Not My Father's Son

by Alan Cumming

It has not been pleasant as an adult to realize that dealing with my father’s violence was the beginning of my studies of acting.

Memory is so subjective. We all remember in a visceral, emotional way, and so even if we agree on the facts—what was said, what happened where and when—what we take away and store from a moment, what we feel about it, can vary radically.

I smell the roses to try and figure out how I came to be in the garden at all.

There’s a thing in Scotland called “smirr” and it’s miserable. It comes off the sea and it’s not quite a rain but it’s thicker than a mist. Well, right then, it started smirring.

I loved the sound of the snow. It was calm and echoey at the same time, and the world felt a safer place being insulated by it.

I found myself embracing the childhood I felt I had missed. My

realized that I was living my life backwards. I had to be a grown-up when I’d been a little boy, and now I was tending to the little boy inside who’d never had the chance to properly play.

I suddenly realized. My grandfather was Steve McQueen!!

Of the original eight hundred Cameron Highlanders who went to France, only seventy-nine answered the roll call when they returned to Britain.

My father loathed me, so it was only natural I should loathe myself.

Rather alarmingly, considering the fragile state of both my and Tommy Darling’s psyches at this stage of our parallel stories, the Imperial War Museum is housed in the Bethlem Royal Hospital, also known as Bedlam, London’s once notorious lunatic asylum.

For yes, being a woman, even one with a penis and for the purposes of drama, really made me feel that women have been coerced into a way of presenting themselves that is basically a form of bondage. Their shoes, their skirts, even their nails seem designed to stop them from being able to escape whilst at the same time drawing attention to their sexual and secondary sexual characteristics.

And I think that has happened so that men feel they can ogle them and protect them in equal measure.

“A man like your father, Alan, a proud man but an angry man, would never have let me through the door if he thought I was carrying another man’s child.”

Although combat stress, or post-traumatic stress disorder, is now recognized by the military as a medical condition, there is still a huge amount of stigma attached to it by all sections of society, and there is no significantly successful treatment. Sadly, the article went on to say that suicide is the leading cause of death for members of the U.S. Army today, which has seen its rates double since 2004.

It’s a bit like when you break up with someone and you can’t stop talking about them until you get them out of your system. Though of course, having known many friends who suffered from Compulsive Break-up Talking syndrome and unfortunately having suffered from it myself more than a few times, I knew the danger was that my Compulsive Familial Bombshell Talking syndrome could oh so quickly and easily develop into Boring Old Fart Who Just Can’t Seem to Move On syndrome.

It was so beautiful. I realized I had grown up in spectacular beauty but I hadn’t noticed.

Grant later told me how in the woods I’d run and leapt on stones and over fallen trees, but the closer we got to the house the slower I became, and more measured. Of course the woods meant freedom to me, air and imagination and being unobserved. The house was all darkness and silence and expecting the worst.