POINT 2: NO SHIT

The evening didn’t end there. I had to sit through the meal. I had to pretend to have an appetite. And, actually, concentrating on the food was a good excuse for not joining the conversation, for not looking up. My nephew sat next to me, more subdued than before, looking slack-jawed and vaguely injured. In the bathroom I had contemplated apologizing for making a scene, for introducing the “I am gay” awkwardness at a family dinner, for “flaunting” my sexuality, as some would no doubt describe it later, probably as they draped an arm around their heterosexual spouse or used the event as a “teaching moment” for the products of their heterosexual union. But I quickly decided against that. I had not made a scene. I had calmly made a statement. And they deserved to feel awkward, not just the homophobic jokesters, but all the people who had enabled them by laughing or doing nothing.

I could pull my nephew aside and explain to him the wrongness of what he did, of how he behaves, of the hate-filled redneck path he was progressing down, but he would probably just stare at his feet and nod and wait for me to finish. And the truth, I knew, was that as soon as he was in the car with his parents that they would counter any talk of mine by assuring him that he did nothing wrong, that it was all in good fun, that I was just being ill-humored, overly sensitive. The lesson, if there was one, would be not to mention gay stuff in front of Kim.

My nerves settled a little as I ate. My sister-in-law, now saddled with the task of being an apologist for her asshole husband and her son, made a few attempts to interest me in conversation. I politely responded. Things were cordial. I felt calm as the realization overtook me that I had no connection to these people, no tie familial or otherwise, no obligation to ever share a meal with them again, to ever see them again. Life is full of a fair amount of shit, much of which we cannot avoid, but that’s all the more reason to insist on roses from the people who are supposed to love us. I will not accept shit.

After the meal, there was talk of where the next Christmas gathering would be. I never felt more irrelevant and more free. I handed my stepmom $50 for my meal. She said, “Put that away. It’s our treat. We hardly ever see you.”

On the way out, my sister-in-law gave me a big, showy hug, as if to say, “See, we embrace gay people.” I knew she would be embracing her son shortly, way more tightly, telling him not to feel bad. I rode back to my dad’s house with my dad and stepmom. I half expected them to say something about the incident, but they didn’t. It was in the air, but the tone seemed to be “the more quickly forgotten the better.” I knew nothing would ever be different, and there was kind of a sad comfort in that. There was permission to give up the struggle.

When I was alone in my car, I called a gay friend. I was totally calm now, almost laughing. I said, “I have to tell you this awful thing that happened at dinner.” She understood. She had seen it all before. The details varied, but the experience, the emotion, was deeply familiar. She laughed with me and said, “Good for you.”

Then I drove to my mom’s because I had to pick up her dog to watch while she was out of town. I plopped down in her armchair and told her how ill-mannered by brother’s children were. I told her how they made impolite remarks and picked ungraciously at their food, and how their parents said nothing. She winced hearing this, because they are generally better behaved around her. She does not enable assholes. Then I told her about the incident. I said, “And then I told him, ‘I am gay,’” and that — I realized just then — was the first time I had ever said those words to my mother, too. It was known, of course, but I had never said “I am gay.” I said it again. And she blinked back a tear and smiled, “Good for you.”

That’s family.

I will not accept shit.

POINT 1: I AM GAY

This is a rant. And a late-night rant. So I may regret some of it in the morning. I may owe someone an apology when I wake up. But for right now I’ll proceed with all the sensitivity and finesse of the assholes I had dinner with.

(I’ll apologize to you in advance, Amy Preacher, because I know you would not approve of this method, even if I eventually get around to saying something essentially Christian.)

The thing about assholes is that they don’t know they’re assholes, especially if they are mainly surrounded by other assholes or asshole-enablers or asshole-apologists. They are the last to realize that they’ve hurt someone’s feelings but the first to realize that their own have been hurt. What assholes lack in empathy they invariably make up for in self-pity. A Master Asshole can offend you to the core and come off like he is the one to be pitied.

My dad is a Master Asshole. He is 64.

And so is his son, my brother. He is 44.

And so — I found out tonight — is his son, my nephew. He is 15.

These aren’t the only assholes in my family. But they are the main ones. My dad and my brother are both married to asshole-enablers, women who are essentially decent and right-minded but who lack the wherewithal to tell their men folk not to be ill-mannered, obnoxious assholes, women who’ve been immersed in assholism so long they may not even recognize it, women who apparently expect so little out of life that they are happy enough to spend it with jerks and let these jerks pass on the assholism to the kids like an heirloom.

