Family Jewels by Kate Christie

Author:Kate Christie [Christie, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780985367718

Chapter Eleven

We eventually found the tapas bar on a street that had a parking strip down its center where a canal should have been. In spite of this flaw, the restaurant was excellent. My father and I ordered sangria, potato tapas, asparagus salad, sautéed mushrooms, and garlic bread. He hadn’t ordered red meat once since arriving in Europe, I’d noticed. Was it coincidence, or out of respect for me? I was a pescatarian, a fish and vegetables kind of girl. Not that he ever seemed to remember.

The food came quickly, which was a good thing—I didn’t want to sit there too long thinking about how odd it was to be imbibing alcohol with my father. Before this trip, we’d rarely sat at a bar or restaurant together, just the two of us. With six people and their respective spouses and children in the family, we hardly ever caught each other alone.

Shortly after the food arrived, my dad swallowed a large gulp of sangria and inquired, “Can I ask you another question?”

Apparently he was on a roll.

“Of course.” I looked at him curiously, but he focused on spearing hot mushrooms and cold asparagus with his fork.

“I hope this doesn’t sound ignorant,” he said, “but I’ve heard more about gay people having parades than being persecuted by the Nazis or the police. Why is that?”

My father was asking questions I’d learned to answer for myself my first year of college, but then he had never needed to consider the impact of cultural forces on his own life. He was straight and white and male, and not just a little financially privileged. Why would he need to learn to think critically about a culture that had always compared other people to him, only to find most of the others lacking?

“What you hear and see,” I explained carefully, as if he were a U of M student newly freed from a farm near Muskegon or a suburb of Detroit, “is filtered through a media dominated by a majority that isn’t always interested in being fair or inclusive. Anyway, what do you expect from a group who organized politically in the ’60s and ’70s? Once we realized we couldn’t stay hidden anymore, we knew we needed to be visible on our own terms.”

“Is that why you look like you do?” my father asked, gesturing at my gelled hair, assorted piercings, low-slung jeans.

Really, did the man not watch Glee?

“I actually feel like myself like this. But also, it lets other gay people know I’m like them. It’s a kind of subcultural cue so that we can find each other.”

In my head, I started devising a reading list for him: that book by Ellen’s mom, the one by the Boy Scout in Iowa raised by lesbian moms, and maybe someday well down the road, Heather has Two Mommies. I pictured a child with elfin features and adorable freckles, but the image was shattered by another, more frightening one—Toby, sporting a disapproving glower.

“I never realized any of that,” my dad said.

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