Father's Day

My father died 15 years ago. We never reconciled.

He was a domestic tyrant and never showed any love towards me. But I still sought his love against all odds. Many years later, the wound has not healed.

He was his mother’s preferred son, a spoiled child, my Swiss German paternal grandmother had eyes for him only and kept him in a cocoon. So when my father married my mother, he probably saw in her a substitute for his mother and expected her exclusive attention. Which he got for a few years.

But not having children was not an option at the time. No pill and, God forbid, no easily available abortion. So, too soon, they had children, three of them including me the eldest. I now think he saw his children as an inconvenience disturbing the cosy relationship he had enjoyed with my mother for too short a period.

Family life was not his thing. He did all the right things, took us on vacation to the seashore each year, fed us, worked hard to bring money home. But he would hardly ever hug or kiss us. And he found faults with us all the time. Whatever we did, it was never good enough.

I still tried for a long time to win his affection. But also unconsciously made up my mind that if he didn’t love me, something must be wrong with me. Being gay and knowing I was different from a very young age didn’t help even if it was something I kept to myself.

As I grew up I rebelled of course and his antagonism towards me reached new levels. He never hit me or my siblings. We sometimes wished he had. His resentment stung us more and the pain was longer lasting.

We were not allowed to have friends from school at home. We were not allowed to play music on “his” stereo which was locked with a key he kept. We were not allowed to touch anything he owned which was almost everything in the house. His “things” were his and his only. And later, an adult and a doctor, I was not allowed to use the car that he hardly ever drove when I visited during holidays.

The few times we had visitors, family or friends, he was charming and everyone complimented us for having such a funny, loving father. The moment the last guest passed the door his face would change and become downcast. He would look angry and start making nasty remarks until we all started crying.  No one outside our family ever suspected his Janus two-faced personality and when I mentioned that he was maybe not exactly the congenial person they thought he was, I was met with incredulity and accusation of being ungrateful.

It reached a high one day as I was visiting from Réunion island as I did every three years. He had made my mother cry once too often so I argued in a violent way with him. He went upstairs, brought a riffle and threatened to shoot me. I called my brother who drove me to a hotel in Paris for the rest of my stay.

My mother was chronically depressed. For many reasons: having had a rough life leaving school early so she could raise her four sisters and brothers when her own violent father died, my grandmother being useless a running a family, having to leave the country she was born in and considered hers. And also because my father kept criticizing her whatever she did. There were specks of dust she had left on the furnitures, the dish she had prepared was not as good as the last time. Or it was cold. Or too hot.  She had spent too much time visiting the few friends she had. She looked too happy.

Being a devout catholic, she never considered leaving him or worse, divorcing him. We blamed her for lacking the courage to do so even if she admitted sometimes he had made our lives miserable. But she said she was happy to have a husband who didn’t drink, spent money on women or beat her (like her father with her mother) and who was hardworking and had offered us a roof that we owned. We couldn’t help think, my sister and I, that we would have liked him to be less picture perfect and more affectionate even if it meant him having a mistress… Somehow, she loved him to the end basking in the memories of the too short first years of their marriage before they had children.

One episode stayed with me. I was back home after two month at the Officer’s training school before being sent for a year to Tahiti. I was wearing my new Navy officer uniform and my mother was beaming with pride. I took her to the church for mass so she could show her lady friends her newly promoted son. My father sat sulking and said: “You’ve been in the army for two months and you already are an officer. I’ve been in the army for 30 years and I’ve never been one”.

Having such a toxic upbringing left traces. Not being loved by the one person I wanted to be loved is probably the reason I was incapable of long lasting relationships. Somehow, I thought I was not worth being loved so I made myself unloved.

Low self esteem drove my sister to suicide when she was in her 40’s. The last few years of her life, she accused him of abuse without being specific on the kind of abuse. I don’t think it was sexual. But it led her to escape from the family house as soon as she could by marrying an older man with means which whom she was unhappy most of the time and kept cheating on. 

