[gentle brass music]
- Patrick: I'm riding to school with my oldest brother,
and on the way to school,
I'm putting glitter all over my face.
And my brother said, "What in the hell are you doing?"
I said, "I'm putting on my costume."
And he said, "Well, I wouldn't be caught dead wearing that."
So he dropped me off at the school
and he called my dad up, and he said,
"Dad, I think you better get up there.
This is not gonna look good."
So my dad drove up to the high school
and he had his farmer jeans on and they had cow crap on 'em
and he had his clodhopper boots on, and when I saw him coming,
I ducked around the hall and hid from him.
And it wasn't because of what I was wearing.
[Robin laughs] It was because of
what he was wearing.
So the assembly goes well and I climb in the car,
and I'm riding home with my father.
And my father says to me,
"I was walking down the hall this morning
"and I saw a kid that looked a lot like you
"ducking around the hall to avoid his dad,
"but I know it wasn't you,
'cause you would never do that to your dad."
And I squirmed in my seat, and I finally busted out and I said,
"Well Dad, did you have to wear your cow crap jeans
to my assembly?" [Robin laughs]
And he said, "Look, everybody knows I'm a dairy farmer.
This is who I am."
And he looked me square in the eye, and then he said,
"Now how about you?
"When you're a full-grown man,
who are you gonna go out with at night?"
And I said, "I don't know."
And he said, "I think you do know.
"And it's not gonna be that McLaughlin girl
"that's been making goo-goo eyes at you
"but you won't even pick up the damn telephone.
"And I'm gonna tell you something today,
"and you might not know what to think of it now,
"but you're gonna remember it when you're an adult.
"Don't sneak, because if you sneak, like you did today,
"it means you think you're doing the wrong thing.
"And if you run around spending your whole life
"thinking you're doing the wrong thing,
then you'll ruin your immortal soul."
And of all the things a father in 1959
could have told his gay son,
my father tells me to be proud of myself and not sneak.
My reaction at the time was to get out in the hay field
and pretend like I was as much of a man as I could be,
and I remember flipping 50-pound bales
three feet up into the air, going, "I'm not a queer!
What's he talking about?" [Robin laughs]
But he knew where I was headed.
And he knew that making me feel bad about it in any way
was the wrong thing to do.
I had the patron saint of dads for sissies,
and no, I didn't know it at the time, but I know it now.
[gentle brass music]