The Legend of My Dad’s Fifty Boyfriends by Spencer Williams

My older brother and I keep making jokes about charging a cover fee for our dad’s future funeral. We agree he knows too many people, and since the venue will need to accommodate at least an opera house’s worth of sniveling mourners, it seems like a smart investing opportunity. We’ve also decided a speaker’s fee can be purchased in advance—there will be exactly zero open mic slots for those not bound by blood, or already adopted into the care of my then dead-dad’s splotchy blue arms. 

Our mom sighs exasperatedly at us when we cackle in her presence over these post-mortem plans, shooing us away like she does the gossiping grackles on the porch. But because we can’t quit, we continue snickering in my brother’s car, trying to decide if twenty-five is too cheap a price to grant passage through the lobby doors of the Metropolitan. Maybe this is because we know the reality is that dad’s funeral will require at least a weekend’s trip worth of festivities—enough time for any vaguely familiar suit jacket from our childhoods to recall their own minute or embellished memories of dad’s charity: helping a neighbor’s kid get into college, the many times he’s acted as an unofficial liaison between lawyer and inmate, or the camping retreats he planned for a harem’s worth of young men spiraling down the trap door of wavering Christian faith. In fact, the blast-zone of dad’s philanthropy is such that even his children are not unscathed by the breadth of his grace.

 If adoption counts as an act of charity and not merely a civic duty given population concerns, my dad is the reigning Dolly Parton of Chula Vista. Or, if Dolly Parton is too lofty a benchmark, he is a close Mother Teresa second. With my mom, they adopted my brother Micah from Korea, and then me from a hospital near the Mexican border about fifteen years later. And while the two of us are officially part of the “Williams” clan on government paper, we’re constantly reminded that won’t be the only pilgrims seated in the pews of dad’s viewing. There are also numerous spiritual adoptees who live across country lines for whom my dad is also a father figure. These symbolic kin like to call at random times throughout the year just for the chance to live inside his voicemail box, and to remind us—his legally bound children—that he is merely out on loan. Songs of “Hey, remember that time you saved my life? I’ve been thinking about you, Ron. Would love to see you again,” and other tributes keep like dusty records in the corner bin of my dad’s psyche. At times, the onslaught of his celebrity is a difficult storm to weather. Periodically, his more proximal acolytes find him in line at the coffee shop or in the bread aisle of the grocery store, turning a ten-minute task into a one-hour confessional. But if I’ve learned anything from my years as my dad’s youngest prized possession, it’s that charity can look like anything as long as you feel good doing it. My dad doesn’t mind these daily intrusions—he welcomes the surprise game of matching names to faces, of histories forgotten and performatively remembered. In other words, charity. 

*

My dad has lived in the “anything goes” state for the entirety of his life, beginning in Burbank, California. I don’t know much about Burbank except that it’s a mostly unremarkable place when you forget it’s part of “Porn Valley,” a decidedly unsexy moniker for the San Fernando Valley area which also includes LA and—you guessed it—San Fernando. But you wouldn’t know anything about Burbank’s cum-stained history if you met my father. His air is that of a man still clinging to a belief in the contagious properties of cooties. The only porn in his closet is a stashed bag of Dove chocolates, haphazardly hidden behind a row of thick flannels. Proof of his innocence is in his desire to keep you, whoever you may be, under his roof for the night. He is perhaps too approachable, unable to gauge manipulations that aren’t visible on the surface. Without a gun pointed to his temple, he believes too easily in the unwavering goodness of man. I love him for this, even as I am envious of his utopic gaze, his stunning lack of pretension. From his car window, he hands houseless people cans of Vienna Sausages that keep, unexpired, in his glove compartment. “Everyone needs protein,” he says, brow raised in exclamation, hand over his stupidly ginormous heart.

