CHILDHOOD etc.
When I was about
eight or nine, at the dinner table one night, I asked my parents what a lesbian
was, having encountered the word in my reading. There was a stunned
silence except for my two older brothers and sister, who either had milk spurting
from their noses or were choking on their food. The bulging eyes and the silence
of my parents was odd because my father considered himself the font of
knowledge. Realizing that something was extraordinarily wrong, after
dinner I consulted the dictionary. The next night, to save myself further
embarrassment, I told them all, with a happy smile, that I had discovered that a
lesbian was an inhabitant of the island of Lesbos, and this resulted in the
same milk episode and stunned stares, but I felt vindicated…although I didn’t
know what vindicated meant, either.
I was a young
child…or a not-quite-old boy…when I saw these large letters on the sides of
milk cartons in our family fridge: HOMO (which, of course, stood for
HOMOgenized)…but having recently heard more-informed friends (who were blessed
with OLDER brothers who could explain things that parents wouldn’t) …and seeing
those letters and having heard those same classmates calling other guys
“Homo! Homo!” made me not want to drink any more milk…
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