myself a present.
I came out to my mom.
Sort of. By accident. I left out a mail from Billy, which I could just have left on the machine, but no, I had to go and print it out and leave it on my night table, looking like a huge white flag.
I get up this morning and I kinda half notice it’s not there. I lump into the kitchen and I can see where it went. The letter is in Mom’s hand and the look on her face tells me, yup, she’s read it. She has these gray lines down either side of her mouth. She holds it up to me, and says, “Can you tell me why you wouldn’t have the courage to tell me this directly?”
And I’m thinking how could I be so dumb? Did I do this to myself deliberately? And I’m also thinking wait a second, where do you get off reading my letters?
So I say to her, “Did you like the part where he says my dick is beautiful?”
She says, “Not much, no.” She’s already looking at me like I’m an alien. And I’m like: Mom, this is what you get for being NeoChristian—your son turns out to be a homo. What the Neos call a Darwinian anomaly.
Mom sighs and says, “Well I suppose we’re stuck with it now.”
Yeah Mom, you kinda are. Aren’t you suppose to say something mimsy like, Ron honey you know we still love you? Not my mom. Oh no. Saying exactly what she thinks is Mom’s way of being real, and her being real is more important to her than anything else. Like what I might be feeling.
So I dig back at her. “That’s a shame, Mom. A few years later and I would have been embryo-screened and you could have just aborted me.”
Mom just sniffs. “That was a cheap shot.”
Yeah, it was. NeoChristians are about the only people who don’t abort homosexual fetuses. Everybody else does. What do they call it? Parental choice.
So Mom looks at me with this real tough face and says, “I hope you think you’ve given yourself a happy birthday.” And that’s all the conversation we have about it.
My little brother is pretending he isn’t there and that he isn’t happy. My little brother is shaped like a pineapple. He’s fat and he has asthma and he’s really good at being sneaky and not playing by the rules. I was always the big brother who tolerated stuff and tried to help Mom along. Her good little boy. Only now I’m samesex. Which to a NeoChristian Mom is like finding out your son likes dressing up as a baby and being jerked off by animals. Sometimes I think Neo is just a way to find new reasons to hate the same old things.
What really dents my paintwork is that Mom is smart. What she likes about Neo is that it’s Darwinian. Last summer she’s reading this article “Samesex Gene Planted by Aliens?” And she’s rolling her eyes at it. “The least they could do is get the science straight,” she says. “It’s not one gene and it’s not one part of the brain.” But then she said, “But you gotta wonder, why is there a gene like that in the first place?”
My mom really does think that there’s a chance that homos are an alien plot. Please do not fall over laughing, it hurts too much.
Ever since the Artifacts were found, people have been imagining little green men landing on this beautiful blue planet and just going off again. So people scare themselves wondering if the aliens are about to come back with a nice big army.
Then about five years ago, it turned out that the genes that control sexual orientation have some very unusual sugars, and all of a sudden there’s this conspiracy theory that aliens created the samesex gene as some kind of weapon. Undermine our reproductive capacity. Even though when they landed we were all triblodites or whatever. Maybe having homos is supposed to soften us up for conquest. Hey, if the aliens invade, I promise, I’ll fight too OK?
On my way to school I ring Billy and tell him. “Mom found out. She read your mail.”
Billy sounds stripped for action. “Did she go crazy?”
“She went laconic. You could just hear her thinking: you gotta
I came out to my mom.
Sort of. By accident. I left out a mail from Billy, which I could just have left on the machine, but no, I had to go and print it out and leave it on my night table, looking like a huge white flag.
I get up this morning and I kinda half notice it’s not there. I lump into the kitchen and I can see where it went. The letter is in Mom’s hand and the look on her face tells me, yup, she’s read it. She has these gray lines down either side of her mouth. She holds it up to me, and says, “Can you tell me why you wouldn’t have the courage to tell me this directly?”
And I’m thinking how could I be so dumb? Did I do this to myself deliberately? And I’m also thinking wait a second, where do you get off reading my letters?
So I say to her, “Did you like the part where he says my dick is beautiful?”
She says, “Not much, no.” She’s already looking at me like I’m an alien. And I’m like: Mom, this is what you get for being NeoChristian—your son turns out to be a homo. What the Neos call a Darwinian anomaly.
Mom sighs and says, “Well I suppose we’re stuck with it now.”
Yeah Mom, you kinda are. Aren’t you suppose to say something mimsy like, Ron honey you know we still love you? Not my mom. Oh no. Saying exactly what she thinks is Mom’s way of being real, and her being real is more important to her than anything else. Like what I might be feeling.
So I dig back at her. “That’s a shame, Mom. A few years later and I would have been embryo-screened and you could have just aborted me.”
Mom just sniffs. “That was a cheap shot.”
Yeah, it was. NeoChristians are about the only people who don’t abort homosexual fetuses. Everybody else does. What do they call it? Parental choice.
So Mom looks at me with this real tough face and says, “I hope you think you’ve given yourself a happy birthday.” And that’s all the conversation we have about it.
My little brother is pretending he isn’t there and that he isn’t happy. My little brother is shaped like a pineapple. He’s fat and he has asthma and he’s really good at being sneaky and not playing by the rules. I was always the big brother who tolerated stuff and tried to help Mom along. Her good little boy. Only now I’m samesex. Which to a NeoChristian Mom is like finding out your son likes dressing up as a baby and being jerked off by animals. Sometimes I think Neo is just a way to find new reasons to hate the same old things.
What really dents my paintwork is that Mom is smart. What she likes about Neo is that it’s Darwinian. Last summer she’s reading this article “Samesex Gene Planted by Aliens?” And she’s rolling her eyes at it. “The least they could do is get the science straight,” she says. “It’s not one gene and it’s not one part of the brain.” But then she said, “But you gotta wonder, why is there a gene like that in the first place?”
My mom really does think that there’s a chance that homos are an alien plot. Please do not fall over laughing, it hurts too much.
Ever since the Artifacts were found, people have been imagining little green men landing on this beautiful blue planet and just going off again. So people scare themselves wondering if the aliens are about to come back with a nice big army.
Then about five years ago, it turned out that the genes that control sexual orientation have some very unusual sugars, and all of a sudden there’s this conspiracy theory that aliens created the samesex gene as some kind of weapon. Undermine our reproductive capacity. Even though when they landed we were all triblodites or whatever. Maybe having homos is supposed to soften us up for conquest. Hey, if the aliens invade, I promise, I’ll fight too OK?
On my way to school I ring Billy and tell him. “Mom found out. She read your mail.”
Billy sounds stripped for action. “Did she go crazy?”
“She went laconic. You could just hear her thinking: you gotta
Similar Books
