An Unprofessional History of Jack
The moment the things of the dead enter our lives, they begin another history. I inherited three gay histories, the archives of three gay men in my life. Two were family friends I called uncles. Their archives were straightforward in their queerness as they’d lived out and proud. Yet once I had finished going through their things, a faint voice began calling to me. Maybe I had been playing it safe. There was one archive left, the first gay archive left for me, my father’s. Maybe after all this time piecing my uncles’ back together, it was really my father’s history that I was trying to solidify. Maybe I had to go back into the closet and bring all the skeletons out.
My father was the first of these three gay men to die. He died on June 8, 2010. His death certificate reads: Was case referred to Medical Examiner? Yes. Autopsy? No. Time of death: 0552. Immediate cause: Undetermined natural causes.
My father died in his sleep and no one knows exactly why, leaving space behind for the archive to fill. A story quickly poured in like concrete, a story I quickly accepted and retold: he drank himself to death. It was easier to say this than get into the opacity of his queerness. It suggested an illness, a sort of inevitableness, an end that had a beginning and a long middle. And it was the easiest way to avoid uneasy answers, like how I had come out to everyone in my life but him.
My parents divorced over his alcoholism. Up until that point I hadn’t been aware of my dad’s drinking. After the divorce I became aware of it all. I started high school, drank vodka myself, then became able to smell his coffee to know if it was spiked. I pushed the fear that managed to creep past teenage invincibility down whenever he drove us. I learned to ask servers to water down his drinks. When the police asked if I, eighteen and a newly legal adult, wanted to take him home from the public disturbance he was making, I let them take him instead.
Somewhere in the year or so after their divorce, my mom and I separately realized he was gay. He sent out an email soon after, making it clear he was begrudgingly doing this, but letting the people closest to him know that he was bisexual. My therapist in high school said men are rarely bisexual, that this was his way of softening the blow. He was gay. Tropes of the closeted queer flooded in. It could explain the drinking, or why he had trouble at work socially. And several years later it was all used to explain how he went to bed one summer night and never woke up.
That was the first history of my father.
My father was always behind a lens. He left behind thousands of photographs, hundreds of videotapes, and very few answers. I approached this archive gingerly, trying to outline his beginning first. I went through his photographs and records and organized them chronologically, buying a scrapbook and sticking him into order. I found out he was born in Detroit, MI to Lillian, a clerk, and Robert, a factory worker. In the early photos of his parents his dad is in a uniform, serving in WWII. Soon his father stops appearing in pictures. I know he left the family, moved to California. My father and his mom moved in with her parents, Russian immigrants who lived outside of Detroit. He was an only child. My mom told me that he loved his mom, but his grandparents were cold. Since his mom worked, his grandparents helped raise him. His grandmother would often tell him he was a bad boy. His grandfather would go fishing often and never invited him to come along. They mostly spoke Russian, but my dad brought very little of it into my life.
I pasted photographs of him graduating high school, then college, photographs of a trip he took to Europe after college, photographs of him on a Navy ship off of Vietnam. But I stopped the scrapbook there. I thought that perhaps this was another beginning to another question. The military is such a homoerotic space, guys sleeping next to one another, getting dressed and undressed every day—surely he figured out his sexuality by the end of his service, right? Is this when the drinking started, too? I go back and notice there’s no prom photo of him from high school. The absence of a girl beside him intrigues me. I wonder if he knew he liked men by then. Or if, like me, he went with his best friend, only for everyone to realize they were queer later. I had no proof, just my own desire to find a point where I could layer my story onto his and iron us together through time.
After the military he continued his education at NYU, right next to Greenwich Village, a historically gay neighborhood. The community talks about the seventies as a decade of free love and sex. Did he go to the bars, make his way to the piers, go cruising? Or, what mental gymnastics did he employ to avoid it all? Then he moved to San Francisco of all places. Does this count for something? What constitutes proof of queerness in the archive? I’d rushed to document my father before the fall, and in editing the archive, I kept trying to grasp a before and after, a forced interpretation of the past, like a revisionist history of my father.
There were plenty of pages left in the scrapbook, and plenty more photos, but I wasn’t interested in going any further. I was older, could drink legally, and the family folklore loomed large. My father’s father also died from alcoholism in his late sixties, so my father’s death formed a pattern. After he died, I became concerned this pattern would continue in me. I’d think about my body while drinking and feel the nucleotides in my DNA hug the alcohol coursing through my blood until I ended up in three kinds of therapy at once. And as I pulled back the layers, I got swept up in emotion and started throwing him away. My father gave me my first archive, a chance to find a second history of him, and rather than look, I turned my head.
