Make the Yuletide gay
Dec. 20th, 2012 02:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistIt's traditional for people my parents know to send Christmas cards, often with a picture of the family -- this year, my parents sent one I'd taken of them in Cornwall, for example -- and so Mom was showing off the new babies and suchlike of this year.
She got to one, though, that she introduced oddly: "And there's one I really don't like." She explained she had this old friend who, she found out a few years ago, "was gay." Her friend never a picture with her "significant other" in it before, but she did this year.
"I had a real hard time with that," my mom said, which is strong, emotional language for her. "I used to stay at her house and everything...I don't think she was that way then, though."
In the brief glance I had at the picture, it didn't even look like the two women were touching. They were standing, as if defiant against small-town Hallmark-Channel Midwestern culture.
It made me really sad. It stung a little, but mostly it made me sad. While I'm intellectually aware of my mom's homophobia, I've carefully avoided the subject she reacted badly to the news that a high-school friend of mine was gay, and that her best friend's brother was gay. I guess I was hoping the intervening decade might have mellowed her a bit, or revealed that I'd exaggerated it (after all, a decade ago I still thought I was straight, and I thought I might have been only retroactively making a mountain of personal offense out of that molehill).
And yet her essential unwillingness to make a fuss means she hasn't cut ties with this friend or anything; she does exchange cards with her and didn't throw this one away or anything. "Significant other" is pretty respectful language for her friend's partner, and while it sounded a little stilted because it isn't a phrase my mom usually uses, it wasn't too scornful or anything.
Still, I'm aware that any hope I may hold is probably delusional: I keep thinking of the momentary emotion that swelled up in me that made me want to ask "Why should it have bothered you to stay in her house?" or "Of course you don't think she was 'that way' back then or you'd have had to think you had a gay friend!"
I do wonder if she thinks she has a gay friend, now.
She got to one, though, that she introduced oddly: "And there's one I really don't like." She explained she had this old friend who, she found out a few years ago, "was gay." Her friend never a picture with her "significant other" in it before, but she did this year.
"I had a real hard time with that," my mom said, which is strong, emotional language for her. "I used to stay at her house and everything...I don't think she was that way then, though."
In the brief glance I had at the picture, it didn't even look like the two women were touching. They were standing, as if defiant against small-town Hallmark-Channel Midwestern culture.
It made me really sad. It stung a little, but mostly it made me sad. While I'm intellectually aware of my mom's homophobia, I've carefully avoided the subject she reacted badly to the news that a high-school friend of mine was gay, and that her best friend's brother was gay. I guess I was hoping the intervening decade might have mellowed her a bit, or revealed that I'd exaggerated it (after all, a decade ago I still thought I was straight, and I thought I might have been only retroactively making a mountain of personal offense out of that molehill).
And yet her essential unwillingness to make a fuss means she hasn't cut ties with this friend or anything; she does exchange cards with her and didn't throw this one away or anything. "Significant other" is pretty respectful language for her friend's partner, and while it sounded a little stilted because it isn't a phrase my mom usually uses, it wasn't too scornful or anything.
Still, I'm aware that any hope I may hold is probably delusional: I keep thinking of the momentary emotion that swelled up in me that made me want to ask "Why should it have bothered you to stay in her house?" or "Of course you don't think she was 'that way' back then or you'd have had to think you had a gay friend!"
I do wonder if she thinks she has a gay friend, now.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2012-12-21 07:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-12-21 04:36 pm (UTC)