While reading poetry this afternoon, something about its associative nature caused me to wonder: whatever happened to Jeffrey Lidgate. Jeffrey was a childhood friend from elementary school. Lawren Harris P.S. We used to go after school to play at one another’s homes. The Lidgates lived in a small, box-like bungalow on the southwest corner of Elm and Griswold, a neighbourhood which I see now is overrun by in-fill housing, big two-story homes that take up the entire lot. After grade six, he went to one junior high school and I went to another and so our friendship faded away. We last spent time together when we were fourteen and went for two weeks to Camp Growling Bear. We bunked in the same tent, in the big boys unit, where everyone else was tall and had deep voices and thick tufts of hair under their arms and over their dicks while Jeffrey and I, the two scrawny little kids of the unit, were still waiting for the pubic fairy to visit us in our sleep and grant all our wishes.
A couple of the other boys bullied us, but mostly Jeffrey. They called him a femme. I stood up for Jeffrey and yelled back at them that he wasn’t a femme and they should leave him alone. Fortunately, the counsellor, who was only sixteen but remarkably mature, sat us all down and had a long chat and his intervention made the balance of our camp session bearable, especially for Jeffrey. Nowadays, school settings talk about zero tolerance policies and tough consequences for bullies, but I think this is just institutional laziness. This sixteen year old had all the right instincts and would put today’s educators to shame. He was as respectful to the bullies as he was to Jeffrey, recognizing perhaps that the bullies came to this with their own burdens. One, at least, probably came from an abusive home. Had the counsellor come at him in a punitive way, the kid would only have interpreted it as yet more abuse and would have continued to pass it along to Jeffrey when no one was looking. But the counsellor approached the situation with a lighter touch; the bully saw he wasn’t being dismissed and fell into line.
But here’s the thing: Jeffrey was a femme. However impolite, the bullies were drawing attention to the obvious. Jeffrey was different than the other boys. He threw like a girl. He read Harriet The Spy. He ran like one of the nurses in the opening credits of M*A*S*H. If I’d known then what I know now, I would have responded differently when the bullies called him a femme. I still would have stood up for him, I would have championed Jeffrey against a legion of bullies, but I wouldn’t have tried to do it by refuting the obvious. In a way, I was worse than the bullies because I tried to deny the Jeffreyness of Jeffrey; at least the bullies weren’t trying to erase him. Instead, I would have said: So what? So he’s not like you. Who cares? Leave him to be who he wants to be. If we were all the same, what a boring world this would be. But I was barely fourteen and barely five feet tall, and didn’t know much of anything about anything. And I certainly didn’t have any of my camp counsellor’s instincts.
In the fall, Jeffrey went to one high school and I went to another and, for reasons I can’t quite explain, we never saw one another again. While I can’t say for certain, I think it’s reasonable to suppose that Jeffrey was gay and knew, even then, that he wasn’t like most of the other boys. Early on, I recognized a pattern in my own male friendships: I gravitated towards boys who would later come out, and I continue that pattern to this day, although now the boys I gravitate towards are already out, so we all know where we stand. The only difference with Jeffrey is that we had drifted apart before he was mature enough to do something as courageous as come out.
I play my own odd game with male sexuality. From an early age, I recognized a performative side to my maleness at least as I expressed it in public. When I went outside to play, I was a “real” boy, throwing baseballs like a real boy, taking slap shots like a real boy, running like a real boy, telling jokes, talking sports, singing Monty Python’s Lumberjack Song, all of it like the sturdy hetero boy the world expected me to be. I passed. But I had a closeted life, too. Starting from about the age of seven, when my parents “forced” me to take my first piano lesson, I discovered that there were many things I would rather be doing than playing hockey. I enjoyed learning to play Bach preludes and fugues, tinkering with my chemistry set, reading classic novels, dipping into Romantic poetry, dashing off pencil drawings in a sketch book. I was what they call a sensitive boy. Still a hetero male, but not a hetero male in the way that hetero maleness tends to play out in public spaces, TV, sports, politics, military conflicts, the workplace, and, more recently, the internet.
From about the age of seven, when I started taking piano lessons and going to Jeffrey’s house to play, I intuited that there was something “off” about the maleness I was being encouraged to adopt. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a toxic masculinity, but I wouldn’t call it a healthy masculinity either. It was the masculinity I learned about in gym class at high school, and in the change room at hockey camp, and on the Flintstones when Fred and Barney came home after a hard day working in the quarry and expected Wilma and Betty to have dinner ready for them. The current discourse from conspiracy-minded types is that covert liberal groups are “grooming” children. Gay doesn’t just happen; it’s a thing liberals foist on children through the manipulations of perverts. In my experience, grooming is real, but I don’t think the grooming I’ve known is quite what the Jordan Petersons of the world have in mind. I’ve been groomed to be a real hetero man. I’ve been groomed to care about baseball stats and hockey standings even as I sneak off to choir rehearsals. I’ve been groomed to carry myself with a certain John Wayne swagger even as I sit at the piano to play a Haydn sonata. And, whether I like it or not, I’ve been groomed to think about women in a certain way. The grooming began from an early age, I can feel its tendrils worming deep inside my being, and every day I work against the influence that has twisted me into this ugly scowling straight man who refuses to cook his own meals and scares small children away.
