Oy Vey My Daughter's Gay (17 page)

“If you
can’t say something bad about a relationship,
 you
shouldn’t say anything at all.” - (‘George’ in Seinfeld.)

John and I had just spent Christmas in Barcelona with
Lila when she introduced us to Miranda for the first time. Miranda had passed
the holidays in England with her mother, but we had heard a lot about her and
it was all positive. Lila had alternated between grinning and texting almost
constantly during our three days in Spain. Her excitement was infectious and we
enjoyed a particularly happy and carefree few days in each other’s company in
the warm, winter sun. While enjoying some tapas in a beautifully old and
traditional Spanish restaurant, I received a text from Miranda. It was the
first contact John and I had had with her and we were very excited. I read it
quickly, smiled and read it out loud:
‘Hi, Mr and Mrs McCay. Hope you are
enjoying your holiday. I’m looking forward to meeting you next week. Miranda.’

John and I looked at each other in confusion. “Mr and Mrs?”
I said. “What’s that about?”  Lila just smiled knowingly. I texted back:
‘Looking
forward to meeting you too and please call us Sandra and John.
‘We realised
later that by using our surnames, Miranda had granted us the power of
permission to call us by our first names: a strategic move which duly impressed
us. Knowing how to address a partner’s parents can be a troublesome area of
etiquette, but Miranda had neatly side-swerved the issue in a simple text.
Round one to her. There was little chance of us finding out anything bad about
this girl; we already knew her, warts and all, courtesy of Lila’s fateful blog.
It must have been very difficult for Miranda, having to face us knowing that we
had read about some of the most embarrassing and intimate details of her
romantic life.

Round two was also Miranda’s, when, on arriving at our
house, she presented me with a very expensive and hand-picked cheese board,
together with speciality olive oil and balsamic vinegar (some of my very
favourite things, which she’d obviously discussed with Lila). Miranda was
attractive, cultured, intelligent and charming
- 
and
she was an obsessive reader
. We were quickly won over. She was also
the perfect houseguest: considerate, appreciative and mannerly. Any awkwardness
we anticipated whilst making up the double bed in Lila’s old room seemed to
melt away on meeting her. Both John and I felt that we’d know her for ages, so
comfortable were we in her company. Over dinner she talked politics with John;
poetry with me and politely laughed at the obligatory parental stories of Lila
growing up.

The next day, Lila, Miranda and I embarked on a girly
shopping trip, during which we laughed and joked as if we’d known each other
for years. As Lila emerged from the dressing room in yet another hideous
concoction, I began to suspect that she was choosing ridiculous clothes for the
precise purpose of creating a rapport between Miranda and me. Over lunch I
discovered Miranda was a vegetarian. Even that she carried off with aplomb,
apologising for causing any inconvenience whilst struggling to find a suitable
dish on the menu. By contrast, when Lila later went ‘veggie’ she did so with
all the fervour of a reformed smoker and questioned the ingredients of every
meal I presented to her.

We had organised a party to introduce Miranda into my
family. Prior to the party, she sought me out and inquired as to the family
connection and interests of each guest. Later, with the party in full swing,
John, Lila and I looked on in awe as Miranda proceeded to spend time talking
and bonding with each guest individually. I can confidently say that, by the
end of that night, she knew more about my family than Lila did. My family, for
their part, fell under her spell. We were thrilled that Lila had finally found
someone worthy of her. Miranda appeared to have it all. Like Lila’s first love,
she was a lawyer. From her cut-glass English accent and impeccable manners, we
surmised that she came from a long-standing family of lawyers who probably
resided in a country pile (I’m not even sure what that is, but the word fits my
image), sipping vintage sherry and checking their share prices in ‘The
Financial Times’.

We couldn’t have been more wrong. When we learned the truth
about her background, we gained even more respect for her. Miranda’s parents
had been engaged, but her father had left before she was born and, in doing so,
never contacted them again, nor provided any sort of support. Although she knew
her father’s identity and had reached out to him around the time she got
together with Lila, he had declined to meet her, conveying through a third
party that ‘A biological daughter is not the same as a real daughter.’