At eighty-three, he sees no need to slow down, interpreting his retirement years as nothing but a friendly suggestion. His calendar is perpetually cluttered with reminders for meetings with former and current compatriots, be it my godfathers who seldom call me, or ex-students that want to get ice cream and watch the sunset. His indecipherable pen scrawls pollute the tiny boxes beneath the pristine photos of lighthouses, reminders of my parents’ yearly summer excursions to Maine, the only time he is not steadily booked and busy. I admire the work ethic, the extreme productivity, but I’m also weary of it. At a certain point, the self becomes a secondary consideration amidst so many appointments. My dad thinks himself invincible to the hands of time, but I see it on his sun-beat face, his sun-dried hands, his wavering, sun-stroked memory. On his best days, my dad takes in our dialogues with both cheer and vacancy, his classic golden retriever stare making me want to reach out and ruffle the hairs of his white fauxhawk. 

*

Another joke between siblings: our dad might actually be gay.

Like any good transgender daughter, I’ve done the labor of looking into my dad’s eyes and telling him that “serving cunt” means your look is flawless. Tens across the board. Mostly though, our talks are half-assed lessons in interpretation. He tends to stare beyond my shoulder when I speak of my life on the east coast, confused, but always smiling. This is to say, he remains perpetually enthusiastic about my speech when it’s directed at him, but never quite sure what I mean when I tell him his outfits are “slaying the girls” today. Since I’m a transgender fag and he is decidedly my opposite, our lexicons are forever fixed in deadlock. He says, “sup bro” and I say, “slay queen” and we trade these phrasings to one another until our ears glaze over. It’s only a mild disconnect, infinitely survivable, and one that provides me with ample anecdotes to relay back to my friends over drinks. Like how his understanding of contemporary pop culture is limited to American Idol and Masterpiece Theatre, which he half-watches in his sleeping-robe next to mom at night, simultaneously reading e-mails from his fossilized Cox address. In the rare moments when I feel compelled to unpack a phrase or two—like “serving cunt”—on his behalf, he listens intently for as long as he deems necessary, then turns away, maybe to a bird sitting on the wire just outside, or a car honking in the distance. A repetition emerges in our exchange. The quizzical sound of “huh…interesting…” fading away like my patience under his breath. 

I’ll admit, I do feel a tinge of excitement treating my elderly, assumed heterosexual dad as the reactionary springboard for my lexiconic faggotry. Maybe it’s because I’m not entirely convinced of my father’s devoutness to the heterosexual industrial complex, and that I believe at least a sparkle of fluidity is inherent in every person, whether they’d like to admit it or not. I’m well aware that this belief stems from my own utopic vision. I want nothing more than to live in a world where everyone chews their food quietly, never slaps my back as a way of saying “hello,” and is, for lack of a better word, a faggot. That being said, I’m not an idealist. I know most people are not on board with glitter as a casual accessory, with throwing bricks through bar windows, or with their constitutional rights always fluctuating between “secure for now” and “fuck this country.” But my dad doesn’t need to wrap his head around any of this. What he needs is for me to download Glee Soundtrack Volume 1. into his Apple Music library so that he can Bluetooth connect Lea Michele’s upper register to the car’s glitchy speakers.

While my dad and I seldom intersect in terms of hobbies—he is, after all, a jock at heart—what my dad and I share is a love of reading. Give him a deep cushioned chair and a pair of glasses, and my dad will disappear into the latest presidential tome—the kind of book only dads read—or a stack of fantasy novels, still holding fast to the belief that George R.R Martin will finish writing Game of Thrones before he meets the underbelly of the earth.  

I grew up on comic books. Mom kept a stash of old Donald Duck issues in the back of her mahogany drawers and as a child, I would spend hours on the sofa flipping through the misadventures of the angriest bird in the world and his half-dressed kin. As I grew older, my love of comics evolved beyond superheroes and famous supporting Disney characters. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was the first graphic novel I remember crying to, which I read in the private dark of my room with a flashlight. Reading Bechdel’s account of her closeted dad felt transgressive at the time, a peek into the queer world I was slowly turning towards. In Bechdel’s carefully drawn study of her dad, I saw faint glimmers of my own. 

