My father is the only person I know who rooted for the landlord in “Rent.” When we listened to the soundtrack of the musical in our suburban living room, he used to say, “Those kids need to pay their rent. You can’t just do what you want all the time.”
“But they’re artists!” I would say. “Living with AIDS!”
As a middle-schooler in Wilmette, Ill., I knew nothing about being an artist or living with AIDS. But I loved the queer, activist characters who were so exotic compared to my traditional Midwestern parents.
My father shook his head. He ran a property management business and was himself a landlord. He valued duty, worked late every night, served as our synagogue president, faithfully watered my mother’s garden and made us pancakes on weekend mornings so she could sleep in. He wore practical colors like beige and had no patience for self-indulgent bohemians.
But I never gave up my middle-school dream of becoming like the artists in “Rent.” When I turned 18, I left Illinois for an artsy school on the East Coast. It didn’t take long before I realized I was bisexual, chopped off most of my hair and got four piercings — even though my father had threatened not to pay for my wedding if I altered the body that God gave me.
I didn’t bother coming out to him because I knew he wouldn’t get it. Plus, his ultimatum didn’t faze me. My new crew of feminist, queer friends laughed at the idea of traditional nuptials. We stayed up late planning our alternative futures, which included no houses with white picket fences, no “His and Hers” bath towels, no carting our children around in S.U.V.s. We would make art, attend protests and create our own relationship styles and gender roles.
College is also where I met Caleb. One day, he sat down next to me in the dorm lounge as I was doing my art homework and asked if he could sketch with my pastels. He was a straight man, but I liked him because he was an artist and a great listener. We quickly fell in love, dated through college and then moved in together.
Four years later, while folding laundry in our Boston apartment, Caleb asked if we should start talking about marriage. What were we waiting for?
I froze. I knew what I was waiting for. Dating a straight man was one thing, but getting married felt like stepping onto an escalator — a narrow, one-way track toward wedding, suburban house, children, death. The life, in short, that my parents had.
My hair had grown back out. I hadn’t made art in a while. I was not Maureen, the radical bisexual performance artist from “Rent.” I asked Caleb if we could pause the marriage conversation for the moment.
A few months after dodging Caleb’s proposal, as I was unlocking my bike outside our apartment, my mother called me. With no warning, she said, “Your father’s a bisexual. He’s leaving me to be with men.”
I sank to the curb. Hands shaking, I called my father. He talked slowly, explaining that he had been out before marrying my mother and had dated both men and women but went back into the closet after their wedding. Now, at 65, he couldn’t take it anymore. He said he felt “dead inside.”
My father was queer, and my parents were splitting up, just as Caleb was talking about getting married.
Before my father and I said goodbye, I told him that I, too, was bisexual. After we hung up, I realized I desperately needed more answers from him. Who was he? A warning sign of what happens to queer people in opposite-sex marriages? Was I destined to be like him?
A few days later, I flew back to Illinois.
The morning after I arrived at my childhood home, I interrupted my father reading the newspaper. He had taken a break from packing as he prepared to move out. I asked if we could have a “gay talk” on the porch swing.
As we gently swung, I said, “How soon after you got married did you realize you had made a big mistake? How repressed did you feel living a heterosexual lifestyle in the suburbs? Do you think Caleb and I can make it?”
He sighed. Speaking quietly, he recounted how he had faced pushback from his gay friends when he decided to marry a woman. But, to him, it was always about the individual, not the gender. He insisted that he had loved my mother and been attracted to her and had thought that they would be together forever. Now, many different factors were motivating their divorce.
“I could end up dating another man or a woman,” he said. “I don’t know. I just know that I need to be alone for a while.”
This felt too messy. “So is this not about you being gay? Is this just a normal divorce?”
He said he couldn’t answer.
I flew back home deeply unsatisfied. If my parents were splitting up just as couples often do, then it didn’t portend anything for Caleb and me. But if they were getting divorced because my father was bisexual, then maybe we were doomed.
Over the next year, as my family splintered and mutated, I flew back to Illinois often. With each trip, I noticed what was missing: our weekly Shabbat dinners, our holiday celebrations, my childhood home. But I also noticed what was newly present: aspects of my father I had never seen before.
First, it was the neon socks — an entire drawer full in his new Chicago apartment. On my next trip, he wore a bright orange muscle tee. He kept his beige polos and dress shirts in a corner of his closet, but they got squished behind more tropical short sleeves.
The changes were more than aesthetic. He laughed more. He formed a circle of friends who were his own, not just the husbands of my mother’s friends. It took him a while, but he eventually sold his property management company.
In between my trips home, our phone calls that used to last five minutes grew to 45 as we talked about his new buddies and nights out in Boystown, Chicago, America’s oldest officially recognized gay neighborhood. He told me about living through the AIDS crisis and the funerals of friends he had attended.
The father who left for work early and came home late, who told me to “Work hard!” and “Go to sleep!” and didn’t remember the names of my friends, was slowly replaced by one who confided in me and allowed me to confide in him.
The pressure to hide his sexuality had led him to hide other needs as well. He had submitted himself fully to the expectations and demands of his community, wife and children. Working long hours, he explained, became a way to avoid confronting his own yearnings.
“I had to suck it up and say, ‘I’m fine. Just put on a happy face,’” he said. “Most people don’t want to know how you’re really doing.”
On my most recent trip to my father’s place in Chicago, I was surprised that he still displayed a picture on his mantel from his engagement photo shoot with my mother. They were just a little older than I was now. He was kissing her cheek as she laughed. These days, my parents are rarely in the same room, and their tension and grief were palpable on the few occasions they are. Yet, looking at this photo, I saw two humans who were so clearly in love.
Soon after this trip, I proposed to Caleb outside our old college dorm. I couldn’t be sure he and I would have a fate different from my parents’, but I decided to propose anyway because I thought we might. I wasn’t Maureen from “Rent,” but I wasn’t my father either.
I was out to Caleb, my family and friends. I shaved part of my hair into a side undercut. At work, I ran the Gay-Straight Alliance. I joined the queerest Jewish community I could find. For our wedding, Caleb and I designed our own prints and textiles, performed in drag and staged a fashion show. In some ways, he and I were conventional and in other ways we weren’t.
Sometimes, I wonder what my father was really thinking when I listened to the “Rent” soundtrack with him as a child. Was he mourning the life he could have led? If he were in my generation, would he have made the same choices as I did? What would our relationship have looked like back then if he could have been his full self?
I loved him in beige, but I love him more in color.
Julia Stoller lives in Boston and is a math instructional coach in the Cambridge Public Schools.
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