Stephen Hunt: I Was A Gay Pen Pal Daddy
Stephen Hunt: I Was A Gay Pen Pal Daddy
When father feelings arise, children with needs appear. . . .
Gay, in my late thirties in 1974, I felt I couldn't postpone fathering another day. Then, synchronicity struck. Fate in the form of a personal appeal letter airmailed from India landed on my desk where I was office manager for a national runaway switchboard in Chicago. Happily, I said yes to the letter writer and quickly put my own pen into the service of pen pal paternity. I'm so glad I did.
What followed was transforming for me and for my five new “foster children” of Hindu faith living in Madras in south India. Four young girls and their little preschool brother Vari, 5, jumped into my life just like that. It was hands-across-the-ocean at first sight, so to speak, when a black and white snapshot of the children spilled out of a first letter envelope with bright Indian stamps pasted on it.
Raised myself with two straight siblings, a warm caring mother and baby-doctor father in a family with cocker spaniels to boot, I was amazed how quickly the role of mail-daddy felt like it fit. I'd known I was gay since my late teens, but until now I'd felt stymied by how in the world I could ever fulfill my needs for loving and nurturing little ones -- on my own terms as a grown gay man? Heartily reinventing the role of Daddy as a 20th Century pen pal foster dad, I soon basked in support from my lover and partner Jerry Gregory (formerly with the State Department, later a travel agent) and my approving sister, a parent herself.
My new foster children's natural father was an impoverished, overwhelmed man who wrote me in English. His wife was bedridden with elephantiasis. Eventually I revealed to him I was gay -- and a not very staunch Protestant. It made no difference; he was grateful for my interest and support. He may not have known what gay fully means in American culture! As I became his family's patron he never expressed any disapproval. In fact, he wrote me that he lifted up my name once a week in Hindu prayers at his temple. I was on his prayer list, halfway across the world.
No organized pen pal group was actually involved. However, everyone advised me cautiously to check out the true circumstances of the five children before sending any support. But the first letter rang true and felt right to me, so I answered immediately with an American Express money order. I did consult the internationally experienced Methodists in Evanston, Illinois about the children. Through their church contacts in New York City and India, months later a social work investigator called on the children at home and verified to me by airmail that they were as represented: alive and very needy. Their father just got by, renting a few repaired bicycles. I'm glad I hadn't waited for “authorities” to approve the arrangement. I began sending direct, regular money orders of support, and monthly gift parcels by sea -- to meet needs I trusted were deep and daily.
Every loose dime saved out of my pocket change now became a rupee for my children. Thrift was just the first of many personal values that shifted, and enriched me. I found myself sending my children bigger packages each month and creatively filling and decorating them. Each package took three months to arrive by sea at the port of Madras. I was obliged to learn a parent's pre-planning and patience. Sometimes I imagined I heard my kids squealing in anticipation when a package arrived for them from America.
Practically speaking, I woke up to what I could do on my part as provider. I spent lunch hours excitedly shopping in three thrift shops near my office for items to send my young girls. They loved the bargain summer dresses, blouses, sandals, accessories and colorful mills ends that eventually arrived for them. They had a tug of war over the first red patent leather purse from their Chicago pen pal dad. I found and sent three more like the first to satisfy them. They wrote me their sizes and color preferences. Vari entered school. I received pictures of him and his sisters along with his report cards and little drawings, which went up on Jerry's and my refrigerator door beside receipts for the little guy's school tuition.
As the months passed, my kids spontaneously begin sending me unsolicited little packages of their own. (Hummm, I was their role model, how gratifying.) Unprocessed spices arrived, some strange to me, in interesting raw forms. Flower seeds too, from the subcontinent, crossed the ocean and some even thrived in my Midwest garden. Several popular Indo-English paperback novels published in Bombay were gifts they sent. These opened me up to new variants of English expression and Indian characters and experiences. Our letters flew back and forth, and eventually filled a large suitcase of mine.
I saved all those letters; they are packed away to this day. Our correspondence began in 1974 and ended around 1980, trailing off into holiday greetings. My pen pal parenting lasted a good run of six years, and was satisfying. But the children's needs diminished. Though it was hard to release and let go, eventually I had done enough I felt in adding my contributions as their distant Daddy. Today, in a new century and millennium, I've retained a strong interest in India's culture, especially in the budding gay and lesbian movement on the subcontinent. New foster children abroad need new people to be interested in them. And opportunities for gays and lesbians have widened.
As my children's homeland and set down experiences grew in my thoughts and feelings, I developed a new soul and interests. Jerry and I visited the brightly lit sari palaces and spice emporiums in Chicago's lively Indian/Pakistani neighborhood. We began taking friends out to ethnic restaurants there. We watched for edgy foreign films and rented them as videos even before they came to Chicago art cinemas. The world enlarged visibly for me as I cherished and favored my five growing children. All along, I was gaining a deeper understanding of parents like my straight brother and sister. Too, I hit it off better with parents and kids everywhere it seemed.
The first year, during a fiercely hot summer in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, I received news that Vari had died from the high heat. Learning this, so many of my anticipations for little Vari halted abruptly, as they were not to be. With tears in my eyes, I had him remembered in a sensitive service announcement from the pulpit of the gay-friendly MCC Church I attended. A healing of sorts eventually calmed my grief, and partly filled my fatherly sense of emptiness and loss over a just-budding son swept away too soon. The family in India put my photograph alongside Vari's last one, in the prayer niche of their two-room home. I was deeply touched.
One by one, my foster daughters grew up, made matches and got married. They resourcefully sold the extra contents of my gift packages, especially the drip-dry men's shirts, for their dowries and for goods like handmade wooden clothes presses that they needed to set up housekeeping. All my daughters appreciated the light, stippled, art nouveau aluminum-ware I'd found when out and about antiquing, and had sent to each of them in stylish sets. The pieces were beautiful, kept a polish and were light to ship. I kept one tray decorated with a pine bough for myself, and still burnish and use it at holiday times. My girls passed into the keeping of their husbands and families and wrote no more to me when settled in their new lives. But I treasure their Hindu wedding pictures, with grooms on horses and heaps of marigolds. They were my pen pal passage to India..
They all married, but not before their tireless widowed grandmother, who was often fearlessly on the road selling wares, tried to get me to send for and marry an eligible village girl related to her. This was the only time during my years as a pen pal daddy that I had to vigorously sidestep marriage myself. After all, I was not an eligible batchelor but a partnered gay. Grandmother forgave me, and sent me a series of brass Hindu gods and goddesses she acquired while making her once-in-a-lifetime circuit to Benares and other sacred places of India. She said she sent me these small sacred gifts out of gratitude for what I had been to and given grand-children over the years.
Actually, I am in my children's debt. From Madras they helped me to fulfill my own needs for fathering; I, a gay man who chose to be there for them in a new way. They helped satisfy most of my deepest longings to nurture young lives and reinvent myself. [-End-]
