MEMOIR
Growing up, supermodel Maggie Rizer felt having a gay dad made her different. Yet after his death from AIDS, it was entering the fashion community that helped her feel like she belonged again
My family has been holidaying at the same wooden cottage on the fringes of Lake Ontario since the 1800s.
As long summer days ease into night, I sit on the porch and watch my kids eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and hunt for frogs in the damp grass. To me, it’s a place of peace, a way of accessing a simpler sort of life, but it’s also the place where, more than 30 years ago, I got the call I’d known was coming all my life: my dad had passed away.
Growing up, I always knew my dad, Kevin, was gay. I was born on Staten Island into an Irish Catholic family in the late 1970s and, at the time, he was struggling with coming out because of the stigma around being gay. It was difficult for my parents. They’d grown up together and my mum was crippled by embarrassment, hurt and confusion. Eventually, my parents split up. To escape the small talk in our small town, my mum moved to northern New York state with my sister and me, where we knew nobody, while my dad stayed on Staten Island. Later, my mum remarried.
My sister and I were bullied at school because our dad was gay and while it was tough, the experience gave me an early education on the importance of being tolerant. But it wasn’t just Dad’s sexuality that we were grappling with; we also knew we would one day lose him. Dad had contracted HIV in 1980. Back then, nobody knew what it was and there were none of the treatments or medication that exist now, so his HIV positive status was another thing that people found scary. I now realise he was coming to terms with a lot – his identity, his health, the prospect of dying too soon. But back then, as my parents went through a difficult divorce, I took Mum’s side. My sister and I would visit Dad at his apartment in Manhattan, but he and I would butt heads a lot. One day, he took me aside and said, ‘I’m not going to be around for ever, please try not to give me such a hard time.’ I knew he was right and I tried to embrace the time we had left – however long it would be. He introduced me to fashion; I loved his sense of easy style and perfectly worn-in Levi’s, and he even took me to a Calvin Klein store, because I was obsessed with the brand’s Kate Moss ads.
For my spring break in 1992, when I was 14, Dad and I took a trip to Bermuda. My clearest memory from that trip is of Dad and I swimming in the pool. He cut himself, and I was too scared to get in because of his HIV. It was at the airport on that trip that I got my first inkling that the end was near – my grandmother came to pick me up but something about Dad wasn’t
