Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli. The newly released movie Fairyland, produced by Sofia Coppola and directed by Andrew Durham, stars Scoot McNary as a gay single father raising his daughter in San Francisco in the 1970s.
Chapter 2: What is the story behind the movie 'Fairyland'?
It's based on a memoir of the same name by Alicia Abbott, who wrote about growing up in the early years of the gay rights movement in the capital of gay America, San Francisco. It's not uncommon now to see children with gay parents, but it was uncommon when she was raised by her gay father in the 1970s and 80s. Her father, Steve Abbott, was a poet, essayist, and editor.
In 1969, when he married the woman who became Alicia's mother, he described himself as bisexual. Both of them were graduate students at Emory University in Atlanta. Alicia writes that while her parents shared a bed and a life, her father helped organize Atlanta's Gay Liberation Front and was the gay lib editor at Atlanta's Alternative Weekly, The Great Speckled Bird.
Two years after Alicia was born, her mother was killed in a car accident. Soon after, her father decided they would move to San Francisco, and the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood became their home. Steve Abbott died of AIDS-related complications in 1992. Terry Gross spoke with Alicia Abbott in 2013. Her memoir is based, in part, on her father's journals.
Chapter 3: How did Alicia Abbott's upbringing influence her perspective?
Alicia Abbott, welcome to Fresh Air. I'm so glad you wrote this book because I feel like we, or at least I've read a lot more about what it's like to be a gay parent than what it's like to be a child of a gay parent. And I haven't read anything about a child of a gay parent at the dawn of the age of the gay liberation era. Do you feel like this gives you a kind of unique perspective on that era?
Yeah.
Yes. I mean, I think that the experience of being a child of a gay parent in my generation or a child of a gay parent coming of age today is very different. Most of the children born of gay parents in the first two decades after Stonewall, those children were the products of heterosexual unions, usually straight marriages.
And so in those situations, typically the parent was closeted and would come out after the child was born and Either the parents would divorce or maybe the parent wouldn't come out. But usually in those situations, the child would live with one of the parents. And because the way the courts were set up, they're often living with the straight parent or sometimes with the mother.
Chapter 4: What unique challenges did Alicia face as a child of a gay parent?
My situation was unique because my mother died. And so there really wasn't anyone clearly who I was going to live with other than my father. So he was – I was living in an exclusively – gay-headed household from as early as I can remember.
Children today, they are usually the product of a gay couple who would either adopt a child or go through a process of artificial insemination to have a child, but it's very much there as a couple wanting to have a child together. So I had a very different situation when I was young. There was very few
gay parents, or especially a few gay-headed households, so that I knew very few kids like myself growing up.
There's a section from your memoir, from early in your memoir, that I want you to read. And this is really like your prehistory. It's about how your parents met. And so you're not even born yet in the passage I'm going to ask you to read, but I think it kind of sets the context for your birth and for the situation that you and your father found yourself in.
Yes. When my parents first met at an SDS party and my father told my mother he was bisexual, she answered, that means you can love all of humanity instead of just half of it. It was 1968 and everyone was talking about revolution. My father had just returned from a summer in Paris. The city was still roiling from the May riots when students had shouted, be reasonable, demand the impossible.
Now, in the halls of American academia, anti-war students were shutting down campuses from UC Berkeley to Columbia. My mother was intrigued by my father's open approach to sexuality. She never got hung up on his boy crushes like his other girlfriends had. She was only jealous of his relationships with women and, according to dad, even liked the guys he was attracted to.
On weekends, they went to the Cove and to the other gay and mixed bars that dotted the outskirts of downtown Atlanta. There, my mother picked out the young men my father could never attract on his own, men who'd never consider a gay encounter, but who'd be up for a drunken three-way. In those early years of the sexual revolution, it was hip for young people to try new combinations.
Sometimes, my mom would dress in men's clothing when they went out. Dad said she made a cute boy. Other weekends, my parents hosted dinner parties, entertaining the anti-war and grad student friends with spaghetti, cheap red wine, and charades. Dad wrote about feeling satisfied at the close of these evenings, seeing himself and my mom as leaders of a salon of intellectually engaged students.
As they cleaned up after one such party, my mom suggested they marry. Landlords won't hassle us so much, she reasoned. We'll be able to stock the kitchen and house with wedding presents. My parents will give us more money. Other than that, our life won't really change.
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Chapter 5: How did the AIDS epidemic impact Alicia's family life?
Your aunt had offered to adopt you, but your father insisted on keeping you, considering his reservations about being a parent. Do you feel like you understand why he kept you? Absolutely.
For one thing, my father wrote about in his journals, feeling this connection with me after I was born. So before I was born, he wasn't necessarily very enthusiastic about having a child. But after I was born, he really enjoyed spending time with me.
And actually for a short period, he was a sort of house husband before even John Lennon was a house husband, working from home trying to sell his work while my mother was working a 9-to-5 job. And so after my mother's death, I think my father felt like he didn't have very much. His relationship with a young man that he had while he was with my mother had dissolved.
And he, in a sense, felt that I was all that he had in the world and he was all that I had in the world. So I don't think he could have imagined letting my aunt or anyone else take over raising me.
When you were a young child, after your mother died, your father decided to move to San Francisco. So you and he moved there. And early on, he had other roommates living with you, including one or two men who were drag queens. And I'm wondering what your reaction was at a very young age when you hadn't been exposed to much at all.
