I am writing about fathers, and God, and the subversive, unconventional romance film, Secretary. I understand immediately how that premise, without context, can potentially be stomach churning, so I want to be clear from the outset. I am only speaking of approximately twenty seconds of the film; a moment between our protagonist — the sweet, masochistic, and frankly, a little crazy — Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and her father, Burt Holloway (Stephan McHattie).
It’s a moment near the end of the film. Lee Holloway has developed a sadomasochistic relationship with her boss, Edward Gray (James Spader). As a final test of their love, he leaves her in his office, dressed in a wedding gown, palms placed flat on the table, and asks her to stay there. Lee does so for days, unmoving, refusing food, and becoming a local spectacle in the process.
Lee’s loved ones are desperate to snap her out of this inexplicable and off-putting submissive haze. They try to drag her from the desk, they bring her food that she refuses to eat, they bring her large stacks of feminist literature. Those that feel she can’t be convinced try to spin her masochistic penance into something more palatable than a BDSM game — maybe she’s a martyr, maybe she’s partaking in something bordering on the spiritual. Everyone wants to make it make sense to themselves, and no one wants to accept the truth for what it is, or worse, accept that Lee is, indeed, happy for reasons they cannot understand.
Lee stays silent throughout these spiels and pleas, accepting that no one could possibly understand what she is really doing, what this means to her. Finally, her father comes to visit. He sits before her, the image of a good, Christian, suburban man. He’s groomed, respectable, dressed nicely — he wears some cheaters low on his nose as he reads aloud to the now soiled, sweaty, exhausted Lee. One anticipates a new tactic to force her out of the chair. Instead, he reads from an unseen book: “You are the child of God’s holy gift of life. You come from me, but you are not me. Your soul and your body are your own, and yours to do with as you wish.” A tear drips from Lee’s eye. She speaks the first words we’ve heard her speak in ages, a tiny and sincere: “Thank you, daddy.”
It’s a flash of a moment, a bookend at the end of a montage, hardly pivotal to the plot in any form. Yet it rattles about in my head more than anything else in the entire film. So vivid is this singular moment of Secretary to me that much of the rest of the movie often falls away when I think of it. I forgot, for example, until a recent rewatch, that Lee’s father is actually, for the rest of the film, a recovering alcoholic that often triggers Lee into some of her self-harm practices. I forget all of these scenes, that entire dynamic, so vividly engrained for me is their quiet moment as father and daughter in the law office. These few seconds remind me so, so much of my father.
My dad has that same aura of a Good Christian Man. He believes in God, but not as something to be feared, nor as something that demands a life of penance for sin. He believes in a higher power that celebrates love above all else, that celebrates everyone on earth for exactly who they are, exactly as they want to live. When I recently read Jay Hulmes’ beautiful poem “Jesus at the the Gay Bar”, I think of my father and his relationship with religion (especially that beautiful final verse, “my beautiful child/there is nothing in this heart of yours/that ever needs to be healed”) before I even think of myself, a queer woman with a relationship to religion.
I do not yet have children, but I imagine it is easy to claim you are supportive of your child up until the moment you are faced with your child living in a way that you did not anticipate, or cannot personally understand. The funny thing is, I wouldn’t even be able to tell you when my father has felt challenged or surprised by the way I choose to live, because I have always felt I was not put on this earth to be explained, or to make sense to my father. My father works to make that clear. The notion that Lee’s life must be explainable and digestible to her dad is not of interest to him — his daughter’s happiness, even if it comes down to something extremely unconventional, is his sole desire. His role, as he sees it, is to have her know that she is meant to exist as she wants to exist — that she does right by him by living with agency, that she does right by him by being God’s holy gift of life and celebrating as such.
I wake up on Easter morning 2019 in Los Angeles, hundreds of miles away from my dad. I am the most hungover I have ever been, and laying in a sunny bed with the first girl I’ve ever fallen in love with. My parents don’t know about this girl yet, they think we’re just friends on a vacation (but they will find out soon after, and all my dad will say is, “Isn’t it great to be in love?” And I’ll cry. “Yeah, it is.”). I wake up to a text from my Dad wishing me a happy Easter — he loves me, and I am God’s Girl on this Easter Sunday, he writes. The text makes me laugh, so at odds from the way I feel after my messy night out. But it feels true, too. Even if my dad knew exactly where I was, and what I was doing at that moment, he would send me the same message, see me the same way, perhaps even feel more joy in his heart than he already did.
I’m not sure what Lee’s dad is reading from when he soothes her. When I search for the passage, it doesn’t seem to be a Bible verse or from any prayer. In fact, all the references online attribute this little verse entirely to this moment in Secretary. Is he reading from a journal? Are these his prepared remarks for a moment he knew would come, a sense that one day he would need to explicitly say he was happy for Lee for doing something impossible for him to understand?
My father does not ask me to make my life and my choices make sense to him. When I cry, the option is to share what I want to. When I come out, the option is to share what I want to. When I write, the option is to share what I want to.
I wonder how my parents see me often. Not unlike Lee, I often feel the need for penance (in fact, I might even describe myself as sweet, masochistic, and frankly, a little crazy) — I am scared of hurting others, I am scared of doing wrong. Not unlike Lee’s father, my dad is regularly insistent that if I am living for myself, it is impossible I am doing wrong.
There’s actually one other tiny moment in Secretary that makes my heart ache, always makes me want to hug my dad immediately. Before anyone goes into the office to try and coax Lee out, we see the briefest shot of her dad standing outside, leaning on his car, cup of coffee in hand — willing to let Lee go and live how she really, truly wants to, but unwilling to become unavailable to her as a father. There just in case she needs anything, just in case, maybe, she comes out of that office, tired, hungry, dirty, needing some help.
My dad’s held my hair back when I drunk puked. He’s felt joy in the joy I found in queer love. He’s slept on my floor some nights after I developed a panic disorder. He held my hand when I cried last week at the dinner table over something that happened three years ago. I write essays which are almost always personal, sometimes excruciatingly so. He loves them, he sends them to his friends. In my father’s eyes, I am God’s girl and his girl, not in spite of all this, but because of all this.
Perhaps the greatest testament to how much I believe in my father’s belief in my living as I please is the work like this that I do. I trust that he’ll understand how strange a premise this is, and also trust that he’ll understand what I’m saying anyways. I come from my dad, after all. But I am not him. This is my soul and body to do with as I wish. And while I believe this is a God-given right, I feel grateful to be bestowed with the added gift of knowing that to do what I wish is to bring my father joy in the process.
