Vaughn R. Demont's Blog, page 5

This Title Is False (Fiction/Non-Fiction Story)

This Title Is False

by Vaughn Demont

 

My mother has told me repeatedly that every lie I am ever going to tell in my life, she has already told, so there was no point in trying to slip one past her. I never took it as a challenge until I was in my teens. I was a terrible liar. One stray feeling of tension and my delivery would be screwed by fits of hysterical laughter that claimed my breath. My mother quickly picked up on this tell and set to changing confrontations to interrogations.

She would begin by invoking my full name, to inform me that I was in trouble and had about two minutes to come up with a story. The interrogation would be in the living room or bedroom, someplace that was undeniably her turf, and she would take a rigid stance, fold her arms, and commence with the opening evidence of the conflict, all of which would culminate with the inevitable, “And don’t you lie to me.” I’d stumble through the first four or five words of the rehearsed story in my head and invariably I would guffaw like a drunk and continue laughing even as additional days and later weeks were piled onto my sentence. I would hear my full name said and I would stifle a snicker as the tension raised, wondering what I had to cover myself on. I couldn’t even tell the truth without giggling.

Like any skill, lying required practice and study. You have to adopt a philosophy, a style, a rational filter. Who gets lied to, who gets the truth? I learned the various species of lie: the white (“I’ll be home at six”), the whopper (“Yeah, I’ve got a condom”), the half-truth (“That was the best I’ve ever had… with you”), the omission of detail (“This is my… roommate”), the bald-face (“It’s not what it looks like”), the plea bargain (“Ok, I took the car but I’m not the one who totaled it”), there were too many. Lying, like any sport, requires specialization. Just like pitchers who do either off-speed or throw heat, you had to find your niche in the game and run with it. You also need to know who to throw to, and who to just walk. Anyone you’ll be maintaining a long term relationship with will require honesty about ninety percent of the time, with nothing higher than a white lie. Anything higher tends to get complicated. A total stranger, however? Lie your fucking ass off.

I found ease in the detailed lie. Numbers, names, places, dates, times, I would pack in as much as I could.  The more work it would take to verify, the more likely the person you’re lying to will simply give you the benefit of the doubt and just let it go. This helped a lot when I was working as a grocery store cashier. With long orders to scan and bag, it would all go by faster if I would start talking to the customers and telling various stories that would make me seem a little more interesting, but not outrageously so. I’d talk about the time I met Tom Cruise in an elevator and got to shake his hand and that he was pretty cool in real life. I’d talk about my prowess in baking brownies that were essentially bricks of fudge that I would sell to the women I knew on campus during their “special time.” I’d joke about my sister and her fiancée and how she had him on a short leash. The only real truths in any of this was that I’d heard someone mention they thought they’d seen Tom Cruise once, that I could bake brownies if I had four hours to kill, and that my sister was engaged at the time. I got rather popular, actually. People would remember me and come back through my line on later occasions just to catch up.

I’d come a long way. I’d started out as a four year old eating a cookie I shouldn’t have taken and saying I never took it, even though my shirt was covered in crumbs and my tongue was pocked with tan congealed clumps that dribbled out onto my lower lip, waiting to be wiped off onto a shirt sleeve. My mother looked down at me for a moment, no indulgent smile, not thinking it’s cute or adorable that I was a mischievous little devil, just a look, the knowledge that her child has strayed from the path of honesty and lied to her for the first time. This is where it changed for her. This is when every word from my mouth that followed after would be scrutinized, examined, tested for veracity.

And now at sixteen I was selling what I felt to be high quality bullshit to the general public. I was considering a career in law to back up my writing.

It never occurred to me, however, that perhaps the mother of my sister’s fiancée might happen through my line one day and I’d have no idea who she was. She listened to my stories with interest and recognized my last name on my tag, and later told her son that the cashier at the store was talking about how he was whipped. He in turn had a few words for my sister, who in turn would had quite a few words for me, and then she informed me that the sole reason I had any interest in writing at all was that it was all lies.

It was right about then that I took up lying as a challenge. I would start lying about things that didn’t even need covering up, just to see if I could get away with it. After that I’d go bigger, to make myself not seem so ordinary. You would think that I’d go with something heroic, say my family was rich or that my absent father was a U.S. Attorney or that my second cousin was in Pearl Jam. Heroic lies are for the guy you met in the airport lounge, where there’s zero upkeep. Heroic lies only get you limited attention and phantom envy and the eventual need to prove it. The other end of the spectrum is the tragic lie, where you make your life seem worse to contrast your relatively sheltered existence. They’re easy to maintain, and they reward you with pity and sympathy. When you speak people care what you say.