Not that women can’t be assholes in their own right. But this is not the norm in my family.

I could write a book about my dad’s career as an asshole. He was not nice to my mom — in every way you can be not nice to a woman. He was not around much when I was growing up. We used to stand on the corner waiting for him to pick us up for the weekend, and sometimes he would come and sometimes he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t pay his child support if he had some other use for the money. He regularly called my stepdad a chickenshit and implied unseemly things about my mom. He was blatantly sexist. He was a terrible racist. He used to tell me and my sister that if we ever dated a black man he would disown us; he says the same thing now to my sister’s daughter, who is actually dating a black man. He sends and instructs his other granddaughter to send text messages to my niece referring to watermelon and barbecue and “darkies” — to shame her into not loving a perfectly decent young man. She is 17.

My mom said no to this asshole after nine years of marriage. I was 4.

My brother has the same traits as my dad, only, I thought, in a milder form. He is a police officer, which is good and bad. Good because cops at least get some training in race relations and civil rights — what they can and cannot do to other human beings, regardless of what they can and cannot think about them. Bad because cops — many, certainly not all — tend to be very conservative, ex-military guys — like my brother the Marine — whose idea of an intellectual is Rush Limbaugh. Guys who think the height of wit is a joke with a punchline that Hillary Clinton is a lesbian.

My brother is a better dad than his dad was.

My dad displayed a certain pride in our kid accomplishments, but nothing like the devotion my brother shows his kids as he proudly coaches their athletic teams and puts money away for college. My brother has something of a heart, a little empathy. He wrote a letter once to my dad berating him for not picking us up as we waited on the corner, for not being a better father. My dad was shocked. He apparently thought his good intentions had obscured all his bad deeds — that we hadn’t noticed. He asked me if my brother was right because HE sure didn’t remember things that way. Unable to lie or to hurt him, I carefully changed the subject.

My dad would give me the shirt off his back now, but I’d find little warmth in his shirt. I’ve never been one to say “well, he’s nice TO ME.” The measure is not me; it’s everyone. Neither would my brother, who is nevertheless so much like him. My all-forgiving sister would find warmth in the shirt — until he broke her heart by being such a racist bastard to her little girl.

Another sign of my brother’s decency. One Christmas years ago he cornered me after he’d had a few drinks and — in tears — apologized to me for calling me “one-eye” when we were growing up. I was very moved. I had mainly forgotten that. But when he made himself repeat the derogatory nickname — to show me that he understood the hurtfulness of it, something he could say with glee as a mean-spirited boy but could hardly force from his lips as a repentant adult — it brought back a lot of emotion. I had not thought of that ridicule in years, but it had stayed with him; it had haunted and shamed him. I found myself hugging him and telling him it was OK. And it was not the usual trick where the Master Asshole does something bad to you and himself ends up being the object of concern and pity. It was a genuine tenderness between two people making a pact to be good to each other from here on out.

Or so I thought. I was 30.

That night has stayed with me. It has haunted me. I don’t see my brother very often, but when I do I always think of his tears wetting my shoulder, and the memory helps me to not completely give up on him when he is saying something racist or sexist or — tonight’s theme — homophobic.

Enter Asshole No. 3: my brother’s son. You might think it’s harsh to refer to a 15-year-old as an “asshole,” and maybe it is, but remember that I’m playing by the assholes’ rules tonight. And who’s to say at what point your assholism is a ward of your parents and at what point it becomes your own responsibility. Do assholes split such fine hairs? I think not.

The point of our all being in the same room, the same expensive restaurant to be exact, was a belated Christmas gathering. My dad was footing the bill. I hadn’t spent too much time with my brother’s two younger children since they had become awkward, gangly teens with braces. My brother doesn’t socialize with his eldest child because, having worked as a stripper, she is obviously a “whore” and would be a bad influence on his two younger children, which he and his wife obnoxiously refer to as their “core” family (some “Focus on the Family” bullshit that they picked up at “church.”) I will note here, however, that the “whore” is the only one of his children who has ever sent me a thank-you note for a gift. She has sent me several, in fact, all exceedingly gracious.

