Saturday is the weekend when no one really reads blogs, probably because they’re all Orthodox Jews. Which makes Saturday the perfect day to post things that make me somewhat uncomfortable, things that I do not think will get a lot of attention. And possibly to confess to a few drive-by shootings.
But that’ll come later.
Today, I wanted to tell you something that I did yesterday, something that still really bothers me.
My 8 year old son has a fucking annoying habit of speaking in a high pitched voice. He does it for fun and there are times when I think that I can actually hear my skull fracturing as a result. But when he adds a semi-butterfly dance to it, fluttering his hands and sort of prancing, I totally lose my shit. And I did yesterday.
I’ve asked him not to do it before, because it is annoying, but he does it every morning. He thinks it’s funny. He probably thinks that my being so annoyed by it is funny.
And I wanted him to stop. And I did it by saying, “when you do that, it looks really gay.”
Yes, in 2009, in NYC, in Greenwich Village, I told my son that a bit of playacting made him look gay. To be fair, if this is about fairness, I did not use “gay” as a synonym for “stupid”, as so many teenagers do. No, I meant that it made him look homosexual.
I am trying hard to avoid a Jim Baker-like crying fiasco where I ask people, including my son, for forgiveness. But his reaction haunts me.
He stopped. And he became serious. Like the Wii-is-broken serious.
“I am not gay,” he said.
“There is nothing wrong with being gay,” I told him. Even though a mere two minutes earlier I implied the exact opposite.
“I know,” he said. “But doing that doesn’t make me gay.”
I swear this isn’t a mea culpa. It’s more than that. It’s my trying to figure out why I said what I did, how I knew that saying that something “looked gay” would be the perfect way to get him to stop doing it.
I told John and he went to his desk and emailed me a “I can no longer be your fag and I’ve alerted headquarters” letter.
I emailed another friend and he suggested several interesting and rather kind possibilities for my reaction.
But I’m struggling with it.
When I was in my 20s, I read Edmund White’s The Beautiful Room is Empty. It is maddening when people say “this book changed my life” (especially when the book was written by Nora Roberts) but that book reminds me of the unknown struggle that so many teenagers, coming to terms with their sexuality, face. It’s sobering. I think about that book frequently, and I feel like I betrayed its spirit.
I’ve often said that I didn’t care if my children grew up to be gay, so long as they were happy. And I still believe that to be true.
But if it’s true, why did I, in a moment of irritation, say “it looks really gay”?
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