The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
The holiday that changed me ‘I never properly said goodbye’
A road trip to a Navajo reservation after his father’s death brought closure for author Armistead Maupin
Ihad a problematic relationship with my father. When I was growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina, I just wasn’t the boy he wanted me to be. He was very right-wing, a white supremacist, in fact, and I spent too many years impersonating the son he wanted. For a while, I had him convinced. I was a card-carrying young conservative in school and volunteered for Vietnam.
My love of Bette Davis should have tipped off the old man that I was what he often liked to call “a fairy nice fellow”. But he chose not to put the pieces together, the way so many fathers do.
I finally came out to him in a letter one of my fictional characters wrote to his parents in Tales of the City. I was no better at confrontation than he was.
My choice of partners did little to help my relationship with him, until he met my husband, Christopher Turner, who charmed him in minutes. Chris has a conservative Southern father himself, so he knew just how to deal with him.
Though his health had been declining, my father died unexpectedly in July 2005. We were thousands of miles apart at the time, but I remember exactly where I was and exactly how I felt at the moment of his death.
Chris and I love road trips, and we were several days into one when we decided to camp at Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado. There are ancient native cliff dwellings there which are remarkable, but the campground itself was a nightmare. I remember standing in a long line for a shower with people I would now describe as Trumpsters. I was not a happy camper.
But the place started to win me over with the beautiful skies and landscape. Chris made a surprisingly good dinner on our little camp stove. Then, just as we zipped ourselves into our tent, a violent thunderstorm descended upon us.
We crawled into our double sleeping bag and fell asleep in each other’s arms while the heavens raged. It was easily the most wonderful night of my life.
I had such peaceful, loving dreams, which I attributed to the euphoric effect of negative ions being released into the atmosphere by the lightning.
But the next morning, as we were on the road again, my sister called to say my father had died the night before, so we left our car with friends in Santa Fe and flew to Raleigh for the funeral.
I should have known not to expect any solace from that ceremony, a quasimilitary affair at which a uniformed sailor helped to lower the coffin into the grave. All the usual suspects were there. Senator Jesse Helms, Washington’s most virulent homophobe, had shown up at the house the day before to pay his respects.
There could not have been a more vivid demonstration that I no longer belonged in this family. And it in no
way felt like I’d properly said goodbye to the old man.
So we flew back to Santa Fe, retrieved our car and headed straight for Monument Valley, in the heart of the Navajo Nation. It’s a place of towering redstone spires and obelisks, and it held a special significance for me because my friend and mentor, the British writer Christopher Isherwood, had honeymooned here with his partner Don Bachardy. There was an obvious symmetry between their trip and ours.
We hired a young Navajo man to take us onto the land; everything about him was unexpected. His name was Harley and he wore a heavy-metal T-shirt and explained that his people revere gay men because they combine the physical strength of a man with the big-hearted sensitivity of a woman. Maybe he had clocked us – but it felt like a benediction after my father’s homophobic culture.
Harley took us into a cave called the Big Hogan, where he had us lie on our backs and stare up at a hole in the ceiling. Then he whipped out a flute and began to play a lovely, ethereal tune. He asked what we could see; it turned out to resemble the head of an eagle, with the blue circle of sky forming the eye.
There’s something else you should know about my father: as the president of a hereditary organisation, he was entitled to wear a diamond eagle that had once been worn by George Washington. He was so proud of that damned eagle and wore it at every ceremonial event.
I was glad I hadn’t said goodbye to my father at that colourless Episcopal funeral in Raleigh. Here at last was the proper farewell. While Harley played his flute, I stared up at that circle of blue sky and released the old man into the ether. It was a moment I will always treasure.
An Evening with Armistead Maupin will tour nationally, beginning at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, on Oct 6 and concluding at St George’s Bristol on Oct 26 (myticket.co.uk)