These two were once some of my best friends, from my college days to the 2000s. They are father (left) and son (center) and we are eating dinner in an Asian restaurant. There is much more to the story than just friends. I am not naming any names or circumstances which would give more information. Any computer expert could find out who they are quickly, or know them from my mediocre portrait likeness. Some other readers will know exactly who these are. I've waited and debated whether to post this, and I decided to go ahead.
I don't know the correct way to say this, but the father is no longer a father. He came out as transgender after 40 years of living life as a male. It was one of the biggest shocks in my life. In all the time I knew him, I never suspected. He was married to my best friend and fathered two children including the one depicted here. I helped raise the children. By the time I did this portrait, he was openly trans and going through the transition process. What I will never understand was that his wife lived with him for twenty years and bore his children, all the while knowing that her husband was transgender and really a woman.
Things were never the same between me and that family. There could be any number of reasons for this: geographic separation, joining different communities, pursuing different hobbies, and I must admit, uneasiness which shows some level of transphobia on my part. I am old enough that this was something that was never ever talked about or even openly conceived. What do you call someone who begets children with a male body but is really a woman? I couldn't solve a lot of problems.
I don't have any more contact with the people I drew at the restaurant. I feel that anything I could say to them would be tactless and tasteless. But I greatly miss them and the good days we had, twenty years ago and more.
Black tech pen on sketchbook page, 8" x 6", December 31, 1998.
This is the last installment of my "Twenty Years Ago" sketch series. It's now 2019 so I have to draw new sketches.
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