My younger brother understood my father better and never opposed him directly so he would be safe from his wrath. He did well in life and has been happily married with the same woman for 30 years. 

And here I am, on another Father’s Day. Reading on social media about the celebrations, cards, the flowers and the chocolate or the regrets of having lost too early a beloved father.

And I am still wondering what I did wrong so mine wouldn't love me.

June 21st, 2020

Dan Rather of LGBT Pride month

Some thoughts on Pride month:

If you had told us back in the 1960s and 1970s that there would be legal gay marriage in all fifty states, we would have been stunned. This was a notion that probably didn’t enter even the deepest reaches of our subconscious, let alone bubble to the level of an actual concrete thought we could put into words. You couldn’t ignore that there were women or African Americans in society, but you certainly could ignore the presence of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, who most often were closeted. That such people would one day be open members of society, living with pride and having children and legal marriages? It is impossible for me to adequately convey how utterly alien those notions would have seemed.

It may be difficult for some younger readers to imagine, but for most of my life the LGBTQ community was never discussed in “polite” company. Horrible epithets for gay people were bandied about without a second thought. The very theoretical idea of someone “like that” living in your neighborhood, let alone teaching your children, was seen as a perverted threat to society. It is hard now to think back to how much this malignant ideology crossed almost all political, religious, racial, and gender boundaries. If you had asked my younger self what I thought about gay rights, I am not sure exactly what I might have said, but I am sure I would not be proud of it today. The fact that most of my peers — and even many leading progressive voices at the time — felt the same way might explain, but does not excuse, my former perspective.

In 1967, two years before the Stonewall riots in New York City would bring gay rights to national prominence, CBS News aired a documentary hosted by Mike Wallace called The Homosexuals. It had been years in the making and was considered one of the most controversial issues a news division could touch. The report was filled with the tropes of the times: psychiatrists claiming homosexuality was a mental condition, provocative images of hustlers, and interviews with gay Americans in anonymity, including one man with his face behind a potted plant. Wallace could state without controversy that “most Americans are repelled by the mere notion of homosexuality.” He added, with a tone of journalistic certainty, “The average homosexual, if there be such, is promiscuous. He is not interested in, nor capable of, a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage. His sex life, his love life, consists of a series of chance encounters at the clubs and bars he inhabits.”

I raise this not to take particular exception with Mr. Wallace. It was brave to even tackle the subject then, and the program also included sympathetic interviews with gay men talking publicly to a national audience for the first time. But the final product did not escape the deep prejudices of the times, and sadly, this ethos continued for years. When members of the gay community started getting sick with a mysterious cancer in 1981, it didn’t gain much notice. At CBS, we were one of the first news organizations to cover it, but we were still too late. At the national level, President Ronald Reagan wouldn’t even utter the word “AIDS” for years. Our job as reporters, and the job of political leaders, is to confront hard truths without bias or prejudice. Unfortunately, the stigmas surrounding gay people and intravenous drug users, the two groups that initially suffered most, shaped the response from all of us.

We knew how big a story AIDS was, but there was an effort among journalists from all walks to “broaden” the reporting. When Ryan White, a young hemophiliac from Kokomo, Indiana, was diagnosed with AIDS after a blood transfusion, the disease took on a more sympathetic face for the press. It hurts my heart to write these words and think of all the thousands of gay men who suffered and died before and since. Many lived under a cloud of shame, shunned by former friends and family. In 1986, a team of reporters, including myself, did a one-hour special called AIDS Hits Home. It was certainly far from perfect, but it was an improvement over The Homosexuals from twenty years earlier. I remember interviewing a mother alongside the gay lover of her now dead son. You couldn’t hear the story without being moved. But as I look back now, the subtext was that America should care more broadly about AIDS because it was no longer just a gay disease. It could infect you as well. Those were the times in which we were living, and we were not sensitive. It does bring some comfort to know that no one would cover the story in the same way today.

