Composing a Further Life

service, we asked everybody to share something about Paul’s odd sense of humor. I still think fondly of it, the best memorial service I’ve ever been to. People
laughed
. They remembered him well, and then we had some music, an opera singer that we knew. Paul died in 1984. I was devastated. But I thought, You’re conscious, you’ll get over this, I mean, people die. Get a grip.”
    As often happens with gay couples, there was friction about Dan’s standing after Paul’s death. Paul had left the house and a life insurance policy for Dan, but he had stipulated in his will that $25,000 should go to his sister, and he didn’t have that amount in cash at the time of his death. The family had not been aware of the relationship or who this roommate was who had been taking care of Paul, and although Dan kicked in about half the needed cash, that was as far as he would go. In the end, he was able to keep the house. By the time of our conversation, he had lived there for twenty-five years, with the yard and the fruit trees and the fishpond.
    In 1985 Dan went back to a job he had been laid off from earlier, but the computer language he knew best was going out of usage, so he couldn’t get programming work. For a while he rented out rooms in the house, and then he got involved as a volunteer with the Employment Development Department, helping other people get jobs, coaching them on how to handle interviews and what to put into résumés to avoid suspicious gaps.
    “In Silicon Valley, jobs come and go like the wind,” he said. “I had been raised with the mentality that jobs should last—you got a job and you retired from it thirty years later. I had never had a job last longer than three and a half years, and after a while I’d get so depressed if I lost a job that I’d cry. I’d go to all these job interviews—I mean, going out for sixty jobs, it’s an incredible thing to do. And I was counting them.”
    Dan was in a good position to empathize with others looking for jobs, and ironically, after all this time, he found himself back in the classroom, teaching job seekers how to perform, how to “sing their own songs.” This experience as a volunteer may have given him a new confidence in his ability to teach, for since that time he has had jobs as a trainer rather than a programmer, traveling around the country teaching people at corporations that have bought new computer systems how to program and use their equipment and software, always trying to keep ahead of the turnover in the industry.
    Dan had referred often to his lack of mentoring, and it struck me that that concern might have helped him become an effective trainer. I wondered, too, whether that experience had been part of his willingness to talk to me about his life, for he had continued his connection with the gay fathers’ group and was interested in my questions about his relationships with his children and grandchildren. Early on he had sent me an e-mail in which he wrote about having kept in touch with his ex-wife and their daughter, who lives nearby with her husband of seventeen years and a teenage daughter, and with their son, who is married but has no children so far.
    “In 1985,” he wrote, “my son at fifteen was having some issues about Daddy and his live-in partner, who had recently died of complications of blood poisoning. You might also guess that it is difficult for my son-in-law to have a gay father-in-law. A friend in the gay fathers’ group that I was working with had a son doing a documentary on children of gay parents. It became
Not All Parents Are Straight
. We spent Labor Day weekend taping with my ex-wife and the two kids, and I thought that was the end of it. The thing spent a lot of time rattling around and finally got finished, and in 1987 it was shown at the Roxie in San Francisco. We went up there, thinking it would be a nonevent. We couldn’t get in and had to wait for the next showing. It set records for the four showings that day. Sold out each showing. Later it went national and got some good ratings for that kind of show, and for the next three years it was all over the country. It was my fifteen minutes of fame. I was on the road a lot then and ran into it in Wyoming and in Wisconsin, where I was asked if I had been on TV the night before. Well, it was okay. I can talk about being gay, and it can be interesting. You go through a constant process of coming out and redefining yourself. It takes time to put it all