Arts & Entertainment
The delights of being different
Two new parenting books explore the gay dynamic in families
‘Far From the Tree’ explores how parents can celebrate the differences between themselves and their children. (Photo courtesy Penguin Group)
Most parents love their children, yet accepting and being supportive of offspring who differ from you is one of life’s toughest challenges.
Two provocative and moving new books about parenting, difference and identity are just out: “Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity” by Andrew Solomon and “Oddly Normal: One Family’s Struggle to Help Their Teenage Son Come to Terms with His Sexuality” by John Schwartz.
Solomon, with his husband John is a parent, and Schwartz, who is straight, is the father of a 16-year-old gay son Joseph. The Blade talked with Schwartz by phone and interviewed Solomon before he spoke on Nov. 16 at Politics & Prose in Washington.
Schwartz, a national correspondent with The New York Times, and his wife Jeanne knew early on that their son Joseph was different from his older brother Sam. Joseph wanted nothing to do with Sam’s trucks. “Joe went for the dolls,” Schwartz writes. “As Jeanne recalled it, ‘Barbie never looked so fabulous.’”
As time went on, John and Jeanne Schwartz felt it likely that Joseph was gay. John and Jeanne Schwartz, who’d met in 1975 at age 18 at the University of Texas in Austin, were fine with Joseph’s sexual orientation.
“We were comfortable with Joseph being gay,” John Schwartz says. “We wanted to support him.”
Schwartz was happy when Joseph, then in the seventh grade, came out while they were eating sushi at dinner one night. Then, just as things seemed to be going well, there was trouble. Though he received support at home, the school wasn’t supportive of gay students, Schwartz says.
“Joseph is a quirky guy,” he says. “But the school put labels on him — from Asperger syndrome to depression. It wouldn’t acknowledge that being gay was a key way in which Joseph was different. We wanted the school to see Joe as a whole person. The schools in the New Jersey town where he lives are good. We’re happy with the teaching. But if these schools are good, what’s going on in other parts of the country?”
Angry at the way in which the boys talked about girls, Joseph taunted them. After the boys told the guidance counselor that Joseph’s taunts had made them uncomfortable, Joseph took an overdoes of pills. After hospitilization and months of therapy, Joseph recovered from his depression. Today, Joseph is involved in theater and other activities and finds support in his gay peers. His children’s story “Leo, The Oddly Normal Boy” is a touching ending to “Oddly Normal.”
“I thought parents were the obvious audience for the book,” Schwartz says, “but it’s had a delightful resonance. A 72-year-old man e-mailed me that he’d just come out and told his wife that he’s gay.”
Being normal only gets you so far, Schwartz says. “The things that make you different … are the things that make you interesting.”
Solomon, 49, knew he was different even before he could conceptualize his sexuality. He was unpopular at school because he was so unlike the other boys.
“I never traded a baseball card, but I did recount the plots of operas on the school bus,” he writes.
Today, Solomon and his husband John and their children, are a loving family. John biologically fathered two children for some lesbian friends in Minneapolis while Solomon has a 5-year-old daughter with a friend he knew in college and a son who lives with them full time they had with a surrogate.
Solomon used to worry that it would be difficult for children born into such a different type of household.
“But people are born into households with parents who are cruel or born into terrible poverty. Or they’re born into a whole variety of other challenges,” Solomon said, “I would like to think…that our household is one in which there is a great deal of love and that it will carry the day.”
“Far from the Tree” is a provocative study of difference and identity as well as an argument for acceptance of diversity. Solomon interviewed about 300 families who have raised offspring with differences from themselves. These parents had children who were deaf, dwarfs, autistic, schizophrenic, transgender, prodigies, had Down syndrome, were conceived in rape or became criminals.
There are vertical identities such as ethnicity, nationality or religiosity that are passed on from parents to their children, Solomon says. But there are horizontal identities such as being trans, gay or deaf that are usually not passed on from generation to generation, he says.
“Many parents will love children with horizontal identities, but they’ll have trouble accepting them,” Solomon says. “The tension between love and acceptance can be terrible.”
