What is it about fathers that makes them so predictable? Father’s Day lumbers up to your calendar and what do you buy the old man? What do you say to him? Is the nicest thing to do for a dad on Father’s Day to leave him alone with his ballgame on TV? Dads aren’t as expressive as moms. They can even be a little dull. And we gay sons usually have more to do with our mothers anyway. Call it oedipal or just chalk it up to the fact that aesthetics matter to mothers, but it’s easier with them, that’s all.

But that all changed for me when my mother passed away. Suddenly my dad, at 80, was asking me to help him find new love. So I didn’t only start pimping for him and screening for him (God forbid he should end up with anyone less than perfect), I started coaching him and dressing him. It got very “Queer Eye” for the old guy, as I’d scold him for talking with his mouth full of food and stop him from pouring Splenda into his wine. I introduced him to concepts that were foreign to him, such as the dry cleaners, and got him to stop wearing those vinyl loafers from K-Mart that annoyed me more than I’d like to admit. I know I’m not him and he’s not me. And without my kind of raging aesthetics, he didn’t live for just the right collar or cuff. Still, some tweaking never hurts.

The truth is that, as a gay son who was single, I had more time for him than my brother did. I was also a better sounding board for all his dating questions. And when he told me about his dates, I wasn’t as shocked as a straight person might have been with his senior “Sex and the City” life. Botox, Viagra, Internet dating. When it comes to romance in his world, 80 is the new 60. One woman who was 86 was dating my father and two other men at the same time. Another told him he was just filler until Mr. Right came along. Nasty, sure, but nothing compared to what gay men on the prowl say to each other.

In the wake of a parent’s death, your life changes in all kinds of ways. What struck me most was that my father and I became friends for the first time ever. Well, it’s easy to bond when you’re both dating so disastrously and doing the post mortems. But even though I was middle-aged and resigned to being single, he never gave up on the idea of love – not for me or himself. And shocking as it was, it turned out that my father, who I’d dismissed my whole life as a know-nothing, had things to teach me in his own wacky way: He was so open when it came to love, the world’s most democratic Republican.

“Stop looking for perfection,” he once told me when I was being too critical of a man who ended up becoming the love of my life. “That’s the only way you’ll find it.”

I took that advice, and now I’m as happily married as gays can be.

My dad passed away in 2006. On Father’s Day, I think of him when I look into the eyes of the man I married. I taught him about clothes. He taught me to love.

Who do you think got the better deal?