Faggot

I may ask you a lot of questions.

 I also may not, and if I don’t, I’d prefer it if you didn’t take it personally.

But of course I’d want that.

 My Mom used to ask me how my friend was doing after I came back from hanging out with him, either for an afternoon or a weekend, and I wouldn’t know, because I never thought to ask. She’d ask how his parents were, how his brother was, what he was doing for the summer, did he enjoy the carnival that he went to with me, and I didn’t really know. I knew that I’d had fun at the carnival, especially when we were locked in a spinning cage and being ragdolled on The Zipper, and he seemed to be having fun then too, so yes, we had fun. We played board games for 40 hours straight(or D&D, but I had to lie about that), I didn’t even see his parents, and his brother was too smart and mean to play games with. All that other stuff was just something that I never, ever, thought about unless Mom asked me.

 I used to kind of feel bad about it. Briefly. It wasn’t her intention to shame me, not at all, she just didn’t get that I DID care in my own way, but also, I just didn’t want to be gay.

Now, that word was never spoken in our house, certainly not by my parents. Gay was a word that I’d hear on the school bus, or when me and my friend were being picked on by the kids who grew up to be rednecks. It meant bad; not stealing bad, not lighting your room on fire bad (those bads were also a little bit awesome), but just bad somehow. School was gay, skateboarding was gay, not skateboarding was gay, Star Wars was gay, reading was gay, glasses were gay, if you didn’t like fishing you were gay, inseparable loners who played Dungeons and Dragons were gay. According to a lot of people, I was gay, and gay was bad. Bad-ish.

 I’d seen the word faggot in a book I was reading. It was a word meaning fire wood that I hadn’t seen before, so I looked it up in the dictionary, and it said something about gay, so I looked up gay, and it said something about being very happy and cheerful,(I’m not sure if the other definition for gay was in my school dictionary, but if it was, I missed it.), and it didn’t make sense to me, because I wasn’t. I wasn’t very anything, except sheltered and confused.

 I didn’t know that I was a completely normal young boy with his completely normal best friend. It wasn’t until I was about fourteen that I discovered that I was also not gay, because that’s when things like that really started to matter.

 Not to me, I wasn’t gay, not GAY gay, anyway, and other people were, but so what? I was busy with feathered hair, greasy skin, and inconvenient boners; I had no energy for what other people did. I still didn’t even know what homosexuality was, or even what regular sexuality was, for that matter, though I thought I’d really like to find out.

 What I was taught, though, was that homosexuality, when it came to affronts to god, was second only to suicide.

 Suicide was a taboo as well; nobody talked about suicide until everybody had to start talking about suicide, so I also didn’t know about suicide, not really. Not yet.

 And I still didn’t care because it was none of my business, and I didn’t believe in god because I didn’t like him because he was a mean, two-faced asshole who had other people tell you that he loved you more than anyone else could possibly even imagine.

 I remember talk around the dinner table about one of us seeing two women holding hands right out in the open. It was the kind of thing that you’d see in the city once in a while, but here in our little alcoholic, wife beating, child molesting, drunk driving little town, it was just...unusual.

 There were thirteen suicides one year.

 We are all subject to conditioning by people that are also subject to conditioning, and someone’s best may not look like much to you, but you should go and do your best before you worry overmuch about that.

 No one is “fine”. Fine is not a word that adequately explains a human condition, but what they are may not be for you to know. You may not even be able to handle it. You don’t have to understand, but if you can’t be nice to people, if you can’t manage compassion, at least leave them the fuck alone.