I threw away his t-shirts. I threw away his wedding ring and his mother’s wedding ring. I threw away his photographs, his papers, his ephemera. And at the eleventh hour when my mom presented the possibility that while I might not want to save his family history, a future generation might, I tipped the boxes of history into the bin anyway. In the end, I kept only four items. I kept the scrapbook I had made. And then, while rummaging through the dozens of his home videotapes, I saved three. I fixated on the two earliest ones, from before I was born, with the hope that maybe, just maybe, they’d contain what had anchored me. Maybe my uncles would come back to life for me on the screen. Though unrelated by blood, they became father figures who taught me how to love, then after I came out, models for how to be. The idea that they could show up in my father’s archive sustained me. How I wanted to hear their voices again.
The first tape starts with a panorama of the San Francisco Bay Area. The year 1985 is time-stamped on the frames. It’s a sunny day and windy, whitecaps dot the water, fog in the background. I recognize the vantage point as one of the hills in Marin, one I have been to many times to take in this exact view—the Golden Gate Bridge in front of you, Coit Tower and the downtown skyscrapers behind its cables, and to the right, Ocean Beach trailing south. The pixels on the upper reaches of the video cut in and out with white and black dots. The sound is just a soft buzzing.
This was his opening to his first-ever tape, labeled with his last name and the number one. I realize I am seeing this all through his eyes. Like stepping back through the moment captured by the camera, I start watching the film to capture the moment of capturing, the perception in my father’s mind. As I keep watching, I feel like I’m trying to glimpse him or me retrospectively, moving forward on the VHS as the film becomes a rear viewfinder.
The film cuts to my mom driving the car. My father is in the passenger seat, filming the road ahead through the windshield. The DJ talks on the radio, and my father turns the camera to look at my mom.
He gives a soft, “Hi.”
“Hi, sweetie,” she responds.
The tenderness strikes me, like an affront. It’s so outside of the standard narrative that I feel its difference in a way that makes me question the contours of my self. These videos were the last pieces of the archives I went through of my three gay fathers. By the time I watched this, I had gone through all of my uncles’ things. I’d found my father in their archives, including an anecdote that confirmed he was gay and they knew he was gay before he married my mother. Yet watching my parents together in the film now, I realize they must have liked each other in a way I’d never conceived. A new element appears in the history, a sense of intimacy, and I feel like I shouldn’t watch. Or, as if a child again, I wonder if I’m allowed to. Then again, why else is anything saved—not only saved but stored, cataloged, named—but for the future?
The parameters of this trip become clear: a weekend getaway. My father continues to film as my mother takes the viewer on a tour of the rented house. They’re talking to an audience, but I have no idea who they’re narrating this trip for. When they speak their voices are higher, softer than I remember, as if their younger selves are less weighed down by time.
Now my mom is behind the camera, focusing on my dad as he’s cooking dinner. He’s aware he’s on camera, but he doesn’t smile. They continue to narrate, and I learn the occasion for the trip is my mom’s birthday, that he’s making his “world-famous beef Stroganoff,” which I don’t ever remember tasting. At one point my parents kiss and then I really wonder, who are these people? I have no memories of their sweet interactions with each other, watching them now only as projections transmitted forward in time to me.
I think about how easily straightness can be performed. My father knew he was sexually attracted to men at this point, but it can’t be pinpointed by this footage. Here is the weakness of history, its reliance on evidence, especially for queer history. I want to narrate over the footage, conjure up a queer reading of my father, rewrite this whole story so I can find some familiarity in it, but I know so little about the man on the screen, I wouldn’t even know how to begin.
My mom opens one of her presents for the benefit of the camera. It’s a book and I’m startled when she reads out the title, Having a Baby. My father is very pleased with his gift, asks her to show it to the camera. He seems excited that she’s pregnant, excited by the journey in a way that’s surprising to me, only because I had never thought about it before: he really wanted to have kids. And then I remember how, when I was in college, he would often mention wanting grandchildren before he died, which he always insisted would be in ten years. The idea of family was desirable to him. Did he want to become a family man, try to undo the pain of his father leaving him? But without a father to raise him and left only with a grumpy old grandfather, how could he have known how? Maybe he wanted to assume the role of a father character in a show he watched growing up, wishing he had what was on the screen. I’d never thought about any of this before. He wanted to have a kid not to obscure his queerness, but for some other desire. And I stop myself from denying it from him. In other words, I don’t force him back into the pre-scripted narrative. Instead, I allow him it—why wouldn’t he want a family? Going even further, why wouldn’t he love my mom?
It makes what I know to follow all the more tragic. My mom was carrying her first child, my older brother, who was born with cerebral palsy and complications that left his brain unable to develop past a few months old. I can imagine, now, seeing her pregnant, seeing him excited, just how devastating it must have been for my parents. How hard it was for my mom to nurse a child and watch him develop and then stop while his body grew. For the first time my eyes well up at this part of their history that I always knew but had never before felt, overwhelmed by sympathy for what they will have to endure. And in unraveling the past, I can’t help but analyze further. Was this another turning point? I wonder if he thought he was being punished for his queerness, if he started drinking more then.
It’s all too much to watch, yet it’s just what happened, and I continue watching, my eagerness to see my uncles appear partnered suddenly with a scared fascination of understanding my parents as young people, tracing the weight I carry of what came before me.
