T w e n t y S i d e d
Logan sits at the dinner table looking between his parents. The cups of tea are growing cold on the table as Logan gives several false starts to what he’s trying to say.
“It’s…a few things…” He mumbles, followed by silence.
The creeks and moans of the old house always grow louder when the family is at a loss for words. The layers of wood and brick and old insulation that have been in their family for a century almost become part of the conversation, the house putting in it’s own quiet two cents. Tonight, it’s grumbling, maybe about Logan’s predicament, maybe about the mice in the basement.
“You know…” Logan finally speaks again, his voice sounding louder than reality for a moment, breaking the pause.
“I’m failing English…” He offers, looking defeated. Kelly and Michael share a look, but don’t interrupt yet. It’s not like Logan to do badly in a class, but they’re far more surprised at the idea that he’d think they’d be…mad? No, that doesn’t make sense.
When his parents say nothing, Logan continues.
“And I hate living in my dorm.”
Alright, that made some sense, sort of, but the world was on lock-down, living in his dorm couldn’t be an issue now.
“The showers are down the hall and you have to carry your stuff and change in a weird kind of communal space.”
Another pause.
“Like, it’s private! But it’s also not? Like a pool changing room? Or public bathroom? It grosses me out!”
Logan is on a roll now. His parents nod sympathetically as he vents, letting him go.
“And I hate this lock-down, I miss the grocery store! I didn’t think I would and now I do!”
Fair enough. No one is enjoying the current situation.
“And- and David! I called him when I got back home! And everything was fine until I mentioned a guy on campus asked me out! I was just laughing about it and…” Logan is looking hard at his parents’ faces, trying to gauge their feelings. “I’m not even gay! I don’t think? I don’t know! I didn’t say yes!”
Logan grows more and more animated, all the bundled up feelings of the last few weeks coming rapidly to the surface.
“But David got really grossed out! And said some really awful stuff! We’ve been friends since like, eighth grade and I didn’t know he felt that way! And then…I realized I didn’t know how my mom and dad felt either, and maybe I had this whole idea of how everyone thought and then wham! I find out my best friend is a homophobe! How were we friends for years and years and I didn’t even…”
Logan is experiencing a paradigm shift. A nasty, frustrating paradigm shift.
He slumps, and puts his head in his hands, speaking into them. “That whole friendship is just gone…we fought…and…”
Kelly puts an arm around her son, Michael gives her a hopeless look. Neither of them know what to do, their son’s world has just expanded rapidly, and he’s gotten hurt in the process. It’s easy for a twenty-something to think everyone thinks the same way, especially if they’ve never been challenged. ‘Homophobe’, to Logan, was a word for a nasty little Disney villain type out there, kicking puppies and picketing parades. To another kid, ‘Homophobe’ is something some self righteous little shit throws around as a way of saying ‘less open-minded than myself’. Both of those kids are wrong, and both of them have to learn it sometime. Sadly, for Logan, he’s lost a friend to the process.
Despite the fact neither parent fully knows where they stand or how they feel yet, they affirm that David shouldn’t have said those things.
Kelly and Michael later stay up, sitting and reading through several advice columns and Reddit threads about having gay kids. Logan hadn’t come out to them, but he had admitted he didn’t know what he was, so they decide to get ahead and read up just in case. Would either of them have really cared or been upset if Logan brought home a boyfriend? No…but they also wouldn’t have been prepared for it. The thought hadn’t even crossed their minds.
The age of the internet is strange. Logan had an entire belief system built on the part of the internet he used in high school. David had his own, and Kelly and Michael didn’t experience either. All they can do now is go to research on the exact thing that cause the whole situation and try and be more prepared. This is a mess.
Spec Ops: The Line
A videogame that judges its audience, criticizes its genre, and hates its premise. How did this thing get made?
Free Radical
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
Twelve Years
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.
D&D Campaign
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
Stolen Pixels
A screencap comic that poked fun at videogames and the industry. The comic has ended, but there's plenty of archives for you to binge on.
Aw, poor Logan! Even if he determines that he’s not gay, it’s still awful to realize someone you cared for has harmful beliefs about others that can’t be tolerated. David was really important in his life, and now he’s gone. That’s really hard.
Who knows, maybe they’ll reconcile and David will relent and grow as a result. Maybe David is closeted due to his upbringing, and will eventually come round, pour out his heart to Logan and reveal his long held love for him, only for Logan to have realised that he isn’t gay himself and have to reject him, causing even greater heartache and schism! To be reconciled years (or a few posts) later.
Called it.
Arguably, the whole century-long saga of the family history has been leading up to this point as the climax. Considering that Logan is practically the first sympathetic male in the entire family tree up to now (with the possible exception of Michael, who notably comes from outside the family, and whose reputation will hinge entirely on how he decides to respond to this situation).
