Not My Father's Son

by Alan Cumming

It’s hard to explain how much that feeling of the bottom potentially falling out at any moment takes its toll. It makes you anxious, of course, and constant anxiety is impossible for the body to handle. So you develop a coping mechanism, and for us that meant shutting down.

I’m not religious in the slightest, but I do truly believe that people’s energies can be present or invoked after they’re gone.

But at the same time, seeing the one you love but not being able to touch, when their comfort is what you crave most, actually makes you feel worse, and more depleted, than if you had not seen them at all.

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.

It’s actually quite a good ethos for life: go into the unknown with truth, commitment, and openness and mostly you’ll be okay.

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.

I just couldn’t believe that my father was still able to exert such an influence. He was the embodiment of those buried mines left long after a conflict had ended that occasionally erupt, and the pain of the past as well as the carnage of the present combine in a perfect storm.