“Far From the Tree” grew out of an article he wrote in 1994 for the New York Times magazine on deaf culture. “When I began meeting deaf people, I was astonished by what a vital culture it was,” Solomon says. “I discovered that most deaf children were born to hearing parents, and that they frequently didn’t discover deaf culture until their adolescence.”
Solomon felt a connection between their stories and his story.
“As a gay person, it took me a long time to find my culture and all of it seemed so resonant,” he says.
Superstar Dolly Parton died on Tuesday at a Nashville hospital. She was 80.
The Human Rights Campaign and Lambda Legal are among the groups that mourned the long-time LGBTQ ally’s passing.
“We are heartbroken by Dolly’s passing,” said HRC President Kelley Robinson in a statement. “She showed the world what it looks like to lead with love and stood with our community long before others in entertainment, using her voice and platform to create a world where LGBTQ+ people feel seen and celebrated. Her music and her spirit touched millions; and her generosity, especially toward children, will be felt for generations. We will miss her dearly, and we will carry forward the light she shared with all of us.”
The Washington Blade will update this story.
Theater
New GALA show about WWII spy full of conflict, intrigue
‘GARBO: The Actor Who Saved the World’ an inspired true story
‘Garbo: The Actor Who Saved the World’
Sept. 3-27
GALA Hispanic Theatre
3333 14th St., NW
$25-$50
galatheatre.org
Conflict, intrigue, and abundant imagination – all the elements for an extraordinary story. Add real-life Spanish spy Juan Pujol García who worked as a double agent loyal to the United Kingdom against Nazi Germany during World War II to the mix and it’s truly inspired.
Code-named “Garbo” by the British (a nod to his acting prowess), the anti-fascist’s mission took him from Madrid to Lisbon and later a London suburb where he created fictitious reports while unassumingly blending in with middle-class commuters.
By inventing a phony spy network of 27 agents with intricate backstories and tales of espionage worthy of Balzac’s pen, Garbo convinced Hitler’s generals that the D-Day invasion would hit Calais instead of Normandy, saving thousands of lives along the way.
And now the tale unfolds on stage in “GARBO: The Actor Who Saved the World,” a premiere thriller at GALA Hispanic penned by GALA artistic director Gustavo Ott, staged by Cuban director Carlos Celdrán, and starring out actor Kevin Jorges in the title role.
When Jorges was tapped to play Garbo, he (like the rest of the cast) was utterly unfamiliar with the play’s cunning protagonist.
But that changed quickly. Jorges, 37, has immersed himself in the biography and become increasingly interested and somewhat enamored with the character.
Charismatic with an easy smile and rich, warm voice, Jorges says he had to put aside his sensibility as a gay man in order to portray Garbo, who was a straight, patriarchal figure. But he also embraced similarities with the spy, like their shared aversion to physical violence.
And Jorges cites what he finds a pivotal moment: Garbo says to his British MI5 case officer and handler Thomas Harris (played by gay GALA veteran Carlos Castillo) that after what they’ve been through, neither will be what they once wanted to be. They are changed. They’ll never be the same.
Performed at 90 minutes in Spanish with user friendly English surtitles, “Garbo” is about imagination as resistance. “It’s also about a theatrical vocation that went unfulfilled,” says Ott. “That is perhaps the greatest disappointment of modernity: the insurmountable obstacles a vocation faces.
“Through his imagination, Garbo attempts to reclaim his lost calling—that of being an artist—and in his new trade as a spy, he uses it as a lifeline.”
Ott adds, “Walt Whitman viewed imagination as a traveling companion. He could rely on it when he was alone, when he lost hope, and when life slammed every door shut.”
Jorges was was attracted to acting at an early age, but the murder of his father in Caracas in 1999, made it more than an interest, theater became a refuge that saved him from tragedy. Today, he believes that theater is a refuge for many Venezuelan artists, it’s a way for them to contribute to society despite difficult circumstances.
Despite enjoying a successful early career in Caracas with many roles and accolades, Jorges had no choice but to seek new horizons. Political turmoil and economic collapse prompted him to leave Caracas in 2019 for Spain where he worked outside of his profession for a few years.
