dirty dirty

in non-mice, non-hottie-related news, a new column came out today. out of the fire, as they say...
We’re all adults here.

I was 18 years old when I told my parents that I was gay. It wasn’t exactly my choice, mind you. Let’s just say that teenage boys have certain needs that are often tended to by certain websites. When small-town Oklahoma parents get computer savvy and start looking up certain internet cache files, things start to get interesting. Ok, so my dad went through the computer and found out I’d been looking at gay porn. To this day I’m amazed that he knew enough about computers to do this. It’s not like I expected him to be batting at the monitor with the heel of his loafer, but since my mother referred to anything internet-related as “The E-Mail,” you can understand my surprise. “Robert, I’m trying to use the phone,” she’d say. “Are you on The E-Mail?”

Therefore, when my father called me downstairs at 9:30 on a school night, I knew that something was amiss. In a scene that I’m sure has been played out in many families’ living rooms, my father, before telling me what was going on, turned on the computer and navigated to the incriminating pages. He started reading the titles: “Free Gay XXX,” he read. “Streaming Gay Videos.” Thank God he hadn’t read a few choice others. I could deal with “Free Gay XXX.” I didn’t have to hear my father say “Watch Timmy take his first c*ck,” a sound which I’m sure would haunt me to this day.

“Why do you like looking at these sites?” he asked me. Well, that seems pretty obvious to me, I thought to myself. Clearly, though, this was not the time to be a smart-ass.

“I don’t know,” I muttered, staring at the floor.

“I just can’t believe you’d bring pornography into this house,” my mother said, stricken. “We don’t believe in it. We’ve never even had a Playboy under this roof.” I stared at her, amazed. What issue were we discussing, again—the fact that I had been looking at porno or the fact that it was gay porno?

“I think you’re missing the point here,” my father said. “It’s men in the pictures,” he said, a little flabbergasted.

That’s the Story of How I Came Out to My Parents. I’ll spare you the rest of the scene; it’s mundane and predictable. Did my parents turn me gay? Was I touched inappropriately as a child? Was I called “fag” for so long that I finally convinced myself it must be true? What’s struck me most about coming out to my parents isn’t their initial reaction, nor is it the therapy in which they enrolled me during the aftermath (diagnosis: sane, competent, smart, and 100% homosexual). What amazes me is the way the whole issue’s been swept under the carpet for the last seven years.

I’m no math whiz, but seven years is pretty close to ten years, and ten years is a decade. So, if we’re rounding up, I’ve been out to my family for nearly a decade. And I’ve never heard my mother say the word “gay.”

I’ve been on countless dates and cohabitated with two boyfriends in the last seven years; I’ve been the president of my college’s GLBT association; I’ve started writing a column for a gay publication with a pretty big readership. What do my parents know about any of it? Not much. Our conversations follow well-worn paths, grooves in a record that’s stuck on repeat: we talk about work, about school. We talk about money and taxes, and, with my father, the weather. It’s been unseasonably warm; my mother’s volunteering at the theater again.

I can’t lay all of the blame at my parents’ feet, however, because I haven’t pushed the issue for a while now. If I really wanted to tell them about my personal life—who I’m dating, for instance, or any of the crazy stories I’ve garnered as an urban homo in his 20’s—I could. They wouldn’t hang up on me. They’d listen, probably not contribute much, and then we’d talk about the weather again. Why haven’t I tried, then, to establish the close relationship with my parents that so many of my friends enjoy? Every time I hear someone say “She’s not just my mom; she’s my best friend,” I throw up in my mouth a little. But I can’t help being a little jealous that they have a relationship I’ve been either too lazy or too scared to attempt.

It’s not that I need my parents to be my best friends; I’d just like them to know a little bit more about me than my academic advisor at college did. I suppose that everyone, at some point in adolescence, begins shutting their parents out of their life as part of a natural progression toward independence. But now, at 25, I’m ready to reopen the door, adult-to-adult, and share my life with the two people who might not know me the best but have definitely known me the longest.