Her mother had health problems and, having no other family,
struggled to bring Miranda up on her own. Highly intelligent and fiercely
competitive, Miranda read voraciously and won a scholarship to a private
school. Shunned by her classmates because she couldn’t afford the expensive
clothes and sports equipment they took as their right, she spent a lonely
childhood immersed in books. She went to university, got a first-class degree
in Law and was headhunted by a top London law firm.

If we hadn’t already made it plain that we loved and
accepted Miranda, we may have suspected her of inventing a miserable childhood
in order to win us round. As it was, I was humbled by her resilience and
achievements. We bonded so well that Lila complained jokingly, “I wanted you to
like her, but not this much! What if I have to dump her?”

I responded, in a fake aside to Miranda, “Don’t worry. If
Lila dumps you, we’re going with you!”

“Those who can’t do, teach. And those who can’t teach,
teach gym.” - Woody Allen

If roughly ten percent of the population is gay, during
my twenty-four-year teaching career I may have taught as many as fifty gay
kids. I don’t remember anyone discussing it back in the late 70s when I started
teaching. We certainly never openly speculated about the possibility of a
particular child being gay. Probably because homosexuality was only legalised
in Scotland in 1980, fifteen years after England, and, until recently, it was
not legal to ‘promote’ homosexuality in the classroom (and the definition of
‘promote’ was wide). It just wasn’t in our psyche.

I wonder that I could have missed some of the signs. One of
my own school friends later came out as being gay and, as far as I’m aware, no
one ever speculated on that possibility at the time. Apart from being camp, he
seemed to go out of his way to be annoying and controversial. Possibly, just
like Lila, he was screaming inwardly,
“See me! Notice me! Yes, I’m different.
Please ask me about it.”
Sadly, to the best of my knowledge, nobody did.

These days, while gay kids are not easy to identify, some
boys are pretty hard to miss. Whilst browsing on the Internet, I recently
encountered a list of ways to identify if your son might be gay. (I found no
such list for girls.) It mentioned such things as: likes to dress up in
‘princess’ clothes in nursery; prefers to play with girls; doesn’t like the
rough and tumble of boys’ games. Of course, there are plenty of gay boys who never
exhibit any of these behaviours and, no doubt, many boys who do are
heterosexual. If I hadn’t been a teacher of many years experience, I would have
been outraged. I would have screamed at the screen, saying things like,
‘Don’t
be ridiculous! What a load of rubbish! Stop trying to stereotype people!’
But, despite my inclination to shun the article, I had to admit that most of
the boys who later came out as being gay did in fact exhibit these trends in
primary school, as observed by my colleagues and me.

One six-year-old boy in particular sticks in my mind. I
taught his class religious education and, as it was nearing Christmas, I asked
the kids to draw Jesus and his family. This boy’s picture was−I feel sure
he would approve this term − ‘fabulous’. While Mary was in a hastily
drawn blue shift dress, Jesus and Joseph were resplendent in gowns with
nipped-in waists, and… wait for it… high-heeled shoes. He proudly presented the
picture to me, and I turned it into the coolest Christmas card Lila ever received.

On a more serious note, his father − a seriously
macho man who sported multiple tattoos and a two-finger knuckleduster ring
emblazoned with the name of his favourite football team − had asked his
son’s teacher at Parents’ Night, “Do you think my son is a poof*?”

What to reply? “Yes, of course I do! Now let’s discuss his
work!” Of course she didn’t actually say that; but it’s what she, and all of
us, thought. I wonder how his parents felt about having a son who was so camp
and so obviously different from his peers. His father was obviously thrown.
Luckily, he was also a decent guy with a healthy sense of humour.

I often wonder: did he attempt to change his son? Did he
coach him in ‘manly ways’ and bribe him to accompany him to football matches,
or did he simply accept that his son’s favourite hobby was combing the hair of
his best friend’s Barbie?

Would their eventual coming out be less traumatic for their
parents if they suspected all along that their son or daughter was gay? Would
we have treated Lila differently if we had thought she might be gay? Would we
have been more easily resigned to it, or would we have been constantly trying
to change her?