*

I would describe my relationship with my dad as sturdy, if not a bit random. We don’t have the kinds of blow-up fights you might glimpse between transgender children and their bigoted parents on “Pose,” for example. But my dad and I have our share of charged encounters, our troubles with traversing the other’s unfamiliar terrain—him on account of my transness and technological wizardry, and me, on account of his bottomless well of friendships across political and ideological spectrums. Because he is so many things to so many different people, I find his character impossible to pin down. It’s a difficult fact to grapple with. I want nothing more than to creep into his interior, to sift through the silt and bone for some form of clarity, something to tell me exactly who my dad is. But when we sit alone in the kitchen together, or I in the passenger seat of his car, our interactions carry the awkwardness of having met each other for the first time.
“Who the hell is out here truly knowing their fathers tho,” texted a close friend, who’d read an earlier excavation of this conundrum. Certainly not me. In the simplest sense, my definition of a dad is just “some guy I love for reasons.” In the imagined funeral I attend for him, I stand at the podium with my sheets of prepared platitudes. I stare at the pages, then out at the crowd. I open my mouth and a moth flies out. 

*

In Bechdel’s Fun Home, she explores the life of her late dad using him as a template to shape her own coming-of-age narrative. She locates a double in his image, a lesson in queerness and self-annihilation. In trying to puzzle together the complicated whole of her dad’s private existence, Bechdel relies on dictionaries, novels, and memoirs to cement her understanding of her parent’s closeted life. It seems like an obvious trick to wield these textual sources like excavation tools. Definitions offer resolution in a way that a person, in the throes of denial or indifference or avoidance, cannot. But what is the alternative? I imagine, without these tethers, reaching her dad is like wrapping her fingers around a ghost. 

And so when I think of my dad, his jovial persistence, his hair erect on the crinkly, blue-veined dome of his head, I find myself flipping back to Bechdel’s interrogation of language, trying to locate in my aging parent a flicker of definition. For all intents and purposes, my dad has lived a gold-star heterosexual life. He married my mother in the sixties and has been dutiful ever since, an unwavering fixture to the image of their nuclear domesticity. But part of me remains unconvinced. Despite the photos they’ve adorned their bedroom walls with—portraits of smiling grandchildren, their younger selves standing arm and shoulder against each other, the bloodline they’ve made staring back at various stages of development—I’m convinced my dad is in love with something—or even somewhere—else. 

*

The desert is many things to many people. For some, it’s a place you go to when you don’t want anyone to find your body. For others, it’s a vacation spot, a chance to prove to your follower count that you aren’t completely out of touch with the natural world. But within the contemporary landscape of Tik Tok and Instagram Live, the desert has become adorned with concert festivals, overpriced Airbnbs, trendy bars with new-wave neon signs, casinos shaped like pyramids, and numerous extraterrestrial rumors. Cowboys be damned. The desert is less masc than ever before. 

Nowadays, if you’re looking for a weekend getaway with your rat-pack of gay roadtrippers, you could do a lot worse than the dunes. Or, if you’re my dad, you could commune with the cloudless sky, miles away from any restaurant or MGMT performance, and do a good amount of nothing.  

Unlike me, my dad is not “terminally online.” When he traverses the desert amongst the rattlers and the holes I imagine he digs for shitting, the common Americana themes emerge. The desert in California, despite its recent cultural makeover, is still an untamable land. Men, like my dad, go there to perform their John Wayne cosplays, escaping their domestic realities by imagining they’ve become one with the indifferent terrain. In the middle of nowhere, there’s no living room rug to vacuum, or wife to run errands for. Just sand and ample room to contemplate God.

For this small pleasure, my dad peels away from the road. The standard man-made sites for camping, with their port-a-potty shower fixtures and ready-made fire pits, don’t provide him with a romance visceral enough for the lawlessness of sand and heat. He likes to lay out the tarp he keeps in the back of his van and stare up at the canopy of stars overhead, their vastness, their unrivaled beauty. One might think he likes to remain alone there—just him and the banshee calls of coyote—but he’s almost never alone. There’s always some man lying beside him, keeping inches apart. 

*

When I had not yet reached the age of double-digits, I was privy to a constant stream of young, college-aged men that would sheepishly enter through our home’s front door. Fresh-faced and beach tan, these men would idle awkwardly in mom’s kitchen, or the living room, waiting for my dad to finish packing or pissing. 

