He listened without interrupting. When I showed him the Reel on my phone, he leaned in, squinting, his face inches from the screen. I watched him watching me — my voice, emotion and vulnerability flattened into 60 seconds. I braced myself for the deflection, the joke, the comment that would let him stay emotionally adjacent and untouched.
Instead, he said nothing.
When the Reel ended, he looked at me, not with embarrassment or confusion but with a kind of alert curiosity I hadn’t seen in years.
“What’s the show about?” he asked.
I told him again. Two men. Hockey players. Rivals. Love. I waited for the reflexive discomfort, the quick subject change. My father was a man of his era. Feeling — especially feeling that didn’t resemble his own — had always made him uneasy.
“I want to watch it,” he said.
I laughed, assuming he was kidding. He wasn’t.
A few minutes later, we were sitting on the couch, a queer hockey romance on HBO Max flickering between us like an emissary from a world neither of us had fully known how to enter. As the episode unfolded, I felt myself tense, not because of what was onscreen, but because of what was at stake. Watching meant letting him see me wanting something. Letting him see tenderness without irony. Letting him witness a version of masculinity that wasn’t armored, competitive or withholding.
The room filled with the sound of skates carving ice, the low thunder of crowds, the awkward magnetism of two men circling each other, unsure whether what they felt would be returned.
I stole glances at my father while we watched. His posture, usually stiff, softened. His face, so often armored with skepticism, began to register surprise. Halfway through, he got up to get a glass of water but came right back. I thought I, and the show, had lost him.