I have tried to make a portrait of him that is filled with love but not sentimental or afraid to show his selfishness. While his illness came only five years later, he'd tire all of us out with all the things he wanted to do. While he was very shy as a young person, and he was deferring and self-sacrificing through his adult life, he exposed himself to risk over and over at the end - he risked by coming out to me, my sisters and his friends by trying to catch up with the contemporary gay social scene and, most of all, by falling in love.
Having hidden from the gay world for his whole life he was, at 75, like a teenager: anxious and excited to join, naive about all the cues of gay culture, and very susceptible to the emotional upheavals of new love. Even as he passed away five years later to cancer, he was energized, reaching out he wasn't in any way finished. Change, honesty, and openness can happen when it seems least likely. His hunger to completely change his life was confusing, painful, very funny, and deeply inspiring. He was 75 years old and had been married to my mother for 45 years. ' Beginners started when my father came out of the closet.