“Alright, we’re off,” he’d say, kissing my mom lightly on the cheek, backpack hanging from his shoulder. “Be careful,” she’d offer, not with affection, but with the delivery of a memorized script, before glancing back to the plate she was scrubbing, or the plant she was nourishing. At the time, I relished these frequent weekends alone with mom. There were board games to be played, taped crime shows to watch on VHS. But as I got older, the men my dad brought home began to catch my eye in other longing ways, and I found myself consumed with a mix of jealousy and annoyance towards them. For starters, these men were much more attractive than the barely post-puberty crop I bumped shoulders with in high school, and I couldn’t reconcile how my dad could just whisk these men away to the desert like it was nothing.

Questions emerged. Was it just the two of them? What were these guys drawn to in my dad that I couldn’t see? What allure was I missing? They had a habit of calling dad “Pops” within earshot, inspiring in me a sense of territorial envy—he was my dad, not theirs. Right? Stuck at home, I hungered for a soundbite of their conversations, imagined clipping a tracker to the underside of dad’s vehicle and riding out, brother in tow, to catch them in whatever salacious act I envisioned they did under the protective dark of wilderness.

It’s decidedly weird to think about your parent having sex with anyone, let alone men closer to your age than theirs. But if my dad was intimate with these Adonis clones, he was doing it in plain sight of me and my growing sexual appetites, not even trying to mask the strangeness of his frequent departures or his company torn from the pages of Beefcake. My imagination was volatile, devoid of nuance. In leaving me behind, my dad had given me a handful of resentful blanks I aimed at his freedom, a freedom I desperately wanted for myself. At the time, my queerness was a consuming force. Suddenly I was trapped in the knowledge of my desires, which produced new fears—of abandonment, of bloodshed—and new forms of social engagement. I never came out to my parents as gay. Instead, I skipped right into womanhood as an adult, sparing them of having to buy into corporate brand sponsorships to prove their loyalty to me. 

But my secret was barely that. Despite my fear of them finding out, I lived an excessively gay social life. For example, I was the GSA president of my high school, a position which did not garner me any favors beyond my status as the only out kid in my graduating class, and I owned every Madonna album on vinyl. I discovered a bootleg copy of “Paris is Burning” at a garage sale and immediately dubbed it my “favorite film.” Every other month, I re-read Fun Home, imagining myself between the legs of a collegiate lover, or dragging my tongue across a stranger’s tight stomach.

My gayness was a ring I threw around every erect surface. I believe this is why my dad’s private excursions felt—feel—mythical to me. Perhaps if I was___, then he was too, acting out what I could not. How else to interpret his lack of female companions? How else to read into the lack of physical affections I witnessed between my parents? My dad was only handsy with men. In retrospect, I see this as logical, but curious. Had he also been handsy with women in the same way, would anything have changed about how I viewed him? The problem with unpacking the character of my dad is that, in trying to parse his narrative out in a way that brings him closer to me, he still finds new ways of slipping out between the gaps in my hand.

*

Dad met many of the men he’d eventually steal away to the desert through his tenure as a psychologist at a local Nazarene university. They were mostly surfer-types, a series of copy-pasted hunks with harsh laughs and taut frames. The blue fog of their eyes always betrayed a self-consciousness their washboard exteriors tried to distract from. But beneath my dad’s watchful eye, no shame was untraceable. His job was to unpack and exorcise whatever weight pinned down their spirits, and the desert offered the perfect backdrop for this kind of laborious healing. Devoid of technological distraction, they had no choice but to surrender to the onslaught of my dad’s attentiveness. He was their messiah, offering direction to the directionless, affection to the emotionally stunted, and the sprawl of desert to interrogate their fears of insignificance. All it took was a weekend away for them to come back cured. And so I, in my own smallness, longed for an in to my dad’s world of spiritual rehabilitation, to unload my burdens into his palms and be born anew. But dad was like a phantom—there, then not. He stood atop a white hill of sand too far away from me to be of service, not even granting me the chance to stubbornly refuse his guidance. 

