Fuck, My Father is a Fictional Stereotype

Out of the mouths of fans...

Recently a couple of fans were discussing DANNY and how they related to the various characters, what they would be interested in reading more about, what they gave not a toss about.

Danny's parents came up in the discussion and one of the participants said that she didn't care about Danny's father as, "The drunken, brutish, child molesting father, is a stock character in so much fiction (particularly queer fiction) that he didn't interest me in the least."

I've had some unusual takes on characters in the book, but this one was deeply intriguing to me.

Only two of the characters in DANNY were wholly 'constructed' from external sources i.e. with none of my psyche in them. Danny's father is one of them, made up as a kind of composite of all the males in my family, but most heavily sourced from my father and my maternal grandfather.

Now, the really strange thing is this:- virtually everything that Danny's father does is 'real' i.e. founded in some kind of real life event or behaviour. So, with the exception of the one other character, who is less wholly 'real', Danny's father is the only character in the whole book who is 100% authentic, dyed-in-the-wool real life. How weird is that? The only genuine, non-fictional character in the book is a rather dull and conventional 'stock character'.

It's either that or I've been sharing relatives with homosexual authors.

It does make you wonder about the old 'truth being stranger than fiction' adage. Looks like it's not so much stranger as common as muck.

I'm also intrigued, however, with the assumption that Danny's father is a child molester. Looks like another adage is kicking in here - give a dog a bad name. Of course, maybe he is a child molester. You know me, I don't like to say. But I rather like the assumption that she knows he is. The same surety that asserts Ian is evil, John is tortured and Rab is smitten, I fear. Great fun for me though.

My dad's a very old man now, and not a drunk, or a child molester, but I always felt he was a caricature of a macho, violent asshole.

Looks like I was whole lot smarter than I knew.