Baby Steps

"So who's this new guy?" my mother asked me recently. I hadn't called her in about two weeks; I'd been busy with work, with plans, with living in New York City. Anyway, we'd discuss innocuous things that didn't involve politics or George W. Bush. Or, God forbid, me being gay. Hearing her ask about a new guy in my life sounded completely foreign, like she'd just asked me what I thought of some party drug or the latest Madonna album. In the nearly ten years since I came out to her I'd grown accustomed to talking about safe subjects, having conversations that could be typed out and read verbatim every week, as if we were reading a script of the world's most boring sitcom: "How's work?" "Oh, it's fine. I'm really settling in. Boy, it was rough going there for a while." "I know, I'm so glad that you got that job." Every week was the same, but with subtle differences: my health would be better, or worse. Her hip would be giving her trouble.

I'd recently decided to push the issue with my mother. I wasn't going to edit out anything I told her. I wasn't going to continue living the life that I'd created for her over the last few years: that of a neutered, gay uncle; that of a man with a roommate or companion or friend. I had two options, as I saw it. I could either stop calling home altogether, just call it a loss, or I could try to speak with my mother as a human being, as I would with any of my friends, albeit cursing less frequently and completely avoiding the topic of sex.

I chose the second option and decided to lay it on the line. Our conversation started out following its usual trajectory: Yes, I'd been sleeping enough; yes, my roommates were just fine. When, every Sunday, my mother asked me what I'd done that weekend I'd usually give her the edited-for-mother version: gay bars became bars; dates never happened.

"So, what did you do this weekend?" my mother asked, predictably.

"Well," I told her, "my roommate and I went out to dinner on Friday night, and then I went and hung out with this guy that I've been dating." I waited for her frazzled response, waited to hear how she was going to deal with this new slant in our weekly conversation. I only heard the crackling of static in my cellphone as cars whizzed past. "And then I went out with Scott and his boyfriend Chris on Saturday," I hurriedly finished.

"That sounds like fun," she said, simply. I'd left out that we'd gone to a tiny, dirty bar downtown where I'd been told to look for a half-asian go-go boy named Dennis because he had the most amazing ass my friend had ever seen. You know, baby steps. And then, to my surprise: "So who's this new guy?" I realized that I hadn't really thought out what I was going to tell her; I never really expected her to ask. Who was this new guy? How did I explain to my mother, a woman who's married to her high school sweetheart, that things were still casual between us? How did I explain to her that in New York City people carry their neuroses around with them like sacks of rocks, that everyone in this town is slow to trust another person, slow to commit?
"Oh, he's just a guy that I met. He's pretty great, but we're taking it slowly." There, that's that. My mother made a noise that said, Yes, I know how that goes or Dating's a tricky thing and went on to the next subject.

So we weren't best friends. I never get it when people are best friends with their parents, anyway. But maybe I'd started to shine a little light into the part of my life that was real: not work, not money, not auditions or rent, but my relationships with people. And maybe it was something that my mother wanted to see.