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WHAT IS FATHER’S DAY LIKE FOR A BOY RAISED BY LESBIANS?

June 20th, 2014

by Robert Oscar Lopez

Excerpt: “I used to be timid about criticizing lesbian moms, but not anymore. People have been too reserved about telling them to their faces that their families are abusive and their decision to deprive children of fathers a gross crime. .. Every child has a father. The lesbian couple raising a child has simply decided to steal the child from his father and to steal the father from his child. That’s wrong.”

I waited until the night of Father’s Day to write this, because I couldn’t bear to post it in the midst of all the winsome father’s day specials everywhere–odes to the mentorship, paternal fealty, male role modeling, and caring that everyone attributes to fathers.

I do not want to be covetous, so I am genuinely happy for everyone who has fathers to celebrate and commemorate on this day.

I have a close relationship with my father, but I had to go out of my way to build that from scratch when I was in my late twenties. Some of this is not the fault of my lesbian mother. None of this is really the fault of her partner. Some fault lies in my own reaction to things growing up, my curling up and withdrawing from what was such a confusing arrangement of custodian figures and role models and parental units that I had to protect and shield, when I was still a child who just wanted to be protected and shielded.

Father’s Day isn’t a day when one should be finding fault. One should be cherishing one’s father. And I have one now, so I cherish him and love him. But Father’s Day is always painful because it is on this day that everyone around me shares stories and tells tales about this person in their lives, most often, involving the tender years of childhood and adolescence. I have a father but I don’t have those stories to tell, so I am torn. Instead of narratives about being taught how to pitch a baseball or given pep talks to stick up for myself against bullies, I have maudlin and pathetic stories about being a teenage freak, getting beat up, having nobody to turn to and defend me, feeling abandoned and alone, finding solace in male prostitution and hookups with lecherous older gay men.

My father became my father when I was twenty-seven.

By that time I was already a New York City professional, working at MTV Networks. The time had passed for me to learn how to be a man, for me to have rites of passage or masculine guidance. I had arrived at my late twenties not knowing how to be a man, and making it up as I went along, replacing the missing father with the collective nurturing but ultimately unhealthy guidance of the gay male community. I’d looked for and found countless proxy father figures who ended up dying of AIDS or disappearing. I’d been accustomed to having a huge void where my father should have been, which I filled with a lot of self-medicating behaviors: compulsive sex, drinking, obsessive careerism, recklessness.

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