When Leslie Absher was growing up, her father was notable both for his presence and his absence — even when he was there, performing magic tricks at Leslie’s birthday party, her dad never fully revealed himself. 

Mike Absher was a CIA agent, something Leslie only learned when her mother insisted she and her sister know the truth. They had lived in Greece when there was a military coup and later her father was in Vietnam during the war there. (Leslie’s mother died from cancer when she was a teen.)

As Leslie grew older, she began hiding a secret of her own: she was a lesbian, something she knew her father would not accept. Now, in “Spy Daughter, Queer Girl,” Absher recounts how she had to investigate her father’s life and career to come to terms with him while also learning to live openly as her true self. 

She spoke recently by video from her home in Oakland. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. Your father was secretive and remote. Did the CIA shape him into that person or was he naturally a good fit for the CIA?

I think the CIA was a good fit for who he was. There was a family culture around silence and secrecy, and this fed into it.

Q. Your father lied to you about things – such as knowing a CIA member who seems to have broken with official protocol in Greece. Do you have lingering doubts about your father and what he did or does finishing the book put that to bed?

I don’t lay awake at night but there is that grey area with the lingering doubts – the not knowing is always going to be part of the story for me. I feel pretty clear about what he did in certain places, but I have to live with an incomplete understanding. I’m sure he knew that agent and knew him well. And that wasn’t the first time he misled me. The slippery, non-trustworthy dad was inseparable from the dad I always loved. It’s weird. 

Q. Did your research and experience temper your view of the CIA or just how you felt about your dad?

I think it did both. When I started, I had a black-and-white view of the CIA and my father without a lot of information. Then I waded into this investigation and tried as much as I could to be objective. By the end, I started seeing gradations between the different CIA missions – some were successful, some were not, but I could see more complexity. It’s not black and white anymore. I don’t have a quick and easy endorsement for the CIA, but I don’t have the quick and easy condemnation I once did. 

Through this project, I’ve met with other CIA spy kids but also with former officers. I’ll even be speaking in Virginia with a former senior CIA officer, so I’m letting them more into my world, which is ironic. 

Q. Do you feel like you need to have your guard up around them?

The CIA officers I’ve been in touch with and let more into my life are fairly progressive-minded people. The CIA is full of individuals and they each come at things from their own points of view. But I’ll always be a little guarded. 

Q. Does growing up in the environment you did make it difficult to trust people? 

I had to make a conscious decision to let go of that bias, of always saying, “What’s really going on here?” That became a protective shield I needed growing up and I don’t need it anymore, but I’ll always be untangling that — stepping away from that suspicious mind is the big personal work I’ve done. 

Q. You kept your sexuality secret from yourself and then from your father. Once you embraced who you were what was it like when he refused to accept or acknowledge your truth for so long?

It was very painful. It started in my twenties when I came out to him in a letter and he rejected it. Then there was the silence. I was really angry. He was not accepting something in my life that was joyous, so I thought, “What good are you?”

I’m surprised I hung in there the way I did but I was not able to fully walk away from him. We’d have our infrequent phone calls and visit every few years. I know my sister was also very disapproving of him for not coming to my commitment ceremony to [wife] Susan. He was such a compartmentalizer and he became more religious so there were things closing him down. 

My mom was more heart-centered – they were both culturally conservative people from the late ’50s but I think she would have embraced me, early or eventually. 

Q. Are you wary of secrecy in general?

The overarching story about my life is that I did a lot of work to live an open life. That’s the way I’ve lived for most of my life now, whether it’s through the gay liberation movement or the feminist movement just being open and out is how I live. It was because of those secrets that I felt so confined and so I made the decision to walk away from living like that. 

Q. Were there moments of doubt about writing the book?

There was a shame I carried privately for years, an internal angst that I was a bad daughter for investigating my father. I loved my father. 

Related Articles

• Entertainment |
  ‘Flipping out’: Tiffany Trump’s wedding plans upset by Nicole, Trump’s midterms defeats: reports
• Entertainment |
  7 awesome Bay Area things to do this weekend
• Entertainment |
  ‘Real Housewife’ Heather Dubrow sells California ‘chateau’ for $55 million
• Entertainment |
  Did Warren Beatty’s womanizing include grooming a minor for sex?
• Entertainment |
  Bay Area arts: 8 shows, fests to see this weekend

When my first story was going to run in the Los Angeles Times, he was saying, “You can’t say this, you can’t write that” and I had to keep giving myself permission to put it on the page. It was traumatic because it became big and it was a little ahead of where I was at the time. It was a big risk and I felt ready to be disowned again, like when I came out. 

In the end, it’s a story of reconciliation but it’s well-earned. But the biggest transformation for me was learning to trust myself. I trusted myself to ask the questions, to sort of betray my father by looking into this the best I could because I needed to know. Following my inner voice was my guiding light and while the end product is the book the whole process freed me. I feel stronger now. I trust the story I told.