Anton Lovink - coming to terms with being gay and having children

As previously mentioned, after only 2 1/2 years in Australia, my parents dragged me away from that wonderful nation to return to The Netherlands. I had one very close male friend in Canberra who lived two blocks from the embassy. To my memory I had no other friends and had been violently abused at the grammar school in Canberra, with names like fairy, faggot along with regularly being called Mary. My parents were oblivious to this suffering as I, the grasshopper, felt like I was being eaten alive by all those around me.

Leaving Australia at the age of 13, before puberty, then going through another six months of school in The Hague followed by starting grade10 at Lisgar in Ottawa in the middle of the school year, my sexual development was totally arrested. The grasshopper tried to land but could not.

Bouncing around so much, two years in high school in Ottawa, a year in Switzerland, two years at Queens university then three years at Trent university, my sexual development never flourished because I was always very insecure.

I made life worse for myself as the groundless grasshopper by going to France, working for Shell Paris for four months while at Queen’s, then to Expo ‘67 in my third year at Trent for 6 months as a guide for the Canadian government pavilion, and then the next summer to Morocco and West Africa with an excursion to Ghana, followed in 1969 by three years in northern Ghana and then four months in South Africa. All were wonderful experiences which helped me grow incredibly as an international citizen of the world. But they left me a person who knew himself very poorly, emotionally and sexually.

In 1977, I was hired as communications officer and then conference coordinator for the International Development Research Centre in Ottawa. Through my work I travelled across Canada to promote research in universities in cooperation with institutions of the global South. During these trips, sometimes repeated to the same city, I started to have very sexually pleasant experiences and I met a wonderful man in Halifax in February 1981.

I came home in March that year, for our wedding anniversary, to be with my wife Patricia who discovered that I was sexually totally emptied, even on our wedding anniversary night. We had often had discussions about my being gay before marriage and after our marriage. As she wrote me on April 8, 1981:

“When you first told me of your homosexuality, I felt shocked and couldn't believe what you said, but in a way it was like a nightmare coming true. I always (sic) feared it in you; saw it in you, tried to push it away, ignore it but I couldn't! My inability to love you consistently was a direct result of these fears…”

I was never able to love her either.

In an earlier correspondence from March 1976, while I was finishing my master’s at Columbia University and Patricia was teaching in Bogota, Colombia, I wrote her about my therapist telling me that I was possibly gay. She wrote me back that we would love each other and overcome this sin in the name of Jesus. I believed her since I had not yet had a sexual experience with a man.

Our marriage in 1975 was a wonderful event with lots of music, singing and dancing in a beautiful church and reception hall. I was filled with the love of my family and my adoration of my new wife. We had a wide community of friends and family members who attended the wedding celebration including parents on both sides.

The relationship didn't last. In 1977, knowing I wanted to go back to Canada, I was offered a job as a historian at External Affairs researching the origins of Canadian foreign policy with reference to the Jewish people and generally to immigration.

I took the job and basically forced my wife to move to Canada, against her will. This was the beginning of the total breakdown of our relationship. But we still had two children, Adrienne Michelle born in 1978 and Matthew Thomas in 1980. I carried these children literally and figuratively with such pride, with such joy. Holding them in front of me, on the back of my body, sleeping with them, really wherever I could take them I would. I was totally in love with being a father. But despite this and our shared faith in the power of the gospel, it was far too late to save our marriage.

In late March 1981, Patricia forced me to leave my home. She called my father to tell him I was a homosexual. He immediately drove over and told me that I had to change my name, that he never wanted to see me again and that he did not want to see my children ever again. Although he did not totally hold up to his threats, allowing my mother to come to see me and the children, we never talked again until he asked me to put his pajamas on the day before he died. However, my father’s homophobia destroyed my relationships with all the members of my family, some more than others.

Patricia fought me in court for any kind of access to our children. I was finally allowed to be with them every Wednesday evening, every second weekend and two weeks during the summer months. Under these very limiting circumstances it proved very hard for me to develop a close relationship with my children. However, I always loved them unconditionally. My son Matthew and his two children are very much part of my life here in Ottawa. It is more difficult for me to maintain a relationship with my daughter as she lives in Boston.

I was required to pay significant alimony which I willingly gave for the quality of my children's life. But it was challenging at times as I went through significant periods of unemployment in the late 1980s. Luckily, Pat remarried and had two more wonderful children, who were sort of parented by my much older children.

From April 1981 to July 1984, I spent a lot of time searching for sexual fulfillment, for the intimacy I had never known, the depths of friendship I had never known. One or two of the men I met during this time have stayed in occasional contact through the years. But an incredible number of my friends died from AIDS beginning in the mid 80s, including friends inside the church. The pain of those funerals still lives in me. I was very lucky to not get sick.

Community activities offered some stability in my life. I started the gay fathers group of Ottawa with another gay father. We met weekly providing social meaning to parenting as gay men. The group was relatively successful in supporting all of us in a very hostile world to gay fathers. In 1983, a journalist from what was then called the Ottawa Journal came to my home to one of the meetings. In the full two page spread article in the newspaper, she classified me as “a frustrated priest”.

Luckily for me, in 1984 I met a very attractive French Canadian who was willing to follow me and to help me parent my children. I am eternally grateful to Alain Lanoix for having loved me unconditionally for 40 years this month as I write this in August 2024. I feel like I don't deserve his love as he allowed me to settle into a stable relationship through which my children felt welcomed and through which we were able to develop friends inside the church and in the gay community.

I will tremendously miss his love as I pass out of this world, but I think he will be grateful for the freedom he will have, to travel without worrying about his husband, to live again with no limitations. Thanks be to God.