After 12 of 12 each month, I like to peruse the photos posted by others, and it’s sort of a tradition (I think) that if you surf to someone’s 12 of 12, you should leave a comment to let people know you were there. It’s an encouragement thing. It’s kind of like when I was buying my Mazda Protege back in December of ’03 and got so many encouraging comments from other customers while waiting for the paperwork to get processed that I started to think I might be inadvertently joining a cult.
Anyway.
Since I had a wildly productive day at work, I decided to spend the last half hour or so at my desk goofing off and looked at some more 12s, and ran across a blog kept by an Irish lad called Sam. I left a comment for Sam, piping up on a photo he’d taken of the current petrol prices in Ireland (€1.36) with the comment that it was still cheaper than in the states. Through some quick arithmetic, I pointed out that €1.36 is actually $8.08 per gallon.
I surfed back later after young Sam filled out my reader poll and discovered another post on his blog that caught my attention. Sam recently came out to his mother, and … well:
It’s 1:22AM
Parent of the year told me that she thinks I made a bad choice this morning, and that she was disappointed…
They’re both disappointed, and think I made a bad choice. My brother is an alcoholic, and refuses to get treatment. He refuses to admit that he can’t control his drinking, even though it’s as plain as day, and they’ve said to him that they’re disappointed in him.
Is being gay equal to being an alcoholic?
Well, now I’m reconsidering what I said in my post yesterday about the younger generation than us old fogies (feeling the need to reiterate here that I’m only 33). All things considered, I’ve had a pretty easy go of things, even though I didn’t come out until I was 25. My friends had figured it out a long time beforehand, and were (mostly) nice enough not to tell me … right away.
My own parents were accepting right away, in their own way. They’re now in their 70s, and I’m pretty sure that, unlike my friends, they hadn’t seen it coming. I’ve never really been comfortable talking about sex or romance or anything like that around them–for all the Greek blood, we’re a pretty uptight WASP family in that regard–so they really wouldn’t have known if I’d been dating or not. We still don’t talk much about gay issues–in fact, I can still count on one hand the number of times I’ve actually heard them use the word “gay.” They call Ray my “friend” when referring to him in conversation with others — although to be fair, I don’t usually call him ‘my partner’ when I’m talking to them, so I haven’t introduced the term as ‘what I call him when I’m not calling him Ray.’ And frankly, I could give a fig what the extended family knows about me–I’m not that close to my aunts and uncles.
My parents have told me that they consider Ray as a third child. Unfortunately for poor Ray, this involves treating him like one of their children, including the parental observation of flaws, asking “Is that on your diet?” whenever he eats anything, giving honest observation on what he’s wearing, and doing all of those parent-y things that my brother and I have just learned to ignore over the years.
Ray’s own story–which I won’t tell here because I think it would make him uncomfortable–is significantly different, but after many years I’ve reached something of a level of detente with his parents, who come to visit a couple of times a year and, when I don’t inadvertantly serve his mother poultry products, seem to enjoy themselves.
So, I guess I can amend my post from yesterday: some young gays have it better than we did. For all I know, the boys I saw yesterday aren’t out at home–this is Texas, after all, and we do still have the occasional dragging. And frankly, even though he finds himself in a bit of a rough situation with his mum, young Sam does seem to be pretty well adjusted. Even if he is paying $8.08 for a gallon of gas.
So, what do you think? Does the younger generation of gays and lesbians have it ‘easier’ than those of us now in our 30s…and above…did/do?
