In my writing, my father is ‘Dad,’ because I need this less intimate address as a buffer from what I have lost, left behind, or perhaps never even had.
“I can’t separate my experience of being raised by gay people from my experience of being raised by people who watched a lot of their friends die young.”
Wait a year, or two, or ten. Or maybe you’ll wait two decades — squeezing through the cracks in eVerify and RealID until the bureaucratic walls grow too high and you must go under.