My sister Linda's response on memoir problem and my answer to her

vooman's voice said...

I am sending you a book on the same subject matter and you can read how she handled her family. She wrote their objections right in the book.
Sometimes all of your reasons for not writing your book, I think, might lie in your confidence in being able to write it. When I am around so many writers up here it makes me realize that you are that writer, just as much as any one of these and you need to grab the bull by the horns. You are not going to get any stronger as you get older. When are these reasons why you "can't" going to change into the reasons you 'can'. Any one who wanted to find out these things about you can just read them on, "Daughters of The Shadow Men." and probably already have.

February 12, 2010 4:41 PM

Yes, I have discussed all aspects of my life in my blog, Daughters of the Shadow Men, including my conclusion that my dad was having homosexual affairs, but I would like to point out to my sister Linda that these entries soon disappear into archives and are likely not going to be accessed again. A book on the other hand is a more substantial record which I think in my sister Margie's view could possibly even become a best seller, and there the family's purported darkest secrets would be exposed to the whole world. She lives in Utah and Linda in San Francisco which also makes a big difference. There would be little or no scandal about such a book in San Francisco which has been dubbed one of the gay cities of the world.
Utah has no married homosexuals that it knows of so the publishing of this story could be a scorching exposure of our hapless family that she for one does not want to have happen in her life time, I am sure. If I lived in Utah I might feel the same way, so since my father is her father also I think the only considerate thing to do is to put off the publishing of the memoirs at least until she has died. If I am still alive I might see what I think I can do then. It may be that my manuscript will be inherited by my kids and they will have to decide if possible scandal is worth the publishing of these memoirs.
What is more the two Utah sisters as well as Linda didn't even see the evidence that I saw that convinced me my father was having homosexual affairs. I went on to study bisexuals all my life. I would put red flags by their name and eventually I would decide if there was enough circumstantial evidence to suggest this was part of their life style as most married bisexuals are going to deny it. Some even told me they were bisexual so I studied them with their own confessions to go on, even while noting that their families did not know their secrets either. I guess because I was of another ethnic background I was considered 'safe' to tell.
One of my friends who is openly gay told me that he thought fewer gays were born gay than is thought. He thinks most are molested into being gay as he was. In other words someone older more or less forces homosexual relations on a child or underage teen over a long period of time, and he says after that you don't have a chance of not being gay. I have heard this before from others, that being molested determined their sexual orientation. So this is why I thought it was important that I write my memoirs since I suffered molestation of a type that I think could very easily have happened to my father over a length of time thus rendering him bisexual largely through no fault of his own.
So why should bisexuals or gays for that matter be so maligned? I just don't think people are realistic about sexual orientation once it is awakened. They are prejudiced against gays because of ignorance. Homosexuality is hard to accept for some people who think of it as 'against nature'. Well, molestation is hard to accept, but for heavens sakes to reject the victim because of becoming gay either molested or born that way does not make good sense.
I have stated this a number of times to my family, in my blog, on the family site, and in conversations when I could, but if there are still reactions perhaps it is too much to ask for them to accept the publication of these memoirs in a state which I think is generally still hostile to gays.
Utah is an extremely religious state. It is the state the Mormons claimed for their own, and religious thinking generally favors the idea that homosexuality can be cured. You can be deprogrammed by the church if you really want to 'come to the Lord.' I have also read as many experiences about this as I could, admittedly failed attempts to stop having gay sexual feelings. I really don't expect the church to admit failure in this regard, so that makes this a state where homosexuals are generally not going to be able to 'come out' or talk honestly and openly about what they feel.
I have always had fantasies of 'curing' bisexual men I fell in love with and I would do my part in actually trying to cure them. I just think this might take more than one life time in most cases. I got so I expected them to be tempted by these feelings and unable to resist at some point. I just regard deprogramming a bisexual as extremely difficult. As long as we accept the difficulty and the possibility of failure then I think it is perfectly okay to work on them. If a bisexual is very attractive, many women might work on his case in a life time. They are not going to be able to resist.
My mother didn't divorce my dad for 35 years, why because despite her efforts to spend it, my dad managed to pile up money. I know she felt secure with him. He made the money, and she came from poverty so she appreciated that ability in him. The next husband she married was unable to make money unless she worked very hard as a team to help him do it. But she said he was a lot more fun than my dad so he was worth it, and she found out she was a hell of a money maker, too, which was a source of great pride to her at the end of her life. Her second husband, however, was a womanizer as well as a bad alcoholic, too, so she got an awful dose of that. Her next male companion was another bisexual she had plans to marry one of the reasons being he did not drink, but we finally convinced her that he was a bisexual and was not being faithful to her as it was even though living with her. Because of this talk with her about this man being a bisexual, I think my mother finally unearthed a memory of catching my dad in what looked like an act of sex in a hotel room with another man. Now after all those years, she was no longer buying the explanation he had given her, that this man was a 'doctor.'
I think this was the first time it dawned on my mother that my dad was having homosexual affairs when she was married to him. She was 78.
I wanted to write my memoirs so women like her would not be so apt to live in such pitiful ignorance and unawareness. I certainly could not tell my mother this when I was five years old. It was too dangerous. They had terrible fights anyway. He might have killed her and it would have been my fault. If you are smart you don't tell a wife or a husband about affairs their mate is having for this very reason. You can't predict what might happen. Especially when alcohol is involved. I have seen my dad hold a butcher knife to my mother's throat when he was drunk. No, I was not going to tell my mother what I thought when she was married to my dad.
Now look at my blog neo counter. You can see how few people are actually accessing it. What I am saying here is not going to cause a scandal. A published memoir might be another story.
I can still remember the huge scandal that rocked Utah when Martha Beck wrote her memoir about her father, a famous Mormon, savagely molesting her. She actually did not remember him doing this until she was in the hands of a therapist. So her repressed memories were suspect to her family who were completely alienated from her after this book came out. But there were the physical scars that could not be explained and so on.
But memoirs can cause a great deal of pain for families it is true. I can just imagine what her family went through if they decided her story was not to be believed. Martha Beck has worked for Oprah for a long time who is the champion of molested children. She obviously believes her story, so there must have been evidence that convinced her.
So was the pain she caused her brothers and sisters worth it? I don't know, but I think just as much good will come of my memoirs no matter when they are published because these problems are on going. My kids could just as well publish these memoirs at a later date when they might not cause all the pain. They will still be as valuable I believe, and if they are published at a later date they might save my sisters in Utah pain that I don't wish to inflict on them through any actions of mine.

