“Here, whether sick or healthy, old or young, all were welcome.” Emily Ziff Griffin reflects on a cruise for gay men that she took with her father, in 1991.
February, 1991. The first night on the ship, I wore a cobalt velvet jacket with a shawl collar, stonewashed jeans, and a necklace bearing three tiers of iridescent orbs, an unintentional nod to the disco ball that would cast the ballroom in a glittering glow.
Though I was a novelty in my father’s world—there was only one other family with children in the Pines that I knew, and they were a straight family—the beach community offered a freedom that I did not possess in my regular life at a Brooklyn private school where classmates threw around the word “fag” without a second thought and where I worked vigilantly to hide that my father was gay—and that he was sick.
On the ship, I was adored, fawned over. The men would comment on my golden-flecked wavy hair, almond-shaped brown eyes, and lithe limbs. They asked about my makeup. They complimented my clothes. As a young teen beset with the usual amount of discomfort and insecurity about my changing body, handsome men noticing my looks was a welcome boost to my burgeoning sense of womanhood.
I came upon the ship’s gift shop, a small square space filled with toiletries, candy, mass-market paperbacks, and trinkets. A statuesque young woman in a uniform two sizes too large stood behind the register. I felt her eyes on me as I moved along the shelves. “You are here by yourself?” Her accent was French, and her words had the quality of being tossed lightly through the air. “I’m with my father,” I replied. Her name was Claire.
We didn’t stay long at the disco. My father tired easily, and one of his legs, increasingly riddled with Kaposi’s-sarcoma lesions, courtesy of his dwindling immune system, was bothering him. We went to bed, and I lay awake with the unease that comes from letting fear win out. I went back to see Claire the next day, and the young man from bingo was standing right there in the gift shop. He and Claire were friends.
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