Passive-Aggressive Sexuality

(Wait, that title sounds wrong. But yet it's so much fun I'm going to keep it.)

As longtime readers of this blog know, I'm not out to my parents, even though most of my extended family has figured out this big "secret" already. Sometimes I feel like it's a cruel joke we're all playing on my clueless parents: the only two people in the world who don't know who I sleep with are the two people whose DNA make me who I am. But that's beside the point.

Over the years I've decided that my parents simply don't want to know, because by now they certainly should have figured it out. (By the way, this is the approach I take with most everyone regarding my sexuality: I don't announce it, but I don't shy away from it, and after being with me for long enough, it's really not that tough to figure out.)

Evidence that my parents aren't homo-friendly:

1. My mother once explicitly told me, in her one moment of tender-loving advice-giving to make up for the (at the time) 27 years of not-so-tender-or-loving-advice-giving, that, seriously, in a million years, don't... be gay. (It loses a little in the translation, but that really is exactly what she told me.)

2. When gay marriages were the big news story in Hawai'i, my father made a remarkably disparging noise at the image of two men at an alter during the ten o'clock news. I was sitting right next to him at the time. I think I cringed inwardly.

I have given up ever trying to change my parents' minds about anything, so their preconceived notions of gays and homosexuality is yet another thing that I've not going to talk to them about. As long as we're content not talking about it, we should be fine.

The thing is, I watch all of these coming-out movies and testimonials on television and stuff, and usually it's all about some kid who goes on and on about how he doesn't want to live his life when his parents "don't know him" or the gay kid's anguish at having to "hide a part of his life from his family." Me, I have no such qualms. You don't know my family. We're not that close. Even if I were dating a woman, I probably wouldn't feel the need to tell my parents all about it.

So this Christmas, I was wildly delinquent in putting the tchotchkes I bought for the 'rents in the mail to them. (A DVD, plus two sets of cute little Asian-inspired figurine sets, all reasonably priced.) I'm planning on getting them to the post office tomorrow.

I just looked over the card I had picked out for them, and in retrospect, it's a pretty awful card to send to one's parents on (the occasion of) Christmas:

We all know that
there's no such thing
as perfect parents.
But children don't need "perfect."
They just need love --
love that shelters them...
love that lets them make a few mistakes...
love that says,
"You really matter."
Love is all it takes to make good parents...
and that's exactly what you are.

Oy! The card I'm about to send out actually says, "You're not perfect, but hey, Merry Christmas!" Actually, when I bought it, I intended it as a passive-aggressive comment on the fact that my mother has not yet gotten to the point where she will let me make my own mistakes. She still gets incensed when she gives me advice on things that I fail to heed, for whatever reason. That's the line that grabbed me. So off it's going, in with the gifts.

And as cushioning material for the box to make sure nothing gets overly jostled during transit? I'm going to use a few (clean) pages from the Washington Blade.