As teachers, we weren’t particularly interested in our
pupils’ sexuality. Most of the boys in question were charming and biddable and,
besides, they kept the classroom spotless! Only once did I encounter a female
pupil I thought might be gay. She was clearly besotted with my female student
teacher. She followed her about like a puppy, making her feel distinctly
uncomfortable. Once the student had left, she began to feel worried about the
amount of unsolicited correspondence she was receiving from her admirer.
Eventually she had to ask the girl not to contact her again.

Lila's own teacher-crush at the age of five inspired her to
invent stories that made for an interesting discussion at Parents' Night.

“Mrs McCay, I hear your mother is an astronaut,” the
teacher said.

John jumped in with a rare and humorous comment. “An
astronau
t?
Really? An alien, maybe; but an
astronaut
?”

Lila continued to idolise various girls and female teachers
at school, at summer camp, and in drama class, but she wasn’t as blatant as my
pupil. Most of her lovelorn letters remained safely in the pages of her diary
and her idols probably remained unaware of her feelings. Except perhaps for
Miss Donovan, the student teacher for whom eight-year-old Lila performed a
specially personalised farewell song. She also corresponded with the two camp
counsellors, Lynn and Leigh for many years. Her high school English teacher
received an anonymous letter from fourteen-year-old Lila admitting she was gay
and declaring her undying love, but being Lila, she disguised her handwriting.

Once, when she was about fifteen years old, I was driving
us home from the theatre when I asked her, “Who are the cool boys in your
class?”

“I don’t know,” she replied, making it obvious that she
wasn’t interested in pursuing this line of conversation.

“Okay,” I said, persisting. (Lila was never forthcoming
about discussing personal topics, so her reaction wasn’t unusual.) “Let me put
it another way. Who are the boys everyone fancies?”

“Well, there’s certainly nobody
I’m
interested in,”
she said, making it quite clear that the conversation was closed. Looking back,
I realise how much of an inward struggle she must have been going through at
that moment. If only she had taken the opportunity then to tell me that she was
gay.

“Didn’t you ever think back then that it was weird that I’d
never had a boyfriend?” Lila asked me recently.

“Not really,” I replied. “You were only seventeen.”

“Well most girls of seventeen have boyfriends,” she said.
“All my friends did, remember? Who else do you know who didn’t have a partner
by the age of seventeen?”

“Your brother,” I said.

“Oh, I suppose so,” she agreed, though quietly she doubted
it.

Over the years people have asked me if I ever had any
inkling that Lila was gay. In fact, it just didn’t occur to me. She certainly
wasn’t a tomboy. Lila was − and still is − a ‘girly girl’. She was
devoted to her party dresses. She was a big fan of the colour pink. She hated
most sports, except dancing and gymnastics. Most of her friends were boy-crazy
girls.

Back in the classroom I was uncharacteristically cagey
about Lila and Miranda’s wedding.

“What job does her husband do?” a girl asked me.

“Her partner is a lawyer,” I replied.

“Is he a nice person?” another girl wanted to know.

“Oh yes, her partner is a very nice person.”

It was reminiscent of the TV game show I watched growing
up. The contestants had to answer questions without using the words, ‘yes’ or
‘no’. My taboo words were ‘her’ and ‘she’. If Lila had been straight, I know I
would have been happy to talk about gay relationships, along with all the other
issues we discussed in class. But now I was scared of mentioning same-sex
relationships because my daughter was gay. I know that doesn’t make sense. I
imagined an adult leaping out (as opposed to ‘coming out’) of the closet,
shouting ‘Got you: just because your daughter’s gay it doesn’t mean you have to
try to convert our kids.’

Even if someone had accused me of that, I’m disappointed
that, on that occasion, I didn’t show the moral courage on which I’d previously
prided myself. There was no display of wedding photos in the classroom. The
teacher who had always shared her personal life with her pupils, and had been
rewarded in kind with their confidences, had failed them. Perhaps tellingly,
not one of them asked to see the photos. This was very unusual for my class.
Maybe they sensed I was struggling with something.

* Poof: Homosexual
Male