Confession Time
This is going to be a difficult piece to write. I’m taking a risk here, opening up in a blog with an admission that may even come as news to my wife and friends. Because I may not be who some people think I am.
It’s an old story. Starting about age 12, everything in my life went a bit crazy. I began experiencing odd feelings when I was around my classmates, or hanging out with my friends at the pool. Watching the way they moved, the way they looked with water glistening on their skin, listening to their conversations and feeling a terrible sense of yearning and loneliness. I can admit it now. I was deeply attracted to members of… the opposite sex. Girls. I loved girls (still do, but from the standpoint of a happily married man with no designs on anyone else honestly Maggie how could you even think such a thing). I thought about them all of the time. ALL of the time. At a time when most guys were worried that they just might grow up to like other guys “in that way,” my focus stayed entirely on girls.
I started to really think about this when I was talking to a neighbor. I was on my way out to walk the dog, and ran into her in the lobby. I don’t remember the question she asked, but my answer included the words “my wife.” She looked at me strangely, then said “I thought you were gay.” Of course, this woman is drunk most of the time, and may have been used to seeing me with three or four Maggies. My quadruplet set of fag hags, or something. But, as she went on to say, I was fit and well groomed and had an absolutely beautiful Golden Retriever.
Those are just a few of my many outward deceptions, to cover for my true sexual orientation. Marrying Maggie was a broken thread in my web of deceit, but with her short hair and some really baggy clothes and hoping everyone will squint when they look at her, we might be able to disguise her lack of Y chromosomes.
The more I consider this issue, the more the signs point to gay. Let’s look at the evidence:
- I don’t like watching sports
- I drink more wine than beer
- I’m not a fan of the testosterone-soaked oeuvres of Stallone or Schwarzenegger
- I know the word oeuvre and even know how to spell it
- No, I don’t want to go to the strip club with you
- I own a lot of Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday albums
- The New York Times proclaimed the VW Beetle as a gay lifestyle vehicle, and I have a nice Silver one
- Maggie drives a Subaru Forrester, labeled in the same article as a lesbian choice, so obviously we’re covering for one another
- A disproportionate number of my friends are either women or gay men
- My brother gave me iTunes credits for my birthday and I joked that I’d use them to buy show tunes and then bought show tunes with them (Avenue Q, which features the charming ditty “If You Were Gay”)
- Yeah, I read comic books, but rarely the superhero ones
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I can but claim that against all of the evidence presented I am now and have always been a practicing heterosexual. I will officially come out of the closet and say “I am not gay!”
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