Not having been around the other two recently, I was taken aback by their terrible manners. At first I was willing to write it off as the self-centeredness of youth: talking on a cell phone at the table, picking at their braces, reaching across the table, not saying thank-you or please, openly joking about my dad being fat, commenting on physical attributes of other restaurant patrons (“He’s so short”; “Did you see her mustache?”), being generally uncivilized and unappreciative. My nephew took two bites of his salad, and when my dad told him to eat up he curled his lip and complained that the salad was like “the kind you’d get out of a bag at Wal-Mart.” This was a $10 side salad, but even if it had cost $1.50, if I had made a remark like that as a kid, my ass would have been out the door and in the car so fast that I wouldn’t know what had hit me. (It would have been my mom hitting me). My 14-year-old niece ordered a $40 steak and lobster dinner, ate about a fourth of the steak and picked at the lobster, complaining that she didn’t know it would be “texturey.” Again, ass in the car, and my mom would have fished out a notepad and pen from her purse so that I could write my grandparents a lengthy apology for being a spoiled asshole at dinner. But my brother is not his mother’s son. He is his father’s, and not a word was said to the kids.

Nevertheless, as I said, I might have been willing to overlook most of that as the general assholism of selfish youth, had it not been for the homophobia flowing like wine. It started off small — several joking references to my dad’s male neighbor as his “boyfriend” (because the neighbor is a widower and spends a lot of time with my dad, who is retired). This seemed in good enough fun — they probably picked it up from my stepmom. Then references to kids at school being gay. Or teachers. Then Hillary. Then the gay guy who does my sister-in-law’s nails. Then the “It” in their lunchroom who “might be a guy, might be a girl, but it’s gross.” On the way to the restaurant my brother played some macho guy radio show where the gag was that the guy had a “gay” dog because it showed no interest in mating with females (I was tempted to say “No interest in mating? Maybe the dog is an old hetero married fart,” but I thought if I said something like that the straight people would be offended. Seriously. I thought that. Because I wasn’t in asshole mode until later.) I’m not kidding, if I counted one gay reference, 99 percent of them in a negative light, even though “fag” and “dyke” were never used, I counted 25. It seeped into my veins and began a low boil, almost unbeknownst to me.

And then my nephew — whose assholism, it was now clear, had exceeded the excuse of youth — let loose with a story that began, “This gay guy in Philadelphia,” and he started to act all fey and imitate the voice and puff out his lips, while everyone at the table laughed. Before I was fully aware of what I was doing, I was tapping him on the shoulder and saying his name: “Brian.” He looked me full in the face. And I said to him with surprising calm, “Do you know that I am gay?” He stared at me, stunned. The table grew dead silent. It felt like the whole restaurant was silent. How loudly had I said that? He answered, “Yes.” And I said, “I am gay” — the first time I have ever spoken those three words to anyone in my family — “And I don’t appreciate the gay jokes.” He said, “Sorry,” still stunned. My brother did not say a word — he of the one-eyed Christmas regrets sat stone silent (alas, that was the master asshole trick, after all, and not something lasting and tender for me). No one said a word. I wished my mom were there so someone’s ass would be out the door and in the car right then, preferably the whole family’s. Then my brother’s wife, the asshole-enabler, the asshole apologist, said, “He’s truly sorry. It wasn’t anything personal.”

I sat there for a moment looking at her, thinking “nothing personal?” Then I excused myself to the bathroom, where I choked up with tears and wished I had my phone so I could call a gay friend, my real family, and share this ridiculous story that was stupidly making me cry. Or to ask them to come pick me up. To put my ass in the car. To flee. It crossed my mind that a female relative might come look for me, offer some lame condolence for having been insulted or even for being a poor lesbian (“You know nowadays they really can’t help it, they say”), but no one did. I pulled myself together and washed my hands a couple of times. Then I went back to the table. The food had arrived in my absence and people were eating and passing things and chatting away as though nothing had happened. I was 41.

RICK'S IPQ

My friend Rick, whose uncanny likeness you see at right, has agreed to answer the Infamous Proust Questionnaire for me.
Here are his delightful answers:

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

There is no lowest depth: no matter how bad, there is worse. But since any suffering is compounded knowing that it is inflicted by other people, I’ll say war.

Where would you like to live?

Assuming that I had no problem learning the languages — an entirely unreasonable assumption — I’d like to live in Norway at least until the dark winters drove me mad. But the summer climbing season would be worth one of those winters or two, and I could always slip off to Spain to climb in the sun a bit. I’d also like to live for a year or so in Prague. I’ve met some really cool people from the Czech Republic and that must be one of the world’s best cities. When I’ve finally had enough of winter, I’d go to Thailand.

What is your idea of earthly happiness?

To live in a slightly dilapidated village that is entirely owned by an old coot who hates rich people and won’t let any in. Instead the place is filled with bohemian types who are all into arts and books and stay up all night drinking coffee and arguing eloquently even over the trivial things.

To what faults do you feel most indulgent?