“Yeah, I drink every now and then. I like vodka, but only Grey Goose.” I’ve never had more than wine.

“Yeah, did acid a bit, really didn’t like it, but I’ve done it the prerequisite five times to be considered legally insane. Heavy shit called Mad Hatter. Ever done it?” Most I ever did was speed, but that was a drug for nerds.

“I’ve got an identical twin named Gwyn. Lives with my Dad down in North Carolina and works at a supermarket. Sometimes when he visits I bribe him into taking my shifts at work and no one’s the wiser.” No twin brother, and I ended up in a conference with management wanting to clear up the rumor that someone else was restocking the frozen section. Every now and then, though, I just wished I had someone to stand in for me.

“Did I ever tell you about that party I went to a couple months ago, got drunk, and woke up next to a girl in college? She goes to Auburn but she used to go here. I didn’t tell you about her? Five ten, black hair, takes karate, allergic to peanuts? Anyway, she called me up yesterday, she was at class and took a kick hard in the stomach and had a miscarriage. I had a daughter.” I’ve since found out that the sex of the fetus couldn’t be determined after two months, but these were high school guys I was telling this to preemptively counter any claims about my sexual history. It didn’t matter anyway. I’ve never been with a woman.

Lying stopped being cute.

Lying became a full time job, remembering the personas I’d created and which were shown to which people. Who’d heard which stories, which jokes, who knew the happy and engaged me and who knew the traumatized recovering drug addict me and who knew whichever other mask I had felt like creating one day out of boredom for someone who unwittingly became a part of my life. Variations were only for set groups, work would have the energetic and gregarious persona, somewhat mischievous but always helpful. My friends were split into two sets, the ones who were well-adjusted got the persona closest to actually being me, only edited down, the others getting the smoldering wreck I’d created. My parents knew me as nothing more than official notices from school and occasional chats from someone they knew who’d go through my line at work. Other than that I was a shadowy figure who dwelt in their house.

There was a girl at school named Katie who was the younger sister of someone I knew at work. I talked with her every now and then and I’d heard from a few people that she thought I was cute.

I’d been spending the last week and a half trying not to think about my friend Bryan and that time during the summer when it was ninety-nine degrees and he took his shirt off and his skin was slick and shiny with sweat. I didn’t like where my mind was going. I didn’t want to be one of those people the guys in the locker room would talk about, that word they would spit out with such force and hatred. “Fag.”

So I bought a rose and went to see Katie during her lunch period, gave her the flower, and asked her out. My words were carefully chosen, delivery was smooth, I’d picked out the clothes for the moment, I’d played it out about five times in my head before I even went through with it. Everything was rehearsed. I walked to her, handed her the rose, and told her that I would be honored if she would consider going out with me. I then kissed her hand and told her I didn’t need an answer immediately, and that she would know where to find me when she made her decision. Then I walked out.

Even I almost believed it.

She came to see me later in the day and told me she wasn’t ready for a relationship. Three days later I saw her walking down the hall to her English class holding another guy’s hand. When I got home that night I let myself jerk off while thinking about Bryan. I told my parents I was shaving.

 

 

“I want to move out.”

I was seventeen and my parents were tired of not knowing where I was going or when I was getting home. I’d gotten caught taking some loose change and stealing of any degree was not going to be permitted. I didn’t want to go live at my friend Bryan’s house, actually, even though his Mom had offered. I just figured it was best to make a preemptive strike. It was dark outside, I was seated on the floor looking down while my parents sat off to the right, a united front, already emptying weeks of pent-up lecture, all of it mostly phasing into a dull buzz.

It was an idle threat. It was meant to throw them off guard and maybe arrange a bit of plea bargaining and make it so that I could reduce my sentence to a simple grounding. Then I’d just do my time and set up another mask for myself, maybe a good and earnest worker who’d try to be honest more. It’d even stick for a week or so.

“Fine.”

Instead my face went slack and my hands and feet felt cold, my throat feeling tight and my shirt feeling like sandpaper against my skin. There weren’t any words left.

They were throwing me out.

Two words managed to traverse my dry and rough throat, ride a soft sputter of breath, be shaped by a quiver of my lips, emerge cracked and broken, “I’m gay.”

It didn’t seem the wisest thing to say when my parents were threatening me with expulsion from the house, but I didn’t have anything left.

