I wrote this post a year and a half ago and things have changed so much since then. My mother no longer asks me if The Girl is gay or why we travel the world together. I don’t know if this means she’s realised that I’m gay, I just hope she has.
So I’m chatting on the phone with my mom and telling her that The Girl and I are going to a friends house for lunch this weekend and she interrupts me and asks:
“Is she normal?”
I am mortified. I ask her, “NORMAL? What do you mean?”
She finds it hard to say the word… “Is she… you know. I mean… err. Is she gay?”
She almost whispers the word “gay”. Like it’s a taboo word that she might get punished for uttering out loud.
I lose my temper and say “YOU of all people should NOT be calling someone who’s gay, abnormal.”
She ignores my lesson in political correctness. “Well, is she?”, she demands.
I hedge. “Haven’t asked her, but if she is, what’s wrong with that?”
“I don’t want people gossiping about you.”
“If I’m happy with my decisions, what does it matter what people say?”
“I don’t want people thinking you are like that.”
Once again I feel enraged and say “How can you say such things? You’re well educated.”
“So?” she asks defiantly. “Just because I’m educated why should I accept that kind of stuff?”
I tell her how she should worry about what I think and not what people think.
And she mutters something about that being some kind of spiel.
Now I am at home and wishing I had asked her if she would think that I was abnormal if I was gay.
