In which Ish is the only gay in the village. And by village we mean family.

[ishyface]

At dinner tonight we were talking about sexuality- queerness, specifically- and my dad was actually contributing to the conversation. This is really rare for him. He's not the most prejudiced person I've ever met, but he's always been pretty... tetchy on the subject, for reasons which are partly unknown, partly tied up in his very Catholic upbringing, and partly due to him wanting very much to be a Manly Man. Tonight, however, he was positively verbose. He was talking very earnestly about how using the word "gay" as a pejorative is wrong and about how he thought he might be gay when he was a teenager and I looked at him and felt very, very proud, because it was only a few years ago that I came out to him and my mother and he told me it was a phase and that queer folks made him uncomfortable and he's come so far since then.

And then he turned to me and asked, very slowly:

"So, uh... when a gay person gives another gay person a present... what does that mean?"

I'm not sure what's better, the fact that he thinks gay people giving each other presents has some kind of dire significance on the level of the rites of the Freemasons or the fact that he thinks I'd know.