But I remember my mother taking her interrogator stance, standing firm, arms folding, looking down toward me, and then taking in the words as they came out, and firing right back, “No you’re not!” She knew at any moment I would smirk or titter or look away or clench my fist tight, digging in the fingernails to concentrate on the pain, or grit my teeth and time my breathing, or close my eyes into wrinkled lines and it would all be over.

She never expected tears. Or choked sobs.

I still wonder how much she wanted to hear me laugh right then.

After an hour and a half she sent me to my room.

I toned it down after that.

I wish I could say I stopped lying, that I had some grand epiphany, but there’s always going to boredom in the airport lounge, late assignments that need an excuse, fights with a boyfriend that need to be contained, bland meals that need to be complimented,  stories that need that extra bit of spice to squeeze in that moral. Honesty is what gives my life credibility. The lie gives it meaning.

Close Your Eyes and Lean (CNF Story)

Advisory: This story contains mature content.

Close Your Eyes and Lean

by Vaughn Demont

The body of my last relationship’s not even cold and here I am, ducking away from the wind and banging my knuckles onto an aluminum screen door that’s going to make my hand sting, giving Mr. Right Now twenty more seconds before I exhale hard and just go. I can hear his dogs barking, reminding me why I’m a cat person.

I had to go behind the back of the house, according to his instructions. The house is small, one story, next to the railroad tracks and the high school with buses pulling in. I see walkers along Gilliard Drive and remember hating that road because of the wind off the lake, and as I stand on the wrecked shag carpet sample doormat on the small staircase to the back door with the six coats of paint showing, I already know that they’re looking at me, knowing why I’m here. I see the sign, “Deliveries in Rear,” written on cardboard and stuck in the front window. I would normally at least chuckle at the pun.

 

If his boyfriend answers the door, I’ll just say I’ve got a certified letter for someone who obviously doesn’t live there. It’s a believable contingency: I’m scruffy enough and my backpack can pass for a messenger bag and there are a few manila envelopes inside that I could easily say are priorities. He’d only have to buy it long enough for me to make a timely exit, and then let the cheating boyfriend handle the problem.

 

I tell myself that this is not the start of a new relationship. I don’t need my mother—the relationship barometer—telling me exactly how it’s going to end, like she did with Richard (age), Thomas (cheating), Jack (walkout), Frank (rebound), and finally Chris (500 miles), and being accurate every time.

 

Screw this.

 

Just go home and do it yourself. This isn’t about him.

 

I roll my shoulders and wedge my headphones in a little more securely.

 

My standards should be higher than simple distance.

 

The door opens, he invites me in. I take off my jacket and hang it on the chair at the kitchen table. The little TV is on in the background playing some old episode of Saved By The Bell and I automatically search the catalog of my brain for various trivia on Mark-Paul Gosselar, if only to amuse myself while I take out my headphones and stuff them and the MP3 player in my jacket pocket and sit down. Cups and dishes and plates on the counter, newspaper spread on the table, dead clock on the wall, smell of the dogs and always the wind outside. Nothing in here’s clean. The lights are off, just stray light through the faded curtains. I’m thankful for that.

 

I can’t remember his name.

 

I don’t really care, either, and I wonder if that should scare me.

 

He sits at the table, hair brush-cut with a little more pepper than salt, his build a bit squat, wearing a dirty white tee and sweats. I tell myself it’s only because it’s 7:30am. His face is a bit hangy, eyes tired. I think of a bulldog on Quaaludes.

 

“Now, you know I have a boyfriend,” he said. “But nothing’s going on between us. He’s been playing around himself, you know.”

 

His dogs are still barking, smaller breeds trying to vault themselves over the plywood that barricades them from the kitchen and the bedroom, which are the only two rooms I really care about right now. For a second, I believe they’re barking because his boyfriend’s home.

 

I’m supposed to get on the bus; instead I’m in a house talking to a guy I wouldn’t take home if I were drunk, knowing that in the next five minutes, I’m going to be naked on a bed.

 

I don’t even know what kind of small talk I’m making; I’m just wishing his damned dogs would just shut up.

 

“So, you know,” he said. His eyes were on me—my shoulder, to be specific. “We have to be, you know,” he drummed his fingers slowly on the table with one hand. “Discreet.”

 

“Yeah. Okay.” Like I’m going to brag that I slept with this guy.

 

It starts with a simple kiss and I close my eyes and try to think of someone else but his hands are cold and his face unshaved, sending tactile tremors into my fantasy of Ewan MacGregor and screwing in the rain. The rest is awkward groping before heading into the bedroom. I don’t want to spend too much time thinking on whether I’ve ever been the Other Man. As he unbuckles my pants, I tell myself I’m not cheating.