Really enjoying this story. And this was unexpected for me, I thought this was leading up to Logan & David being a couple, with Logan being worried about telling his parents. But yeah, this has become kind of a comfort read for me – although it covers some difficult ground, I really like that Michael/Kelly had a good reaction to all of this
I was expecting that too. IMO this is far more interesting, since it’s talking about a kind of problem with parenting kids of this internet-enabled generation that I hadn’t really thought of before.
“My son is gay and worried about how I’ll react” is a lot more cliché/played out in comparison.
Letting the internet raise your kids is a damnable sin.
It also carries its own punishment. Just look at the results.
Ooooof. Poor Logan.
Confession time, and it is not going to make me look good. (Although I look good, to me,(physically anyway) all the time)
I know, and have used, just about every homophobic slur that existed prior to 2005. I have not used any of them knowingly since before 1994. Pre 1994 I was societally conditioned into believing that being gay was wrong and dangerous. I also didn’t know any one who was gay. (As far as I knew). It was around 1994 that I actually thought about the subject of same sex attraction, and realized I just did not give a fuck who wanted to be with who. It was kind of mind blowing realizing that what other people were attracted to had no affect on me.
It took a few (too many) years to adjust my vocabulary to the point I doubt that I will say something offensive to the LGBTQ+ community, but I am getting there.
Bay, I remember when your father wrote about you coming out and the rewiring he had to do. I gained a lot of respect for your whole family, which I thought wasn’t possible, because how much I already respected the lot of you.
Keep up the fight, because eventually we as a species will wonder why we had to fight. For anything.
The cultural influence of the internet, and of particular teenage social groups (i.e. the so called ‘alt’ group(s)), on people is interesting – for some of us it’s just memes and jokes and so on but I see it specifically in the people I play D&D with in their usage of American terminology and their opinions on things. Everyone in my group turns out to use the term “Asian” to mean pretty much exclusively East-Asian people, presumably from their interaction with the overwhelmingly American internet, rather than with the overwhelming on-the-ground / official usage in the UK of the last few decades (to mean people from the Indian subcontinent) – it came up when I used the term Oriental in reference to a person, and someone told me to say “Asian” instead, which I found quite surprising and had to look up its being offensive in the USA for various historical reasons. But beyond that sort of thing it’s terms like “whiffed” to mean failed, and other specific colloquialisms. “Leery”, or “Anvilicious”. They all pronounce “warrior” in the American way, and indeed I thought a couple of them were Irish or Scottish because even their accents lean towards various American pronunciations (which align with Irish/Scottish accents). The UK has long been the 51st state don’t get me wrong, and I’m not complaining about it, but these are specific things that are not part of the general homogenised UK vernacular including its American loan-phrases, and also seem to demonstrate a marked lack of exposure to actual British slang and culture. And it seems to be spreading, rather than from TV as it previously did, this time via internet culture to the extent that there are less stereotypically internet-culture-obsessed people also using terminology that makes me wonder how they reconcile it with the standard UK usage. I suppose it’s similar to how “leet speak” of the 90s became standard terminology of the 2000s and beyond. Lol.
I know Logan is probably about 19 or so but the idea of someone in his 20s being insulated from other views is an interesting one – and an interesting point about the term “homophobe”.
And the internet as a means of forming and keeping narrow that worldview / idea of the views of others is also interesting – for me it has been the opposite in that the internet has added to the range of views I’ve seen, but also those views do seem to be siloed into clans of thought. In recent years YouTube’s algorithm has certainly tried its hardest to narrow the range of views shown by the people I watch. It’s worrying hearing my friends parrot things that sound like online clichés as they don’t sound like the selection of views from a number of opposing ones, rather the accepted jingo of the particular clan, insular views – be they reasonable or otherwise. It’s similar to the situation with Brexit – where e.g. in the multicultural offices of London it was of course unthinkable that anyone would be pro-Brexit unless they were racist, and indeed unthinkable that it could ever happen because everyone they spoke to was pro-Remain. Because within that bubble there was a particular worldview not quite in touch with the views of many in the rest of the country. Edit: not that I have am espousing an opinion either way!
But not being exposed to varying degrees of homophobia at Logan’s age? Now that is something I can’t imagine. Most millennials I imagine went through the “becoming an adult” phase during university of learning not to use the term “gay” as an insult as was so readily done at school. Or perhaps it’s a case of realising that some people actually held hateful views, rather than having just used casual homophobic slang without really thinking about it. Surely by the end of school one has already had the “woah, he’s actually genuinely prejudiced about X” realisation a few times. I guess not with David. I thought it was going to be the other way round, that David was offended by Logan’s reaction to being asked out.
I wouldn’t have believed this reaction a year ago. I always thought that in this day and age younger people wouldn’t have to worry about “coming out” to their friends. I learned otherwise from my son’s friend group. I feel bad for the kid that left, but was happy that it wasn’t the gay kid. Thanks for sharing!