This societal change regarding LGBTQ rights continues to our present time. It’s important to remember that as late as the Democratic primaries in the 2008 election, neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton would publicly support same-sex marriage. Either they still had to “evolve” on the issue or it was considered too politically toxic. Both are now solidly pro – gay marriage, as is almost the entirety of the Democratic Party, and even many Republicans. The key, I think — and it is not a novel or original idea — is that our progress with LGBTQ rights is due to greater inclusion with the rest of society. We know that homosexuality is not limited to any race, religion, or socioeconomic class — it is part of human diversity. Once people had the courage and support to come out of the closet, families across the country, rich and poor, black and white, rural and urban, were forced to confront what had long remained hidden: sisters, brothers, sons, daughters, best friends, coworkers, even fathers and mothers, turned out to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, and transgender. Now how will you respond? Will you shun them? Many did, and do, and the trails of pain, loneliness, depression, and even suicide are long and shameful. The tally of those rejected and disowned is large, and continues to grow. But thankfully many people decided to continue to love those whom they had already loved. They made room in their moral universe not only to tolerate LGBTQ people, but also to include them.

Like so many others in our country, I journeyed from ignorance to tolerance to inclusion. By the late 1990s, I had come to realize the undue challenges facing gay and lesbian people in American society, but the true burden many of them faced hadn’t fully struck me. And then one day I was sitting in my office at CBS News when a longtime close colleague came in and shut the door, saying that he needed to talk to me. As soon as he sat down, he blurted out, “I’m gay.” I saw in his eyes an anxiety I hadn’t ever seen during our years of working together, even on the most dangerous or difficult assignments. In that moment I understood the courage it must have taken him to tell me this, and the energy he must have had to expend over the many years we had known each other to keep this central part of his life hidden.

I assured him that what he’d told me it wouldn’t change our relationship as coworkers and friends. As we spoke, I could see his whole demeanor shift, as if a tightly wound spring was finally allowed to relax. How can people be so blinded by prejudice as to not see the common humanity? Thankfully, we have, as a nation and as individuals, made meaningful steps in the right directions. We must be vigilant and keep up the momentum, and there are new threats in the moment and on the horizon. Sadly, we have seen a growing movement of religious objections to same-sex marriage, with business owners denying service to gay customers. Transgender people, in particular, have not benefited from the same level of inclusion as gays and lesbians. And racial minority members of the LGBTQ community face extra levels of discrimination. But so many organizations and businesses — from the military, to government, to our major corporations — have been integrated with gays and lesbians living openly. Our society has been changed forever, and we are a stronger and more just nation because of it.

(The above is an excerpt from the "Inclusion" essay from my book What Unites Us)

Red Lentil soup

Red Lentil Soup

Ingredients

200g of red lentils
garlic powder
dried fried onions
6 bay leaves
a few twigs of thyme
a few twigs of rosemary
5 g of Iranian saffron
a small glass of cilantro leaves, cut with a scissor.
1 cube of chicken stock
1 cube of vegetable stock
50g of angel's hair pasta 
125g of crème fraîche 
black pepper
salt 

Preparation

Cook the red lentils for 10 minutes in one litre of boiling salted water to which you add 3 bay leaves and a teaspoon of garlic powder

Drain

Add 1.25 litre of water in a pan, the red lentils, 100g of dried fried onions, one teaspoon of garlic powder, ground black pepper, the two cubes of stock, 3 bay leaves, the thyme and the rosemary, 4 g of Iranian saffron, the shredded fresh cilantro.
Let it simmer on low heat for 15 minutes.

Let it cool for an hour so the flavours of the thyme and rosemary have time to flourish.

Remove the thyme, rosemary and the bay leaves.
Purée with a hand mixer

Reheat on low heat. When warm, add the angel's hair pasta and let it cook for 3 minutes. Add the crème fraîche and stir. Keep some crème fraîche for décoration.

Pour the soup in bowls. Decorate with a few saffron threads, some shredded cilantro leaves and a dollop of crème fraiche in the middle.

Enjoy!