Last year I read—or probably just scanned—a review of All of Us Strangers that called the film a meditation on gay loneliness.
I’ve probably seen the two words paired together somewhere before in my 50-plus years on the planet. But it felt like the first time I’d noticed it, ever, and it came with a little shiver of recognition.
Followed quickly by the thought, “Is that an actual thing, separate from other things?” What makes our experience of loneliness different from others?
I can’t claim to know what the closet feels like for a queer kid today, or if it’s even demanded of all of them anymore. But in those prehistoric times, before MySpace and Scruff and Neil Patrick Harris, the closet was the nadir of lonesomeness. It required of me a volatile molecular mix of mimicry, terror, denial, and grit. Within its walls, I scanned myself for deformities, policed my body’s gestures, and developed x-ray powers of social perception.
I had a safer closet than others. Passing for straight takes less courage than what the world beats out of boys who can’t (or won’t). And bless them for it.
My two gay parents couldn’t rescue me from the closet. I wouldn’t let them. I counted their lavish flaws and swore I’d never turn out like them. I couldn’t fool them; they’d each clocked my nature by the time I hit twelve. At least I never ran the risk of ending up like some of my later friends, kicked out on the streets. And I did turn out like them, at least in this way.
The dubious company of kids
Slipping free from the closet doesn’t mean shedding its isolation. We just find it in other places. A tea room toilet stall. The holidays in our hometowns. The VIP section at Real Bad and the group selfies at Bear Week. FOMO is just a fun-sized shot of loneliness we take as self-prescribed.
But maybe the clearest reason for gay loneliness, at least from the straight POV, is our default state of childlessness. I say default because, of course, many gays choose a different path of IVF, turkey basters, or adoption petitions.
I’ve never been tempted down that path. My childhood made me nervous around children, and doubtful of my abilities to raise one. I felt certain I would only wound the kid in some unforgivable way.
So I don’t know if gay parents feel any less lonely than the rest of us. Do kids provide a certain kind of companionship? Or do they just wall you off from your grown-up friends and needs? There’s so much you can’t share with kids, for their own good. Not if you want them to see you as their protector.
But I’m thinking more about our later years—is that when we’d feel the absence of children the most? You can’t always count on family to take care of you at the end, but if not them, then who?
A desert compound of old dudes
The few times I’d let myself think that far ahead, I hoped I’d have a small crew of fellow geriatric gays to chauffeur me to my doctor’s appointments, make me banana pudding, and nod off with me on the couch during early-evening Xbox sessions. When we all converged on Palm Springs last year for a vacation together, my real-life crew from Western Massachusetts floated the idea of buying a communal compound somewhere down the line. I liked the idea.
As it turned out, I saw All of Us Strangers with this crew, on a rainy afternoon in the desert, around the middle of our week-long stay. Of course, the film annihilated me. With a lonesome and traumatized gay man as its lead, a writer half-lost in the past, stringing together a narrative of his parents, the film was genetically engineered to wreck me.
But it killed me among friends. And though the five years in Western Mass rank among the loneliest of my life, these friends made my final year there a time I sometimes pine for. That week in the desert, floating in the pool or hiking in the hills or flirting with the locals on the patio at the Barracks (RIP), I had that “I feel seen” feeling in their company that had proved more elusive after moving to LA. I’ll be lucky if dudes of that caliber take care of me at the end.
How grudges fade
I’ve been thinking about that time a lot lately. I’ve watched my father try to navigate life after his partner’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, which more or less reversed their usual dynamic. Of the two of them, his partner made the more natural caregiver.
Last week Dad asked if I would step in, at the right time, to act as his medical power of attorney. My close friends might be thrown by this turn of events. Dad and I have, to put it mildly, a complicated history, including lingering resentments and a case of PTSD that sidelined me for longer than I care to admit. For several years I’d cut him out of my life.
But time, therapy, and his partner’s diagnosis softened me. I’ve met them for dinner the last couple of times I made it to Palm Springs, where they always vacationed. Two years ago, before I met them at an Italian joint not far from their AirBnB, Dad told that this was most likely their last visit to the desert together; the road trip from Minnesota was too hard now for his partner to endure.
I remember the risotto was exceptional and that his partner strained to follow our convo amid the wild, dish-clattering din. After Dad paid the check, his partner told the patrons at the next table that a jacket slung over one of their chairs belonged to him. He’d helped raise me, with common sense and unpretentious meals, since I was 12 years old, and now I took his elbow and gently steered his attention back to the coat hanging from his own chair. I did so while smiling an apology to the other patrons. Did they, like me, glimpse their mortalities in that moment?
Driving back to the hotel that night to reunite with my friends, I tried to shake this memory off, without much success. If pressed, I’d admit I hoped that, of the two of them, my father would be the first to go. I wanted his partner to keep looking after him, as he’d always done, and spare me the emotional acrobatics such care might demand of me.
But life had other plans, and I can’t help but wonder now what Dad will expect of me as he nears his own end. How much attention or protection will he need from me? What minimum level of handholding can I offer that will let me sleep at night?
I can see this coming at me at a good clip, and like my father must have felt about Alzheimer’s, I’m anything but ready.
Who will pull your plug?
His power of attorney request came to me through email—our preferred method of communication: measured and removed from hot, awkward feelings. I scanned the three bullet points asking that I not use extraordinary life-saving measures should he fall into an irreversible coma or be stricken with a hopeless and terminal illness.
The third and final point gave me the most pause: he did not want treatments to continue if their burdens outweighed their expected benefits. It would be up to me, he said, to consider and calculate the relief of suffering, the preservation or restoration of functioning, and the quality and extent of his remaining life.
This couldn’t have been easy for him, to ask this of me. To offer me, the son who had cut him out for years, the power to pull the plug on his life. To make a call that couldn’t be revised. (In relaying all this to my partner Diego and friends, I kept mispronouncing the role as “power of eternity.”)
I can think of exactly three people I’d trust with my own respirator plug, none of them family. I consider myself lucky, as 20 percent of American men say they have no close friends. How had I come to be the one dude my Dad asked? Did he not have friends he trusted more? Was he acting out of desperation, as we had few other family members without active addictions he could turn to?
Or was it a different kind of gesture—more like an olive branch, or a white flag of surrender, asking me to put to final rest my simmering grudges?
I doubt I’ll ever feel comfortable asking him these things. He once admitted to me he had no great talent for self-reflection, a skill he saw in me, which I suppose I put to use here and elsewhere, sometimes to paralyzing effect.
Whether it’s from self-reflection or just plain worry, I know the kind of son I want to be. He is a slightly less selfish version of the son I am now, and though I have no idea how to get there from here, I hope I have time to figure it out.
💔 Beautifully written as always, Mike. This is a heartbreaking twist I did not see coming. So sad. I'm very sorry to hear about your father's partner's diagnosis. And the burden this puts on you is really devastating. Hope you're okay.