I’ve been groomed to be a real hetero man. I’ve been groomed to care about baseball stats and hockey standings even as I sneak off to choir rehearsals.
My first online searches for Jeffrey didn’t yield any results, so I typed his father’s name instead. In his day, Garth Lidgate was a well-known local businessman, an insurance broker with offices in a now demolished strip mall, so I expected it would be easy enough to find something about him. I found an obituary from a funeral home in the town of Haliburton which, coincidentally, is close to Camp Growling Bear. He died in 2016. I searched for his mother, Lily, and there was her obituary, too, with the same funeral home in Haliburton. She had died only three months before Garth. As a kid, I had spent a weekend with them at a property they owned up there, a shack on a hundred acres of pristine forest. Its chief attraction was a stream that ran through it. When Garth wasn’t selling insurance policies in North York, he retreated to this forest stream two hours northeast of the city and passed his days fly fishing. I remember, too, that they were great smokers. Garth, in particular, kept a pouch of tobacco nearby and rolled his own cigarettes. He had yellow teeth and stained fingernails and, in time, developed one of those husky radio-announcer voices so typical in the 70s. Lily at least smoked filtered cigarettes. I remember her standing in the doorway watching Jeffrey and I play, beautiful in her long straight red hair, arms crossed and a cigarette smouldering between two fingers.
After I was called to the bar and set myself up in private practice, I announced it with an afternoon cocktail party. I sent an invitation to Garth and he was there enthusiastically cheering me on. He wasn’t the only father of a gay son who treated me this way. He could understand me. He could relate to me. I wonder if maybe he hoped a bit of me might rub off on his boy. It would have dashed his hopes to learn that I prefer opera to hockey games, but, as I say, I was a closeted hetero and I don’t think he knew about my preferences.
Jeffrey was an only child and, I assume, wrote both obituaries. I note something odd in their wording. In Lily’s obituary, she is “Loving mother of Jeffrey Lidgate.” That squares with my childhood memory of her. She struck me as warm and, although she seemed a bit distant, most of that can be attributed to the fact that, even then, she was struggling against the symptoms of fibromyalgia and simply couldn’t be as expressive in her body as she might have wished. Nevertheless, I don’t think she was emotionally distant; she always seemed to be there for Jeffrey. Then we have Garth’s obituary. There, he is “Beloved husband of Lily Lidgate. Remembered respectfully by his son Jeffrey Lidgate.” I note a difference in the direction of the love. In Lily’s obituary, it is Lily who does the loving. In Garth’s obituary, he draws the love to himself, but not from Jeffrey, who can offer only his remembrance. At the very least, the words suggest a rift. While I can’t know what transpired within this family unit, I imagine it as plausible that Garth was incapable of reconciling himself to (never mind inspiring love from) a gay son.
The obituaries confirm for me that Jeffrey is kicking around somewhere, or at least he was at the time of their writing, so I tried searching again using different terms and believe I have found his professional web site. It includes a photograph of a man my age with a full beard, which I think is funny given that, at the time of our last contact, neither of us could grow facial hair, or any other hair for that matter. Even so, adjusting for age, I look at that photograph and say to myself, I’m pretty sure that’s him—especially when I gaze at the eyes. The site says he is a therapist who supports victims of trauma and abuse, and it makes special mention of support for people who identify as LGBTQ+. If he were one of the kids in Michael Apted’s Seven Up! documentary, testing the Jesuit supposition that a child of seven foretells the man, I expect I could draw a straight line between the child I knew and this man.
As an addendum, it’s worth mentioning that I ran into one of our camp bullies a few years after the fact. My mother had reconnected with an estranged uncle and he invited us for a Sunday roast at the York Downs Golf & Country Club where he was a member. We were not so highfalutin so my mother made sure my brother and I dressed in our very best clothes and prepared speeches about all the productive things we were doing with our lives now that we were young undergraduates. They were serving a buffet of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. I stepped up for my slice of meat and recognized the person handling the knife. He kept his long blond hair in a net tucked underneath a white cap and he wore a white apron. He held his eyes lowered in a servile manner and didn’t look at me much less recognize me. If he had looked at me, he would have seen someone ten inches taller, dressed in jacket and tie, who now had to shave every day. Not exactly the pre-pubescent kid he’d knocked around the fire pit at camp. Yet there he was, the scruffy boy who had ragged on my friend for being a femme, now with his head bowed and serving me lunch.