He had seemed kind of lost in his new life – pushing 60, recently divorced from my mother, recently out of the closet as gay man. The Father's Day gift request I refusedĪ few months later, I helped them move into an apartment in West Hollywood. In late 1980, at a support group for gay fathers, my dad met Lionel –– the man with whom he would spend the next 23 years. Pride Month was inspired by the Stonewall riots of 1969 and has only received recognition from Democratic presidents, starting with Bill Clinton (though in 2019, President Donald Trump did tweet about it).įor me, though, the two celebrations have been inexorably linked for decades. Two years later, a woman whose widower father raised her and her five siblings tried to make Father’s Day a national celebration, but it took until 1972 for that to actually happen. One in 1908 honored more than 300 men who had died in a coal mine in West Virginia. The first Father's Day commemorations were around the turn of the last century.
It doesn’t ever feel like much of a coincidence for me that Father’s Day occurs during Pride Month.
