20 | Out in the Mountains |June 2000

My Father’s Story

BY GARRETT KIMBERLY

The following is a partial
transcript of an interview with
Garrett Kimberly andedited for

publication by OITM stafl

My father was born Akiba
Jacob Wertheim into an orthodox
Jewish family in Frankfurt,
Germany, in 1935. It’s a pretty
horrific but typical Holocaust
survival story; his family man-
aged to sell, give away, or lose
everything of value they had as
they traveled secretly through
Europe. They made it to New
York just at the end of the war.
Like so many Jewish families
that went through so much to get
out of Europe, when they got to
America, they faced incredible
anti-Semitism. My father was
beaten up practically every day
on his way on his way to school
because he looked like a little
Jewish kid.

He decided this wasn’t worth
it. Shortly after he was bar mitz-
vahed, he told his family he did-
n’t want to be Jewish. They
kicked him out of the house.
They sat shiva for him, which is
a Jewish funeral ritual, and never
saw or spoke to him again. He
was almost 14.

The older I get, the more I
look like my dad. He didn’t have
many photographs of his family,
but I have one, and I look more
and more like these people. It’s
weird that there are people I look
like and who are my blood rela-

‘tives that don’t want to know

me. I’m like a ghost to them.

1 had a detective friend help
me track down my mother’s
family alter he died. It took two
years to find them. When I
called, the woman who
answered was my father’s
younger sister. I told her who I
was, and she said nothing. I
heard the phone fall to the
ground. Then there was a long
pause; her husband picked up the
phone and I talked to him for
about 20 minutes.

He basically asked me not to
communicate with the family out
of respect for them. He said,
“You’ve got to understand, your
father walked over the bodies of
millions of dead Jews to get his
"personal comfort.” I can’t imag-
ine turning my son out on the
street, but asuhorrifying as it is,
what they did, it’s also under-
standable on some level. It was
clearly painful and intense for
them.

**=l‘

My father converted to
Catholicism and changed his
name to Greg Kimberly. He
lived on the street for a couple of
years and did some pretty gratu-
itous things to support himself,
as one can imagine. Eventually
he rented a room from this fami-
ly. They became his unofficial

adopted family. He couldn’t
afford rent, but their grandmoth-
er was living there and needed
support. So he took care of her in
exchange for his rent. He spent
the rest of his teenage years
there.

They were also first-genera-
tion German Jewish immigrants,
but Reform Jews, very different.
They didn’t mind that he was
considering Catholicism. They
were wealthy, friends with
Albert Einstein, well educated.
The grandfather was an eye sur-
geon, the grandmother was a
professor, and the woman who
owned the house was one of the

first women ophthalmologists. It _

was a cool, progressive family,
and they helped my father get
back on his feet. .

Sometime in his late teens,
his sexuality started to play a
more important role in his life.
He realized he was gay and that
was a problem, even for this lib-
eral family. He moved out to Los
Angeles to live with the grand-
mother’s twin sister. They fig-
ured LA was this liberal bastion.

He and his partner at the time
decided to move out to
California together. They had no
money, but his partner had a
beat—up old car. At that time you
could retum things at department
stores without receipts. So the
partner would go in, shoplift
something, and my dad would
go and return it. So they traveled
across the country stealing and
returning items.

In California, he moved into
an apartment with this small
group_of men and started work-
ing in the fashion industry; he’d
never finished high school, but
in New York, he worked in tex-
tiles and got to know it. He went
further into the closet profes-
sionally. Privately, he was living
with these men, but profession-
ally he was very much in the
closet. He married a woman
because he was professionally
afraid, but they were divorced
pretty quickly.

He became a popular design-
er. He designed the first popular

jumpsuit, which was a big deal.
He had many famous customers;
he designed for Groucho Marx,
Vincent Price, Marilyn Monroe.
And he secretly began designing
for costumes for drag queens and
became quite famous in that
realm.

Around that time, he met my
mother. My dad had left a rela-
tionship with a man a couple
years before he met her and was
single. At that point, he owned
eight or nine fabric stores
through which he did design. My
mom came in to apply for ajob.
The way they both told it, it was

incredible first-sight romantic
Shakespearean spontaneous

love. He always said he loved

men, but he loved my mother.

Before they got married, my
dad told my mom, “I’m gay, and
I need you to know that before
we commit to living together.”
My mother had grown up in an
environment where she didn’t
know what that meant; she was
the daughter of an overly protec-
tive Baptist minister. I think she
did understand, but on some
“level that was not something
they talked about. So he
explained that he was in love
with her, but for the most part, he
liked men. She said “Are you
gonna be having sex with men
while we’re married?” He told
her no. That was enough for her,
and for 15 years, that worked for
them.

After the divorce, my father
and I moved to Seattle and lived
in Capitol Hill in a heavily gay
neighborhood. All our neighbors
were gay men; my father was
part of a support group for
divorced gay men with teenaged
sons.

***

He was always there for me. I
was in a lot of school plays; he
was always the parent in the
audience taking the most pho-

tographs, the one saying “that’s .

my son, right there.” He was
always embarrassing me in pub-
lic by telling people how fabu-
lous I was. I spent much of my
time being embarrassed in front
of him.

