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Love, Melissa.” They married in Washington, D.C., less than two years later. “Dear Davyd,” she wrote, “Some things are meant to be … I love you forever - let’s grab it and run. Paradoxically, it might have seemed, Dad retained those queer keepsakes alongside fragments of his 30-year relationship with my mother - a pocket-size photograph of Mom in her 20s, the china they were gifted on their wedding day, and images of them in tender, candid moments captured decades ago by an old friend.Īmong those items was a card Mom mailed to Dad on Aug. In one postscript, the man gleefully referenced the location of a gay hookup spot in Rome. Both were from a friend I’d never heard of, who was apparently traveling in Europe at the time. In a box stuffed with faded photos and writings, Dad had stored two postcards he received in the 1970s at a Noe Valley address not far from my first San Francisco apartment. Chronicle collage with images provided by J.D. Right: Davyd Morris and his sons, Alex and J.D., in Falls Church, Va., in 1992. Left: Davyd Morris at the top of Twin Peaks in the 1980s. In the aftermath of his death, however, as I rummaged through everything he’d held onto over 65 years, the narrative I had constructed around my father grew more complicated. After my parents grew apart and decided to end their marriage, Dad returned to his roots while Mom stayed in the Salinas Valley. He was a man who dated men in his 20s until he met a woman he loved, one with whom he tried to build a more socially acceptable life. I never asked him much about his past because I thought I knew his story already. He would offer to pick me up in his car, and I would decline I relished that I could reach him on foot. He would have me over to watch awards shows or to attend the small parties he hosted for holidays or San Francisco Pride. I could walk to his home from mine, a journey I frequently made to spend an afternoon talking about current events over one of his home-cooked meals. We cherished our proximity to each other. The day of my fruitless search for his nonexistent will, I screamed so loud and for so long that my voice was hoarse for four days.ĭad spent the last eight years of his life in San Francisco, and for the final three, I lived here, too.
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It was Dad’s shocking death on a Thursday morning that forced me to confront how wrong those ruminations were as I agonized over the conversations and shared experiences we would never have. Again and again, I returned to the same desperate thoughts: Why can’t we be normal? Why can’t he be normal? I recoiled at the rarity - no one else was like us, it seemed, to my dismay. I did not know a single other person who had both a gay sibling and a gay parent. Among everyone I’d met in both of my hometowns and all the friends I’d made in college at UC Berkeley, I could count on one hand the number of gay people I knew who also had a gay sibling. When I was 21, I thought I learned the truth that explained it all: My father was gay. No trip to the city was ever long enough for him. In his native San Francisco, he was electrified - the world’s most enthusiastic tour guide. His interests skewed more cosmopolitan than those of most other stay-at-home parents and he leaped at seemingly every opportunity to take us out of town. In Salinas and Bakersfield, the places where my parents raised me, Dad was often a fish out of water. Chronicle collage with image provided by J.D. Top right: Davyd Morris with Alex and J.D. Morris (left), his brother, Alex, and his father, Davyd, at Coit Tower in the 1990s.
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But the few overtly romantic gestures I saw Dad perform - the exaggerated kiss here and there - appeared somehow half-hearted.Ībove: Davyd Morris and future wife Melissa Larsen in South Carolina in the 1980s. He packed my mother’s work lunches and brewed her coffee, which he never drank himself. He drank Champagne and listened to Linda Ronstadt, and offered equally impassioned disquisitions on Judy Garland’s filmography, the Summer of Love and the 49ers. Barely a day after his unexpected death, so much of what I thought I knew about my father’s life began to shift.ĭuring my childhood, he always seemed different than my friends’ fathers. The moment I discovered the napkin as I knelt on Dad’s sun-drenched floor that day last June, my eyes grew watery and my stomach tightened. He held onto it for decades - even after Mom was no longer his wife. I assume Dad used the napkin as practice for a card he sent to Mom. “Melissa,” my father wrote, “You have touched my life and I am blessed with love for you forever.