The actor credits “migrant persistence” for his return to the stage. On New Year’s Eve in 2022, Jorges made a pilgrimage to the famous monument to Cervantes at Plaza de España in Madrid where he made a heartfelt wish to act again.
Soon after, Jorges was collaborating with playwright and director Elio Palencia on “Timón Of(f) Caracas,” a personal one-man adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Timon of Athens, reframing the universal themes of betrayal, excess, and misanthropy to mirror the sociopolitical realities of Venezuela. To much success and acclaim, the production toured important cities throughout Spain.
It was Palencia who suggested to GALA’s Ott that Jorges hop the pond to play Garbo in D.C.
While he once viewed each acting job as an opportunity, Jorges now sees them as gifts. And, he says, the part of Garbo is a gift filled with possibilities: “It’s wonderful performing in Spanish with English translation. I love the interaction of culture. I really enjoy seeing the way things are done at GALA. Maybe sometime I’ll be performing in English too.”
Books
Exploring Renée Richards’s life through lens of a trans author
Surprises await in new book about pioneering tennis star
‘Finding Renée Richards’
By Julie Kliegman
c.2026, HarperOne
$28.99/272 pages
Come on in, the water’s fine.
Wade into it up to your ankles, your calves, your waist, you’ll be OK. You’ll adjust to the waves that swirl around you so come on, dive in, it’s all good. As in the new book “Finding Renée Richards” by Julie Kliegman, that goes for swimming, and for controversy.
Assigned to do a story on books written by trans tennis great Renée Richards, Julie Kleigman read the books and became “transfixed by a woman who had fought so hard to simply live as who she had long known she was….”. Their editor had figured that, as a nonbinary and trans individual, Kleigman would have “something incisive to say…” in an article. Instead, once they met and began interviewing Richards, Kliegman was left frustrated.
Born in the late summer of 1934, Richard Henry Raskind seemed to have arrived with a tennis racket in his hand. His mother was a psychiatrist; his father was an orthopedic surgeon who hoped “Dick” would follow his footsteps but Raskind was drawn instead to ophthalmology and tennis. He was also irresistibly drawn to wearing women’s clothing.
His sister knew of this pull and Raskind eventually came out to both parents, but few others on the tennis circuit were aware. When Raskind visited his hometown of New York City, however, he enjoyed furtively going out in women’s clothing but he also tried to squash the desire; in the meantime, he fell in love, married, fathered a son, and eventually learned that it was possible to become the woman he knew he really was.
To continue playing tennis professionally was a bonus.
And right there were the disagreements Kleigman had with Richards.
Richards, “To this day… [makes] a point of describing herself as a woman, period,” says Kleigman, but she firmly acknowledged Richard, almost as a separate individual, insisting that Kleigman use “him/his” pronouns when describing her earlier life.
And as for tennis and trans women’s participation in the sport, Richards had something even more frustrating to say.
Take that as a fair warning: you might be equally surprised at what author Julie Kliegman uncovered in “Finding Renée Richards,” and you may be truly gobsmacked by reading opinions from other women about the topic of trans women in sports.
That’s the main, huge point of interest in this fascinating book; the other is Richards’s life as seen through the lens of a trans individual. Kleigman’s wrestling with the 90-year-old Richards’ firmly dug-in heels is, in itself, worth your time as a study of highly varying viewpoints. That Kleigman and Richards have both lived at least a part of trans history is somewhat of a key to understanding how this book unfolds, as Kleigman offers up Richards’s tale. Readers who are able to read between the lines will be riveted.
If you’re a sports fan and you have opinions, you must read this book – and that goes double if it’s tennis you love. Also check out “Finding Renée Richards” if you just want a raucously good and very fine read.
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Dolly Parton dies at 80
Monument to LGBTQ Canadians officially unveiled
The fight to save one of Baltimore’s last gay bars
When home becomes a journey: migration, memory, and the African diaspora
Gay-owned pizzeria in Dupont Circle burglarized
Trump-Vance administration’s LGBTQ brain drain: what you need to know
UPDATE: Impulse Group’s ‘PrEP Pool Party’ cancelled
Not all trans people are the same
Calendar: August 21-27
