The First Openly Gay Dad

Reading The Candy House and remembering to call my father

I think it would be nice to have a kid one day. I had a friend who kept whining that he wanted kids as a tradwife bit, and this irritated me because it is not remotely something available to me as both a very public sex worker and a minimally-employed person. I guess fatherhood is both a distant financial goal and looming financial anxiety for me, a question of when my career will be secure and lucrative enough to support a child properly.

I do sometimes think this “properly” will be an ever-rising threshold for me, and that gay people intrinsically over-prepare for child-rearing because it’s impossible for us to do on accident. It’s hard for us to do without a paper trail. There’s an application-based nature to all of it that— come to think of it— codifies and compels submission to a politics of respectability. Maybe that’s part of why those politics so thoroughly won popularity within the movement, survivors of the AIDS crisis’ most deadly years trying to prove they’d be good parents. Maybe that’s a generous explanation.

Fatherhood came to mind a lot while I was reading the new Jennifer Egan novel The Candy House. It’s a loose sequel to her other book that I love, A Visit from The Goon Squad, but you don’t have to read the earlier book to enjoy the new one. In both books she builds a narrative across a network of characters sometimes closely related, sometimes connected by ephemeral encounters. I wish I could call her overrated, being a bestseller and all, but I think she’s extremely good.

The Candy House revolves around a technological innovation that allows people to upload and review their life’s memories. This later evolves into a disturbingly invasive cloud of collective memories as well as brain implants for a citizen spy program. She’s great at bringing speculative elements into *literary fiction*, and she manages to satirize surveillance technology without being curmudgeonly about it.

But a lot of the book is about dads. The perspectives of a father and his son bookend the novel, while another father— whose perspective is only accessed indirectly (through the memory device)— is a focal point for the multiple women in the story. Just behind the flashy, Black Mirror-esque portends of techno-dystopia, daddy issues buttress the emotional architecture of The Candy House, wherein Egan seems to have found herself observing men and the generational ripples of our endemic narcissism, which we call soul-searching.

My own dad is a pretty good guy, though it took me a while to admit it. I must get my soul-searching from him, but I wish I knew more about what he ever found, or if he found anything at all, before he settled down in his second marriage. The older I get the less bitterly I take the fact that I was the accidental product of a brief, misguided romance between two people not much older than I am now.

As nice as it sounds to try to rectify these mistakes, a strangely common rationale for parenthood, I’ve always been resistant to the notion that child-bearing is the only procreative act, much less the best one here in the end days. I think queer people have a particular calling to alternative forms of lineage including mentorship, care-taking, and art.

In the final pages of The Candy House, a young character rebels against digitized memory, not because it compromises our privacy or our sanity, but because it threatens our creativity. It is the work of writers to serve as oracles of a collective consciousness, Egan resolves; the efforts of tech corporations to tell us who we are will never quite fulfill us.

It sometimes feels like a reactionary aesthetic has taken hold of many gay men’s imaginations, such that art-making seems passé and domesticity appears edgy. I can understand where this might come from: the incentives of social media compel us all to demonstrate a tasteful eye and acerbic tongue, and in turn it feels as though everywhere you look there are “creators” petitioning for attention. To smooth out the brain and subsist on the smallness of home life appears subversive by contrast, especially if you find it chic to be controlled by dependent upon a wealthier intimate partner.

I do occasionally consider how having a child is a good way of coping with life’s many other disappointments. We can’t all be artists, much less successful ones. But generally speaking, we can all create a world for a child. I see this as no small triumph. I often felt so alien to my father when I was younger because I could not see building a family as a worthy aspiration, when it is something from which he takes great pride.

At least, I think so? Perhaps we’re all stuck speculating about the inner worlds of our fathers. Even if I could afford it, I don’t know if I could bear having someone spend their life struggling to make sense of me. For now, I’m content with having a really cute dog.

XO

TY