He always talked to me with
such respect. When he made
decisions about our life
—whether to move to Seattle,
what high school I should go to,
whether we should visit our fam-
ily in New York -— he always
wanted to know what I thought
was the right thing to do.

We would talk about every-
thing — we’d talk about Ronald
Reagan. He was a huge Reagan
fan. _One of my father’s greatest
achievements was that he and
my mom designed a wedding
dress for Pat Nixon’s niece. He
had this beautiful handwritten
letter from Richard Nixon that
he had framed on the wall, and
he thought it was the greatest
thing. He was a crazy
Republican — he either donated
money to whatever school I was
at or to the Republican party.
The first time I ever saw my
father cry was when Reagan was
elected president — he cried for
Joy-

If I brought someone home he
thought was questionable, got an
F or an A on a paper, won a prize
at school — no matter what I did,
he always would start conversa-
tion about it by saying he loved
me and thought I was wonderful.
He managed always to separate
my actions from my identity.

Dear

Once my brother and I were
playing in the yard and burnt
something down. My father was
very angry. But he also made it
clear to us, as he was being
angry, that he loved us; he talked
to us about our behaviour as this
separate thing from who we
were. He always said that no
matter who I brought home, he
would always love me. Before I
knew he was gay, he told me if I
ever was attracted to a man, that
would be okay, and he would be
proud to call me his son. He did
that at a very early age, before I
ever was attracted to anyone.
There was never shame there for
me.

He wasn’t interested in cul-
ture. I liked poetry, theatre, art.
He didn’t like any ofthat, but he
loved that I liked it. He didn’t
really like women, but loved that
I liked women. He didn’t really
like literature, but loved that I
liked it. He loved that I was
everything I was, and he let me
know. ’

For much of my life, he
would go to extremes to get me
extravagant gifts for my birth-

day. In the last few years of his,

life, I said “I don’t really want
you to get me a fancy gift — I
want you to write me a poem.”
He’d never even written a letter;
the only thing he’d ever written
were accounting sheets. But he
wrote a poem about how much
he loved me —— very sweet,
cheesy, in iambic pentameter
like a limerick, but so beautiful.

The next year, he said “Is
there something I can really get
this year?” We were at the table,
and there was some wax drip-
ping from a candle; I said “Some
wax.” So he made me this wax
sculpture. He went out and got
candles and a big block of wax
and melted them and made a
sculpture. He was just so enthu-
siastic about me, always work-
ing so hard to be a good dad.

During the civil union hear-
ings, I so wanted to testify about
the adequacy of having a gay
parent, that my father was won-
derful and loving, that despite
his internalized hatred of his
Judaism and homosexuality, he
taught me everything about com-
passion, love, warmth, friend-
ship, trust. There was never a
question in my mind that he was
the safest person on the planet to
be with, even though he made
unhealthy personal choices, put
himselfin hann’s way again and
again, and eventually got HIV
and committed suicide.

***

He died in February, 1986;
February 2, Groundhog Day. I
was 16, almost 17. We’d been

living in Seattle for almost three
years. It was a horrible time in
the epidemic. People were dying
left and right.

The previous December, I
was reading Man's Search for
Meaning in school. It’s about
how this man survives the
Holocaust in a concentration
camp and finds meaning in the
midst of this.

My father hadn’t told me he
had AIDS yet. We would see
neighbors completely incapaci-
tated from wasting syndrome
and had Karposi’s — people were
being decimated around us. I
knew what was going on, but
had no idea my dad was sick. I
was in such denial.-I knew he
was making unhealthy choices;
he was going to the bathhouses
every night, and he brought lots
of different men home. I knew
he was sick; he was in the hospi-
tal twice that year for meningitis,
and he’d had pneumonia. But
something inside me was not
putting two and two together,
probably for my own sanity.

Shortly before Christmas, he
was sick in bed. He called me to
his room and asked what I
thought about euthanasia. I
immediately knew he was talk-
ing about himself. We talked for
hours about_why I thought life
was valuable; I’m just reading
this book in school with all these
high-falutin’ ideas, and I’m 16,
so I’ve got it all figured out. We
talked about how much I loved
and needed him, and he said no
matter what happened, he

‘always would love me, would

know I’d succeed, and was
proud of me.

He knew then, I think, that he
was going to kill himself, that he
couldn’t handle wasting syn-
drome. He also knew I couldn’t
take care of him, and there was-
n’t anyone left in his community
of friends to do it. So in some
ways, he spared me a lot. But he
promised he wouldn’t kill him-
self until after I graduated from
high school. I asked him not to; I
told him I needed him around
until I went to college, at least.

But he couldn’t make it that
long. In January, he went into
hospital again; wasting clearly
was starting. He was released
from hospital in late January. He
took a trip to Canada to visit a
man he had been in a relation-
ship withsince he left my moth-
er. He saw many other men, but
this was his lover, the guy that
meant most to him. He came
back the weekend between
January and February. ‘

He killed himself sometime
on Sunday when I was asleep. I
didn’t see him Monday morning