*

Bechdel’s tale of her own dad leans heavily towards the tragic. Her dad was as a violent force, physical in his abuse and withholding in his affections. Even his death was violent, mowed down by a produce truck in the middle of the road. His tortured loathing, his outbursts, and his cacophonic end meant there was no such thing as closure for Bechdel. His darkness somersaulted in her brain and leaked from her pen. In contrast, my dad is untortured—or if he feels a tinge of darkness pulling inside, he never allows it any room to breach his comfortable surface. He likes to send text messages with a grab bag’s worth of emojis—his favorite being the face donning cool black shades over the eyes. “Hella Cali” and such. He calls his children “dude,” daughters included, because we are his “best friends.” Even his more unsavory habits are endearing. There’s always some greenery caught in his scattered teeth—a western ghost town of dilapidated infrastructure—and his breath, which he can’t help but share with anyone in his immediate radius, always reeks of cashew. 

There’s a distinct lack of darkness swirling around in my dad. It seems every orifice is stuffed with a pinch of light. Ultimately, he seeks to be loved and bestow love upon everything and everyone, no matter the cost. 

Sometimes, this leads to frustrating results. Dad’s charisma is such that even my elementary school bullies wanted to befriend him when it was his turn to chaperone our classroom snack time. To appease their want of his company, he’d often invite them to my birthday parties despite obvious protest. There he was, acting chummy with my little tormentors. But he was also a shield. In his presence, I was never harassed, was never made to feel lesser or unworthy. And even now, I can’t match the rambunctiousness of my dad’s physical language with others, can never bring myself to remain for longer than four seconds in anyone’s embrace. 

Often, this feels like a lack. Whereas Bechdel’s dad is cold and rarely physical in his affections, my dad can’t wait to get his hands on you, be it with a back slap, a shoulder rub, a bearhug, handshake, a tackle down to the carpet. In this sense, I am more like Bechdel’s father than he is. I am withholding. Cold to touch. Unable to make peace with my afflictions. But if I’ve inherited anything from my dad, it’s in the wanting to be received without pretense. My dad has never swayed from the personable figure he was in my childhood, but I have been so many things in my life, that when called upon to articulate myself, I can only point to the fragments of those other, failed selves. 

*

There’s no tangible proof that my dad is gay. If he is, he’s made it work for him to the point of irrelevance. And it’s not that I want to “out” my dad as something that he isn’t. My dad is already out in every possible interpretation of that word, living out his golden years with a restless vigor. Assumptions leave no stain upon him. He exists entirely outside of my narrative trappings, my silly, obsessive projections of what is and isn’t true about him. 

Still, there’s an urge on my part to indulge in the easy links between Bechdel’s dad and my own, because their relationships with other men reveal a type of masculine comradery that I miss having access to. My transition into womanhood gave me a lot of things—a new form of autonomy, a calmness I hadn’t felt before in regard to my body—but it also took from me the casual rapport I had with many of my male friends, friends who are no longer sure how to include me in their “guy talk.” I acknowledge it’s a tricky line for them to walk. Too much leaning in one direction and suddenly I haven’t changed at all. I am “a guy” again, and thus misidentified. But the other direction is lonely. Some days I feel stranded in my girlishness, unable to communicate with men in the same way I was able to before. We sit on our islands acutely aware of each other’s proximity, but I don’t know how to swim and there’s no urge on their part to brave the waters between us, to try and close this new gap. 

*

I came out to my parents in a Cold Stone Creamery. The location wasn’t intentional, but I view it now in the rearview as an attempt to mitigate the chill factor of my parents’ expected responses. From mom, I imagined a bug-eyed gasp, followed quickly by a glance at the exit door. From dad, I envisioned an unblinking smile, a failure to compute. To my surprise, they both were receptive to news of my transition, though have since struggled with the language to accommodate such change. 

“We’re trying our hardest to say ‘she’,” is an often-heard motherly refrain. “It’s just hard because we’ve known you as our son for so long.” 