In some ways, nothing's unusual when you're very young because everything's new.
Exactly.
So what was your reaction to seeing men who you were living with in dresses and lipstick?
Well, I mean, my father had already been sometimes wearing dresses in Atlanta. I think for my father, wearing a dress was a political statement. When we were in San Francisco and we were living with two men, one of whom was a drag queen full time and another one who would sort of dress up to go out. I really saw it as play. At the time, I would have been about four years old.
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Chapter 6: What insights does Alicia share about her father's journals?
And I think I was with my father in Nebraska. and visiting my grandparents, his parents in Nebraska. And I turned to my grandfather and asked him, what does it mean to be gay? And my grandfather said, oh, that means to be happy. And I said, that's not what my dad says. And, you know, of course, my dad thought that was very funny. So I was very curious about it.
But, you know, I do recall also my father writing in his journal that at one point as he was getting ready for a date, I said to him, I don't understand why you have to like boys. You know, why can't you like girls? When I grow up, I'm going to like boys. And I think in that, you know, at that point I was watching a lot of television, like Happy Days and stuff.
And, you know, I wanted to take part in this movement. you know, ritualization of romance that was boy-girl. It wasn't boy-boy. It wasn't girl-girl. It was boy-girl. And I, you know, I also had a very strong longing for a mother. And so I think I had a fantasy that if my father had a girlfriend, that I might get a mother. And then if I got a mother, I might get brothers and sisters.
Your father was out. I mean, he came out after Stonewall. And so he was out. He had no problem with that. But as you got a little bit older, your father's gayness became kind of an embarrassment to you. And One of the moments that really broke my heart reading your book, you know, your father's going out at night and he says to you, how do I look?
And you say, because you're kind of embarrassed at this point by his... you know, open homosexuality, and you say to him, you look so queer. And he's, of course, really hurt by that. And I understand you wanting to fit in with your friends and be, quote, you know, normal, fitting in with their friends and their families. But I also figured, oh, your father must have been so hurt.
And especially this is like post-Stonewall and in the gay liberation era, and his own daughter is embarrassed by him When you were reading your father's journals and seeing his life from his point of view, as opposed to seeing it from your point of view, what kind of like shift in perspective did that give you about your childhood?
Well, a pretty powerful shift in perspective. As I was a child, like any child, I saw everything through sort of the lens of myself. And whether I was getting my needs met or not, and whether my dad was being fair, unfair, or exposing me to, you know, ridicule or not. And unfortunately, he died just as I was becoming an adult. He died four days before my 22nd birthday. And, you know, I think...
To be revisiting the journals now, 20 years later, as a parent of two children, I have so much more sympathy for his struggles and respect. The fact that he was a single father living among roommates, trying to find love as an openly gay man and also trying to make a name for himself as a writer is...
And that he was able to do all that, you know, just gives me tremendous amount of respect for the struggle he went through that I couldn't have appreciated at that age. You know, nor should I. I mean, I think that kids should be protected from all of their parents. You know, they don't need to hear all of their parents' trials. They want to be able to enjoy their childhood.
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Chapter 7: How did Alicia's relationship with her father evolve over time?
But Larry can't stop himself from going too far. Here, he says they should do a new show together, but one that's not too easy. Rogers responds with smiling umbrage.
Oklahoma's too easy? The guy actually getting the girl in the end is too easy? You've just eliminated every successful musical comedy ever written, Larry. It's too easy for me. Did you hear the audience tonight? Yes. 1,600 people didn't think it was too easy. You're telling me 1,600 people were wrong? I'm just saying. And I can do something so much more emotionally complicated.
We don't have to pander to what's next. Oh, I was going to say, you're pandering? No, I didn't say that. Irving Berlin is pandering? I love Berlin. White Christmas is pandering? Well, I don't believe White Christmas. Well, maybe audiences have changed. Well, they still love to laugh. They want to laugh, but not in that way. In what way? In your way.
They want to laugh, but they also want to cry a little. They want to feel.
In his real life, of course, Larry is actually a cauldron of feelings. But in his art, he likes to disguise them. The Kenny Rogers appreciates that Hart's sophisticated lyrics modernized American songwriting. But he realizes that such cleverness is no longer in fashion. Now, with its confined setting and garrulous characters, Blue Moon often feels like an adapted play. Yet this isn't a problem.
Linklater understands how to use his camera in confined spaces to keep a talkie movie visually arresting. And he's helped by the snap of Robert Kaplow's screenplay and by an immaculate cast that nails every line. Hawke transforms himself in body and voice, turning his familiar cocky self into a physically shrinking figure, forever tiptoeing on the rim of despair.
His neediness is naked when Elizabeth arrives, and they share a warm, funny tête-à-tête in which she tells him about her sexual encounter with the big man on campus she's always adored. Qualia, it's worth saying, is just terrific here, bursting with charm and vitality.
Kidding himself into thinking this lanky young beauty might be romantically interested in him, Larry listens to her with the rapt attention of one who hopes to wish love into existence. Just as earlier, he'd hoped to wish back into existence his old easy rapport with Rogers.
Although Blue Moon works on a small canvas, Linklater uses it to explore big things, shifting cultural tastes, professional jealousy, the vagaries of artistic collaboration, the weight of passing time. And he gives us an indelible portrait of a man who, for all his uncommon self-devouring brilliance, is driven by feelings that are all too human.
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