Many years back, The Atlantic, on the conceit that the old-fashioned sins don’t get the advertising support of the more modern indulgences, hired Madison Avenue firms to write ads for the ten deadly sins. For sloth, the ad showed a lush Garden of Eden with the slogan: SLOTH If Adam and Eve had been slothful, we would still be here. Now sloth encompasses a bit more than I can indulge, but I’ll take idleness.

Who are your favorite heroes of fiction?

I’m not sure I can separate my fondness for a character from my fondness for the novel, but here are three: Dorothea Brooke from George Eliot’s “Middlemarch”, Lily Bart from Edith Wharton’s “House of Mirth”, and Ignatius Reilly from John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces”.

Who are your favorite characters in history?

I’ve always been very taken by Emilie du Chatelet. After all, her parents gave her fencing lessons as a child. Pity that more 18th Century French families didn’t do this as it might have improved French letters considerably. In any case, Emilie turned out a remarkable woman and could hold her own with the intellects of her day. Among other things, she made a noteworthy contribution to physics. I’d much rather invite her to a dinner party than her companion, Voltaire.

Who are your favorite painters?

In college it would have been the surrealists. These days I’m rather less enamored of them directly but favor some of the artists and movements that interacted with them such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. I also like a lot of the abstract expressionists and have been interested recently in Mark Rothko. If I ever get to Houston, I’ll go see his chapel.

Your favorite musician?

John Coltrane. He played during what I consider to be the most outstanding era of jazz, and he worked with some remarkable talents. Much unforgettable music resulted.

The quality you most admire in a man?

Femininity. It is the most general corrective to the more usual male faults.

The quality you most admire in a woman?

Wit.

Your favorite virtue?

Kindness. Other virtues have their moments, but it is hard to top kindness.

Your favorite occupation?

Rock Climbing. I might get too hot, too cold, thirsty, or get stuck up high with thousands of feet to descend as it gets dark. But I never get bored. I’ve been climbing more than a hundred days a year for more than a decade and plan on doing the same for the next decade.

Who would you have liked to be?

There was a Hungarian born mathematician who was really into math. He decided against a university position because of all the distractions of faculty, students, and having to actually live some place. So Paul Erdos became an itinerant genius and left everything about his life to other people except the math. So somebody would take him to the airport, pick him up there, take him home and feed him and give him a bed. Then he would spend a few days at a university or a conference doing math with any number of other mathematicians. He had so many collaborators that every mathematician now has an Erdos number. Erdos’s own number is 0 for being himself. Everybody who ever published a paper with him has an Erdos number of 1. People who published with any of those have an Erdos number of 2. And so on. It is a degree of separation thing with Erdos in the center. It would be a remarkable thing to have that kind of talent and be that consumed by it.

What is your most marked characteristic?

Other people would be far better situated to answer that.

What do you most value in your friends?

Well, to look at them I’m not sure what they might have in common. Perhaps the best answer is temperament.

What is your principle defect?

Again, it would be better to ask others, but perhaps a lack of perseverance. I’m a little less focused than Erdos.

What is your favorite color?

Teal. Although on some days it would be fuscia.

What is your favorite flower?

I’ve seen some amazing orchids, but there are so many of them, I don’t know which one I like best. The tiger lily is good.

What is your favorite bird?

Hummingbird.

Who are your favorite prose writers?

For novels, I like best many of the 19th Century and early 20th Century writers. These days I read much more non-fiction that fiction. Three very good writers who write for The Atlantic and elsewhere are William Langewiesche, Eric Schlosser, and Christopher Hitchens. Langewiesche is also an excellent speaker.

Who are your favorite poets?

I’m not sure I read enough poetry to be claiming favorites. But shall we say Allen Ginsberg and a couple of his 19th Century influences, Walt Whitman and William Blake?

Who are your favorite composers?

Sergei Prokofiev is probably my favorite overall.

What are your favorite names?

Evocative names. But not silly names with concocted spellings.

What is it you most dislike?

The illiberal and self-righteous particularly when they are indignant which they usually are.

What historical figures do you most despise?

All the egotistical conquerors from before Alexander III through Genghis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte, to Adolf Hitler and beyond.

What event in military history do you most admire?

The evacuation of Dunkirk.

What reforms do you most admire?

The abolition of slavery is hard to top. Universal suffrage was a worthy one too.

What natural gift would you most like to possess?

To be able to write with grace and ease, or maybe the sort of athletic skill that would further my climbing.

How would you like to die?

Old and suddenly.

What is your present state of mind?

Same as it ever was.

What is your motto?

Don’t believe everything you think.