Surprisingly, my dad fares a bit better with the language to the point where it mostly goes unmentioned. To him, I arrived fully formed as a baby in a basket, and nothing has really changed in our relationship that requires a bigger conversation, except for the length of my hair and my constant threat of hacking my dick off. Still, in the face of those provocations, my dad is unflappable. “Whatever makes you happy makes me happy,” he repeats, in a sing-song voice while David Archuleta (his choice) blares from his phone. 

*

I’ve been thinking more and more about his death. This is admittedly a cruel practice, but also, in my view, a practical one. In the near future, he will simply cease to exist.

Upon visiting for a week in the spring, my brother turned to me and said “you know, mom and dad are at an age where you begin to count the visits. They have what, eight good years or so left? So that’s sixteen more visits, if you come home twice a year.” Sixteen more times to say “I love you” in person. Sixteen more times to hear them say “daughter.” 

What then, I ask? 

What then. 

*

Perhaps it’s easier to imagine my dad as a fellow queer because it keeps me from feeling resentment. If his time in the desert is spent acting out that same desires I’ve come to know and perform myself, then we are more alike than previously imagined. He becomes more tangible, more visible, and his desires interest with my own. But if he’s not queer, his frequent absences throughout my life are harder to locate. They become holes I try to fill with my own insecurities about why I was never broken enough to require his attention.  

Or maybe, the subject of his “queerness” is more about me and my defenseless state in the presence of my parents’ untrained tongues. If he is queer, I’m more easily able to forgive him for his inability to call me “daughter.” My form becomes an error in his language and not an error of his intentionality. It becomes easier to believe he knows me better—can see me clearer—than the clumsy words in his mouth suggest. 

Or maybe I just want to connect with my dad in a way that doesn’t feel superficial, to tap into the kind of relationship I know other men already have with him as they trudge through the desert trails together, searching for oasis.  

*

Recently, on a visit home, I asked to join dad on his next trip out into the wilderness. As I expected, the answer was no. Another man was scheduled to take the side seat, and they had much to talk about. There was no room for my presence, my own ideas of God, my obvious attempts at voyeurism. My disappointment was palpable, but a part of me understood. There’s a purity in escaping, however briefly, to a plot of land unmarred by crowds or the curiosity of a daughter. And yet, as my dad creeps closer to the edge of his life, I find myself wanting, with growing urgency, to follow him wherever he goes. 

This brings me back to the podium in my head, the cavity he will leave me with. I have little experience with funerals, but I imagine my job will be to flatter his image to the close friends and family who’ve come to pay their respects. But the re-telling of his life carries with it an impossible tone to gauge. Empty cliches like “he was a good man” will not do him justice, nor will they satisfy my itch for something a bit more honest. I know it’s not about me, but am I wrong for wanting to luxuriate in his mess? 

I am so unlike my dad’s many keepers. I don’t romance any place I can’t shower in. I’m never in any need of a saguaro’s reassurance. But like him, my capacity for love takes me out of myself to the point of invisibility. My dad wants everyone to make it to one hundred. Maybe a handful will. The thought kills. When I think of those who mean the most to me, I realize I don’t want to outlive a single friend. In this, I am my dad’s mirror. 

*

“I know the fiction of the fix,” sings Fiona Apple from the car speakers. And I think, I know it too. I know it by the way it eats at the core of my imagination, positions itself among the other bones in my framework. I know it by the way I set traps for my dad in narratives of my own making, hoping to collect some new fragment I can make peace with. I know it by the way I should let things go, how I should move beyond my dad as a site for my own inarticulate hurts. But try as I might, I can’t resist the headfirst dive into my neurosis on the subject of fathers. He is still here, still sending me text messages overstuffed with pink and blue hearts, mustached circles, the moon with two large eyes. And like any dutiful daughter, I rush to send them back.

Spencer Williams is from Chula Vista, California. She is the author of the chapbook Alien Pink (The Atlas Review, 2017) and has work featured in Muzzle, PANK, Bright Wall/Dark Room, and Apogee. She received her MFA in creative writing from Rutgers University-Newark and is currently a first-year PhD student in poetics at SUNY, Buffalo.

21 April 2022