It wasn’t easy being a gay Armenian-American wanting a family. Especially since my story started with genocide. In 1915 Ottoman Turks killed my eight great-grandparents along with 1.5 million of my tribespeople. I admit it’s an iffy premise for comedic theatre. The Turks chopped down my ancestral tree. It was on me, as the only boy in my household, to replant it. Yet throughout my upbringing I couldn’t shake feeling like I wasn’t supposed to exist.
At seven I attended a Los Angeles day school for my ethnic community, 7,000 miles from our homeland. I recited the Pledge of Allegiance with an additional pledge. “Above all else I will love my fatherland,” we chanted in our mother tongue. As I grew into a young man, my papa pressed me to find an Armenian woman and help repopulate the souls lost. That would be a lot of sex, but okay. Thing was, at 19 I was struggling with my attraction to guys. Carrying on our 3,000-year-old culture with a man didn’t compute. The pressure was suffocating me.
I made a change, moving out of my hometown and starting a new job. At a downtown disco I introduced myself to Peter, the most handsome guy standing across the dance floor with brown eyes and combed-back hair like David Beckham. I liked Peter’s sappy taste in music, and wanted to get closer. Moving in together, I told him I wanted a baby. “Let’s try,” he joked. Too bad the adage “Practice makes progress” failed us.
We felt like we’d struck it rich when we happened upon a “Wannabe Parents” support group at the gay and lesbian center. Filling out a bunch of forms at a friendly adoption agency, we hoped for a healthy baby of any race.
Fast-forward through meeting a prospective birth mother in New Orleans the weekend Hurricane Katrina hit hard—you’ll have to see the show for the quick play-by-play. When our Black biracial daughter was finally born, I wanted to give her the moon, the stars, the whole night sky. Okay I felt a little triggered getting bullied by toddlers when she was in preschool. And shopping for her bathing suit when she was four landed us in hot water at the public pool.
Turned out being a gay dad could be pretty lonely. Peter and I didn’t have a slew of role models who could share with us the real deal. In the New York Times I wrote about fumbling through fatherhood while being a target of bias. In a reversal, in O The Oprah Magazine I published a piece interrogating my reaction when hiking with my daughter and being taken aback by a Black hiker on the trail. I hadn’t been familiar with many stories of one person being an object and perpetrator of prejudice. Yet it’s a thing that keeps playing out, including on the global stage. I wanted to shine a brighter light on my part in it.
A medical emergency spurred me to reconnect with my beginnings in theatre as a teenager. Following in the steps of playwrights like William Finn who hilariously chronicled his health scare in the musical A New Brain, I took inspiration from my printed essays and wrote a one man show I called Best. Dad. NEVER. about striving to raise a self-confident Black daughter but coming up against my scars as the queer grandson of Armenian Genocide survivors. I produced a five-night run at the Hollywood Fringe. Delivering the piece in front of a live audience was electrifying in a way that was different from seeing my work in print. It was closer literally to shouting my story from the rooftops.
Caught up in the festival energy, I looked for an even broader platform. Some of my producing peers spoke of taking their productions to Edinburgh Fringe. It seemed like a massive undertaking. I decided to be an undertaker. Half-kidding! I decided to take it on.
Days before the opening party, something novel was propelling me to push through my overwhelm with the tasks still left for me to do. I recalled the time my dad and I had visited my grandparents’ birthplaces in present-day Turkey. We weren’t meant to be there, traipsing through the country. We weren’t supposed to exist, after all. The Ottomans had intended to do away with all my people. But my clan had survived. My father and I had come back, to prove it.
Like that pilgrimage, taking my tale of how I adopted a baby—nay, the unfiltered, dad-joke-laden origin story of my life—to the granddaddy of festivals is my way of scrawling in the earth, “I was here.” Hope to see you there.
Best. Dad. NEVER, 13.05. Just the Tonic, August 6 – 30
