people sitting around a long wooden table sharing a baguette. They would look up in the middle of a discussion about Flaubert and smile when I approached, tell me I look terribleâsay,
here, darling, have some chocolate
; and ah, mon Dieu,
what a very cultured thing to have a gay father. And a Simone de Beauvoirâtype mother, how absolutely marvellous. Here
, chérie,
âave a glass of Bordeaux
.
Shortly thereafter, a man without a word of English would fall dramatically in love with me, serenading me with baritone arias while scooping me into his arms and carrying me through fields of lavender to a cottage on a hillside. When not being massaged or made love to, I would read beautifully undissected novels under an arched window, sleep under frescoes, and picnic in the shadows of cypress trees. And I would live in that perfect place forever.
None of which happened.
But I did fall in love with France. With walking. With admiring buildings and cobblestones, courtyards and fountains, vistas that made me laugh with sheer pleasure. I loved speaking French. Eating baguettes. Getting quietly chubby
and having no one notice or care. When my language course finished, I got a train pass and clackety-clacked around Europe for three months, sleeping in hostels, jumping on and off trains whenever I felt inspired, and filling myself with beauty as I wandered, drawing nourishment from landscapes and languages, free concerts and museums, passing friendships, movable feasts and shared food.
Just before my eighteenth birthday, after six months of living and travelling on my own, I met up with my dad and Lance in Amsterdam. The three of us spent several days wandering arm in arm along the canals, eating
rijsttafel
feasts, and looking at Van Gogh from every angle. I particularly remember the way the artist drew hands. From there, Lance cycled off to Belgium, while my dad and I took the train to Paris and checked ourselves into a lovely tumbledown
pension
with patchy carpeted hallways and thick floral drapery.
There was a lot of museum-visiting. The odd concert. One ballet. But the thing I remember most was that the hotelier brought us breakfast, setting the tray down on the weathered carpet, knocking on our door and then creaking away. We would roll out of bed and open the door to be greeted by the miracle of a hot breakfast under linen, and balance it over to the table by the window.
Dad would pour the coffee, I, the hot milk, and we would begin chatting. Perhaps it was the distance from home, the anonymity of that hotel room, or the new independence I felt after living in a foreign country on my own. Whatever it was, all the questions I had never before had the courage to ask
found passage to the surface there, and each one my dad considered carefully before answering with excruciating honesty. Many mornings, we talked so much it was after noon before we got out of our pyjamas.
As we divided up the pastries, passed each other the butter, the jam, he confided the torment he had experienced about his sexual orientation at different points in his life, the anguish he had felt in deciding how to go about living truthfully, how long he had struggled with the question of his being gay. Far longer, I learned (taking a hard gulp of coffee), than I would ever have guessed.
“If I'd been born ten years earlier, it's very possible that I would never have come out at all,” he said in response to something I had asked about the timing of it, his being in the vanguard of the gay revolution. “And if I'd been born ten years later, most probably I would never have married.”
He paused. Reached over, touched my arm and smiled. “But I'm glad things went exactly as they did,” he said, his eyes glistening in the dust-speckled light.
He took a bite of his croissant, a crumble of greasy, golden flakes gathering on his lips and fingers, a few on the cuff of his periwinkle-coloured raw-silk pyjamas. With his eyes closed, he licked each finger dreamily, taking so much delight in that damn croissant that I beamed just watching him.
I began coming out as the daughter of a fairy shortly after those Paris chats. Like many people who come into the truth of themselves, I began by sussing out a few sympathetic people far removed from my world and trying the news out on them. When that wasn't catastrophic, I took note of how good it felt to exhale and be myself, and went from there. Slowly, one person at a time.
Mostly it was easy; people were surprisingly accepting. But I remember in my second year of university seeing an article in the student newspaper about the difficulties of being gay on campus and still being so secretive about my life that I would not even sit at the same table with someone reading that issue. It was the late 1980s, when
AIDS
was roaring through the gay community and the public perception of gay people was formed largely by images of gaunt, blistered men. Faces that haunted us all. Those were frightening, devastating times. The death toll was immense, impossible to calculate. To contract
AIDS
was to die. And many of my dad's friends did. I knew who was HIV-positive and I used to watch them at Dad and Lance's dinner parties, wondering how they managed to talk, eat and laugh, knowing a monster was devouring them from within.
One Christmas, Dad invited me to a concert of the Toronto Gay Men's Chorus, a variously talented group that performed a variety of music from Brahms to Broadway. Dad was the conductor. For the choir's finale, he parted the group in two, opening a wide space in the middle of the stage where a long
white canvas had been hung. Every man held a candle, the lights dimmed, and Dad conducted the choir in a half-tempo,
pianissimo
performance of “Stille Nacht”â “Silent Night” in its original German.
The stage was dark, save the teardrop flames of the candles and a small spotlight illuminating my dad's dancing arms. As the choir began the second slow verse, slides were projected centre stage: thin, blemished men in hospital beds, gaunt smiling faces surrounded by loved ones; face after face after breaths-from-death face.
“Schlaf in himmliche Ruh' ⦔
Sleep in heavenly peace.
It didn't matter if the faces were familiar or not, the slowness of the tempo allowed everyone who needed to, to sob. Which I did not, though some were faces I recognized. People I knew, but none I had been very close to. And I had not yet learned to share heart the way I do now. Today I would have cried; then I did not.
Until the last verse, when the images changed. To simple scenes of love and celebration: families arm in arm around Christmas trees and dinner tables, athletic men embracing at Pride Day parades, mothers and sons, an older man with a broad smile holding a sign saying P
ROUD OF MY
G
AY
S
ON
, and then me at age fourteen, cheek to cheek with my dad, arms flung around his neck, the two of us cuddling, all teeth and brown eyes, the same curly dark hair. There were some of my brothers laughing with Dad in the kitchen, then one of all of us, including my mother.
Throughout it all, against the backdrop of the family he had left in order to come into the person he is, my dad was held in a circle of light, his arms sweeping through the air with a conductor's transcendent grace.
In all my life, I had never seen him more beautiful.
⢠a small blue diary
⢠newspaper clippings from
The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Body Politic, Weekend Magazine
⢠drafts of letters to friends and family
⢠letters received from friends
⢠notes to self
⢠inspiring excerpts from plays
⢠loose-leaf journal entries
⢠“My Story”
1978!
I feel compelled to take up this diary again, to write from the heart and the gut about the excitement and trepidation of the last few months, my changing perceptions of where I am and where I am going. Perhaps by recording this I can find some release from the churning and re-churning of those events and thoughts which I dwell on constantly. And, if anyone else reads this, perhaps they will start to understand my view of where I am at.
Halifax, 28.6.78
Finally after years of wondering about myself, wanting and often hoping that someone else would take the initiative, I have taken it myself. Attending the Association of Canadian Orchestras Conference in Halifax gave me the opportunity to do some essential interviewing of Nova Scotia Liberals, but also to be in the same city where the annual Canadian Gay Conference was taking place.
For a year or two now, I have walked by gay bars, discos and baths in Toronto without daring to venture inside. I have been titillated by
Playgirl
and
Mandate
and have learned something from the outside by reading
Directions
*
,
Body Politic
, and an article about gay capitalism in
Toronto Life
(September 1976). I guess the latter was crucial, as it described in detail a Toronto gay scene, which I supposed existed, but which
I knew nothing about. Then, there was the article about Michael Lynch as a homosexual father in the
Globe
.
*
It leapt out of the paper at me, because here was someone with whom I could identify: University of Toronto professor, about my age who looked like a normal, down-to-earth person. He loved his son and wanted to be a good father. He did not see that his being gay made that impossible.