There was no scene with my uncles in the first tape. So, I put in number two. In this tape, my dad takes the viewer through his office in a high-rise in downtown San Francisco. I start to gather these videos are going to be sent to his family in Michigan. He zooms in on the nameplate by his door before entering. I can only imagine the pride he felt, coming from nothing to having his own office, a big shot lawyer in San Francisco. He pans over the shelves, lingers on a photograph of my mom, like a movie, where the husband has a framed photograph of his wife in his office.
My father was fond of convention. He wanted to fit in. He wanted us to smile in photographs, to take lots of photographs: here are my kids at Halloween, here they are in their soccer uniforms, here’s the perfect family of four, as he placed the camera on a self-timer then hurried back and directed us to say cheese. These videos have a similar feel, but because of their expansiveness, frame after frame rather than one slice at a time, they feel more revealing. They give light to a new emotion, one of longing, even of relatedness, mixed with the grief of what could have been.
What if, for example, I’d shown my dad my first tattoo, a skyline of San Francisco. Would he have seen his love for the city passed down? The only possibility would have been if we’d gone to the beach together. We went once, a year after he’d come out, a couple years after the divorce, when I joined my father and his new boyfriend on holiday. It was the first time I knew to smell for vodka in his coffee and to be unsurprised. We stayed in a two-bedroom apartment with one bathroom. The one bathroom was through the main bedroom, and one morning on my way to use it, I walked past them lounging with their shirts off, covered in bedsheets, perhaps naked, having a leisurely morning, reading the paper.
The fact he was with a man didn’t bother me. I was shocked, instead, at seeing him intimate with anyone. My parents weren’t the lovey-dovey type. They shared a bed, but there’s no memory of them as affectionate people, just the recording of affection shared on tape. Whereas here, it was unhidden, unmasked, open, which struck me as careless compared to his otherwise put-together self, like the strings were unraveling.
As the minutes wind down on the second to last tape, I have the sinking feeling that I won’t ever see my uncles again. Out of lament I start questioning my father: did he edit out my uncles, editing their queerness out of his life? These tapes—full of other friends, of workspaces, of vacations, even of my parents sitting down and eating dinner and talking to the camera—were clearly made to be watched by others. But there’s no sign of queerness anywhere, not even in background glimpses of the city, considered a gay mecca at the time. In my uncles’ archives, the AIDS epidemic appeared urgently and frequently by this point. How do I read its nonappearance in my father’s tapes? I find myself left to speculate, looking for his queerness against its absence, reading into details and relying on conjectures, not a very professional kind of historical work.
When I press play on the last tape, it dates itself to the last summer before my parents got divorced. The footage was short, most of the tape was blank. I know he kept taking photographs for the rest of his life, so why not film? Was the camcorder sectioned off in his mind as just for the family? It was as if when the family ended, so did his impulse to record.
I took notes on all the tapes, but his outline is like a margin that bleeds to the edge of the paper and dissolves, a sort of metaphor for queerness, hidden also behind the veil of family secrets, skeletons tucked away in the closet so they can’t be talked to. Here and now, I wish they could talk back. What I found is that what’s left behind after people die can lure you so far into the weeds with promises of truth that you can no longer make your way out of the forest. But what if the truth about someone is much simpler and doesn’t need a whole archive to find?
I think back to his statement about himself, his email where he wrote that he was bisexual, and for the first time I think—why not take him at his word? After all, his word is all that is left. I had finished the last tape, saw when he stopped recording. I had thrown away every other piece of him. I had exhausted what was left of his archive. It’s not so much that history had ended, more that history is all that’s left, that the only way I can ever know him is in the past tense. Any answers moved like shadow play in the archive, maneuvering around events with the benefit of hindsight, as if knowing can lead to understanding, that x connects to y which leads to z, the fallacy that chronology and order are siblings. I was out of evidence to pretend like I knew what I was looking for, which was not a piece of information, but a desire to talk to him, to ask him about himself, tell him it was okay to be queer, show him everything I had learned, ask him to teach me what he knew. But I can’t get any deeper into who he was.
It’s easy to memorialize a person you don’t know. I erected a statue of my father somewhere in the space of my mind, so that while people I loved were alive and around me, the statue towered. Statues built in memorial are made so you don’t have to look too closely. They’re convenient, visual and tangible, solidifying everything they can, capable of offloading a lot of thinking so you don’t have to look for everything that escaped their capture. There, but photographed. It took me a long time to actually look.
The truth is, that man was my father, but he wasn’t my only father. I had two more: family beyond family to show me how to be. Maybe I can’t rectify that my father couldn’t give me more, so I return to digging into my uncles’ archives to get even more out of them, only to learn that studying an archive can be dangerous work. The things left behind hold assurances, like concrete poured into the space of what’s missing. Except history is a fragile thing, and even concrete has its own holes. So like an impossible image—once you really look for what you’re trying to find, you’ll only find more space.
