10:10pm May 29, 2012

This is probably going to puzzle me the rest of my life.

So when I came out to my parents as lesbian, I was most worried about my dad. Because he had made… comments about gay men. So I braced for the worst and I told him.

His reaction: “Oh I knew that.”

If I was a cat I would have whipped my ears back and stared at him with wide eyes. As it was, my ears and scalp moved a little bit, pulling my glasses towards my eyes. “How did you know that?”

All he said was “I’ve been around the sun a few times.”

This puzzled me for years. But it was a good thing. Because whatever it was, he was matter-of-fact and decent about the news. More so than some family members who appeared more okay with gay people on the surface. He seemed to fully accept me no more nor less than he had before, nobody else reacted like that.

So when he visited me last year, I asked him about what he said. He just laughed.

I asked him if it was that I never had posters of boys. No. I asked him if it was how I acted around women. No. I asked him if it was how I didn’t act around men. No. I asked him if it was how I acted around my girlfriend. No, he’d noticed before that. WTF. I mean I’d dated a guy before, that he still knew was bizarre.

He said he couldn’t explain it. He’d grown up on a farm and some of the animals were gay – bulls who had sex with bulls, hens who had sex with hens, etc. And something about me reminded him of something about them. And he couldn’t explain it beyond that.

(No, I’m not offended at being compared to farm animals. Not in this context and not by him. I think it’s cool that animals seem to have taught him to take this as normal on a deeper level despite some of his surface beliefs. Having plenty of exposure to people deeply uncomfortable with me despite surface acceptance of gay people, I’d take someone like him any day. That’s one problem I have with treating oppression as being all about language use. What you say and what you are, aren’t necessarily the same thing.)

I’m still going to be baffled forever.