My father, to my adolescent mind, was a staunch traditionalist, famously siding with the landlord during “Rent” listens in our suburban living room. “Those kids need to pay their rent,” he’d declare. “You can’t just do what you want all the time.”
“But they’re artists!” I’d counter, “And they’re living with AIDS!”
Growing up in Wilmette, Illinois, I knew little of art or AIDS, but I was captivated by the musical’s queer, activist characters, who seemed so gloriously out of step with my conventional Midwestern parents.
My father, a diligent property manager and synagogue president, embodied duty. He worked long hours, tended my mother’s garden, and cooked us weekend pancakes so she could rest. He favored practical beige and had no tolerance for what he saw as self-indulgent bohemians.
Yet, my middle-school dream of living a life akin to the artists in “Rent” persisted. At 18, I headed to an East Coast art school. There, I discovered my bisexuality, dramatically cut my hair, and got four piercings—all despite my father’s threat to withhold wedding funds if I “altered the body God gave me.”
I never bothered to come out to him, certain he wouldn’t understand. His ultimatum, however, was meaningless to me. My new feminist, queer friends and I scoffed at traditional weddings. We spent nights envisioning alternative futures: no white picket fences, no “His and Hers” towels, no SUV-driving children. We would create art, protest injustice, and forge our own definitions of relationships and gender roles.
It was in college that I met Caleb. He joined me one day in the dorm lounge as I worked on an art assignment, asking to borrow my pastels. Though straight, he was an artist and a wonderful listener, qualities that quickly drew me in. We fell in love, dated through college, and eventually moved in together.
Four years later, folding laundry in our Boston apartment, Caleb casually brought up marriage. “What are we waiting for?” he asked.
I froze. I knew precisely what I was waiting for. Dating a straight man felt acceptable, but marriage felt like an irreversible step onto an escalator, a direct path toward a wedding, a suburban house, children, and ultimately, the life my parents had lived.
My avant-garde haircut had long since grown out. My art supplies lay untouched. I was certainly not Maureen, “Rent’s” radical bisexual performance artist. I asked Caleb to put the marriage conversation on hold.
A few months after sidestepping Caleb’s proposal, as I was unlocking my bike outside our apartment, my mother called. Without preamble, she delivered a bombshell: “Your father’s bisexual. He’s leaving me to be with men.”
I slumped onto the curb, my hands shaking. I called my father, who calmly explained he’d been openly bisexual before marrying my mother, having dated both men and women. He’d re-entered the closet after their wedding, but at 65, he simply couldn’t endure it any longer. He described feeling “dead inside.”
My father was queer, my parents were divorcing, and Caleb was talking about marriage. The timing was surreal.
Before we ended our call, I confessed my own bisexuality. After hanging up, I realized I needed more clarity from him. Who was he now? Was his story a cautionary tale for queer individuals in heterosexual marriages? Was I destined to repeat his experience?
Days later, I boarded a plane back to Illinois.
The morning after arriving at my childhood home, I found my father taking a break from packing. I asked if we could have a “gay talk” on the porch swing.
As we gently swayed, I pressed him: “How soon after marrying Mom did you realize you’d made a mistake? How suffocated did you feel living a heterosexual life in the suburbs? Do you think Caleb and I can make it?”
He sighed, his voice soft. He spoke of the resistance he faced from his gay friends when he chose to marry a woman. But for him, he said, love was always about the individual, not gender. He genuinely loved my mother, was attracted to her, and envisioned a lifetime together. Now, he explained, many factors contributed to their divorce.
“I might date another man, or a woman,” he mused. “I don’t know. I just know I need to be alone for a while.”
This felt frustratingly ambiguous. “So, this is not about you being gay? Is this just a regular divorce?”
He couldn’t give me a definitive answer.
I returned home deeply unsatisfied. If their divorce was a typical marital breakdown, it held no special meaning for Caleb and me. But if it was because my father was bisexual, then perhaps our future was predetermined for failure.
Over the next year, as my family navigated its new, fractured landscape, I visited Illinois frequently. Each trip brought a realization of what was gone: our weekly Shabbat dinners, holiday gatherings, the familiar comfort of my childhood home. But I also discovered something new: previously unseen facets of my father.
It started with neon socks—an entire drawer of them in his new Chicago apartment. On my next visit, he sported a bright orange muscle tee. His beige polos and dress shirts were still in his closet, but they were now overshadowed by more vibrant, tropical button-downs.
The transformations went beyond aesthetics. He laughed more freely. He cultivated his own circle of friends, distinct from my mother’s social sphere. Eventually, he sold his property management company, shedding another layer of his old life.
Our five-minute phone calls between visits stretched to 45 minutes as we discussed his new friends and his nights out in Boystown, Chicago’s historic gay neighborhood. He shared stories of living through the AIDS crisis and the many funerals he’d attended.
The father who once left for work early, returned late, and offered terse advice (“Work hard! Go to sleep!”) while barely remembering my friends’ names, was gradually replaced by one who opened up to me, and to whom I could truly confide.
The burden of concealing his sexuality, he explained, had compelled him to suppress other personal needs. He had wholly conformed to the expectations of his community, wife, and children. Working long hours had become a shield, a way to avoid confronting his deepest desires.
“I had to just ‘suck it up’ and ‘put on a happy face,’” he told me. “Most people don’t really want to know how you’re doing.”
On my most recent visit to his Chicago apartment, I was struck to see an old engagement photo on his mantelpiece, a picture of him and my mother, a little younger than I was now. He was kissing her cheek, and she was laughing. Today, my parents are rarely in the same room, and when they are, the tension and grief are palpable. Yet, in that photo, I saw two people unequivocally in love.
Soon after that trip, I proposed to Caleb outside our old college dorm. I couldn’t be certain our fate would differ from my parents’, but I decided to propose anyway, driven by a hopeful possibility. I wasn’t Maureen from “Rent,” but I also wasn’t merely a replica of my father.
I was openly bisexual to Caleb, my family, and my friends. I sported a side undercut. At work, I led the Gay-Straight Alliance. I sought out the most vibrant queer Jewish community I could find. For our wedding, Caleb and I designed our own textiles, performed in drag, and even hosted a fashion show. In some aspects, our lives were conventional; in others, they were distinctly our own.
Sometimes, I reflect on what my father truly felt as we listened to the “Rent” soundtrack all those years ago. Was he silently mourning a life unlived? If he had grown up in my generation, would his choices have mirrored mine? What would our relationship have been like if he had been free to be his complete self from the start?
I loved him in beige, but I love him even more in color.