History of Queen Victoria's Daughters comforting read

I will have to explain why reading a history like this can be so comforting. It is when you are dealing with present day hard problems and there is a lot of controversy and disagreement. It was exhausting to write about Michael Jackson when there are so many different reactions to his personality. I was afraid my black friends would think I was being too harsh. After all, history is being made when a superstar dies young and many are affected. It is unbelievable how many in Los Angeles are expected to surround the scene of his memorial today. There is no question that people are running the gamut of reactions to his death and to his personality, his history, and biographers will be sorting out what happened to cause his early death for years to come, just as they did for years with Elvis Presley.
So it is comforting to go back in history when all the hoopla has died away and read about famous figures then who were talked about all the time, so much was known about them in their time.
I am sure Queen Victoria's daughters were almost as famous, say, as Princess Diana in her time. What I get out of a book like this is a close look say at the times and what those people had to suffer from not having our modern inventions and conveniences. Take the immunizations we take for granted for our children. In this book diptheria hits the families of the daughters with devastating results. One child dies in one daughter's family and then it hits daughter Alicia's family. She nursed one child through it, but her youngest little girl dies. When her little son recovers somewhat he asks for his beloved little sister and is so grieved when his mother has to tell him she has died, that his mother takes him in her arms to comfort him. Unfortunately he was still contagious and she comes down with the diptheria in due time and dies at the age of 35.
I am so glad I don't know her as I would if she lived now days so I would have to grieve over hers and the child's death. I don't think I could take it.
Also the dread hemophilia plagued this large family and caused a number of deaths. Victoria was a carrier, and daughters are the ones who might pass it on to their sons. Queen Victoria had a bleeder son and four of her daughters also had sons with hemophilia. It is a condition that afflicts males. Enough of these sons died young that they must have lived in considerable dread that any little accident or mishap would cause uncontrollable bleeding and these sons would and did die.
Then this was the horse age, and I was reminded once again of how accidents can occur with riding horses as well as horse drawn carriages. Victoria's oldest daughter Vicky was thrown from a horse after riding for 50 years and her neck was twisted and badly hurt. So she lived in misery after, but worse still while she was down and was examined closely by doctors, it was discovered she had advanced breast cancer. Not much cancer awareness then! When she was dying, the doctors would only give her enough opiates to relieve the pain a short time on the grounds that she would die faster if she was over medicated. They were quite heartless in those days when it came to pain. I was sure glad I did not know her well while she was going through her final years of suffering which must have been well documented at the time, because I have hardly ever read such a harrowing account of a painful death. Having gone through nursing Pierre who died of lung cancer, I compared the attitude of her doctors to the hospice doctors he had at the end, who kept him well medicated. But he only found out he had cancer a month before he died, so all the pain he experienced in the months previous he would just grit his teeth and bear with only light painkillers, advil when he ran out of that. This book gave me renewed awe over his toughness in going through cancer pain with such stoic silent strength.
Another big problem this author, Jerome M. Packard, is able to deal with in depth is that of these girls and their daughters marrying men who were even suspected of being homosexuals. In the present day, there is still so much controversy and reaction surrounding this subject, that gay men marrying women cannot be talked about freely. In those days girls did not have as much freedom to choose who they wanted to marry, especially royalty who had to be paired up with some kind of eligible royalty. One grand daughter describes her husband as a lover of boys in letters to her family saying that no boys were safe from him, that he chased after and involved every boy he saw in sexual activities. She even added, 'he does not miss a one.' Needless to say, her horrified family supported her divorce. Access to all the family letters, of course, gave this bio much of its authenticity. The thoughts of these private letters probably were not made public in those days either.
Another of the daughters, Louise, was not so lucky. Her husband was described as being very close to his uncle, a known homosexual, suggesting that he and the uncle were involved. Good Lord, you could not say that now in a book about our times. But she somehow could not get out of that marriage but was never happy. They appeared to have nothing but a distant companionship, but she was constrained not to do anything else by her very proper mother, Queen Victoria, who did not want her to go through the disgrace and scandal of divorce.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book which is very well written. I did not know a thing about Queen Victoria's 8 children, so this was a great find in the thrift store.