Larry Strauss is a high school English teacher and retired basketball coach in South Los Angeles. Most of all, I’m grateful for my father’s patience with me.įor his ability to see only the good in me.Įven when I was an obnoxious 22-year-old and wouldn’t put on a T-shirt to declare, unashamed, unembarrassed and unapologetic, that I love my gay dad. Because of her, I never give up on my students. Larry Strauss: My mother never gave up on my brother. The man had no interest in basketball and didn’t even understand the game, but he took me to one of the most legendary games in basketball history. Actually, when Willis Reed hobbled out onto the court and we all stood up with a collective roar, and when Willis hit the first two shots, I don’t believe my father had any trouble understanding the transcendence we were witnessing. Whenever I meet a married couple of the same sex, I think of my father, and how he and Lionel, alongside their friends and peers, helped to break the road. I’m proud of his commitment to justice – for all people.Īnd I’m grateful for his love for and commitment to my brother and me. Occasionally, he would reach out or his face would hint at a smile, like when I held up a photograph of a young soldier with whom he had served in World War II. My father passed away a little over 10 years ago, after a decade of heartbreak and illness, a slow and quiet fade from the world. I dug out a lot of old photographs to show him in the last few years of his life to try to rouse him from his catatonic state. I probably left my "I LOVE MY GAY DAD" T-shirt next to the box it had come out of, though I might have taken it home with me and buried it in a drawer. What I do know is that I don’t have it anymore. The truth, though, is that I lacked the courage to stand all the way up for my father and his comrades against a homophobic and indifferent world. My dad didn’t push me. I’m glad you got things straight with yourself and the world, but I’m not wearing a shirt that defines our relationship so simplistically.” I told my dad, “I love you, but not because you’re gay.
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I was 22 and in full possession of that youthful self-consciousness mixed with self-serving pseudo-idealism. What I do remember was that someone had made T-shirts that said "I LOVE MY GAY DAD" and I refused to wear one.
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He asked that I march with him, alongside the other gay fathers and their kids, in the Los Angeles Pride Parade.
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The year after he met Lionel, 1981, was the only time my father ever asked me for a Father’s Day present. The indignities he had endured included requiring my assistance to get rid of an angry hustler, who was just a few years older than me, and defending him against the angry Orthodox Jewish parents of a young man with whom he had a brief, awkward romance. He had seemed kind of lost in his new life – pushing 60, recently divorced from my mother, recently out of the closet as gay man. The Father's Day gift request I refusedĪ few months later, I helped them move into an apartment in West Hollywood. In late 1980, at a support group for gay fathers, my dad met Lionel –– the man with whom he would spend the next 23 years. Pride Month was inspired by the Stonewall riots of 1969 and has only received recognition from Democratic presidents, starting with Bill Clinton (though in 2019, President Donald Trump did tweet about it).įor me, though, the two celebrations have been inexorably linked for decades. Two years later, a woman whose widower father raised her and her five siblings tried to make Father’s Day a national celebration, but it took until 1972 for that to actually happen. One in 1908 honored more than 300 men who had died in a coal mine in West Virginia. The first Father's Day commemorations were around the turn of the last century. It doesn’t ever feel like much of a coincidence for me that Father’s Day occurs during Pride Month.