 

I can always tell if there’s relationship potential because I have two modes that are reserved for post-sex: Conversational and Scared Rabbit.

 

Chris and I would usually talk about Buffy The Vampire Slayer and the merits of Japanese voice actors.

 

When this guy leaves to get me a towel so I can clean up, I know there’s nothing with him ‘cause all I want to do is grab my clothes and dash out the back door and down the railroad tracks.

 

Scared Rabbit.

 

Fuck, how can it take five minutes to get a towel?

 

I’m putting on my socks and my shirt and saving the underwear and pants until I can get the towel and wash off and grab my jacket and run like Hell.

 

I’m thinking about calling Chris and confessing, even though there’s nothing to confess.

 

“Alright.” He handed me the towel. “Here you go. That was really good, you know.”

 

I don’t want to talk.

 

“Yeah. Been a while.”

Shut up. Just shut up.

 

“What? How long?”

 

I try to decide whether he means the general act or just that particular position.

 

“Two—two and a half years, I think.”

 

He looked at me a moment and grinned enough to show yellowing teeth. “And I thought I’d gone a while since Sunday.”

Give the slight chuckle, enough to dismiss it.

 

I wipe off and yank up my underwear and jeans, thankful my shoes are slip-ons.

 

“You gotta head out, huh? Me too, my boyfriend’s—” He sighs. “His mother needs to be looked after for a few hours and his sister’s going to Oswego and…”

I’ve tuned him out, getting my jacket on, tightening up my hat. I see a trash can flying down the road adjacent to the tracks.

 

“You sure you don’t want a ride? Windy out there.”

 

“Nah, I’d prefer to walk. Good exercise.” It’s the usual excuse.

 

“Well, I hope we can do this again, sometime. Just IM me if you see me on, ok?”

 

“Alright.”

And I hear him close the door behind me as I step into the wind.

 

My mother’s going to be sitting at her desk when I get back, playing solitaire like she does every morning. When I get home, she’s going to want to talk about how little sleep she got the night before and what she learned from her sleep apnea forum, but then she’s going to realize that I’m not supposed to be there.

 

She’s going to ask, “What are you doing home?” The most important thing to do is answer the question before she can ask it, cut down the chitchat time so I can get upstairs to the mouthwash.

 

But, I’m going to want to drop my backpack and take off my hat and take out my headphones and walk to her and say, “Mom? I just slept with a guy and I don’t even know his name.”

 

“Mom? I just slept with a guy who’s older than your husband.”

 

“Mom? I just slept with a guy who’s involved with another guy.”

 

“Mom? I just slept with a guy simply to sleep with a guy because I haven’t gotten any in two years.”

 

“Mom? I just slept with a guy and I feel like I cheated on Chris.”

 

“Mom? I just slept with a guy so I could feel needed.”

 

“Mom? Am I a bad person?”

 

But I won’t.

 

“I missed the bus.” That’s the answer. Simple and believable. It’ll give me an hour. Then, I’ll go up and check my e-mail and make sure I set my stealth settings on IM so that I won’t have to worry about seeing this guy ever again. I’ll miss my first class of the morning, but I can live with it. It’s what I get for registering for an 8am class.

 

Pace is good and steady. I reach up and adjust one of the headphones with my finger out of habit. Something by Rise Against is playing because I need anger in my ears to distract me from “since Sunday” because even if you can’t stand the guy, it’s nice to entertain that you are the Other Man instead of One of Many.

 

The wind gusts again and I feel the sting of the wind chill for the first time this morning. Left hand retreats into the sleeve to hold the player while the right thrusts into the pocket.

 

And comes out with a $20 bill.

 

He paid me.

 

I break into a run.

 

I need to take a shower.

 

I need to get the taste of him out of my mouth.

 

The wind gives me a shove back, my icy fingers thawing enough to let it catch the twenty and carry it off somewhere behind me. It’s a straight shot here to home. I’m running blind.

Hi, I’m Ace

The first time I suspected it was when I felt… *off* about watching an episode of How I Met Your Mother. In it, the protagonist, Ted, and his new girlfriend are discussing when they’re finally going to take their relationship “all the way”, as it were, and both confess their relative “dry spells”. They start with just “five”, leaving the rest to the imagination. Ted immediately feels relieved that he’s not alone. After all, how *embarrassing* it is to go without sex for five *months*! And then his girlfriend confesses she didn’t mean two months, she meant two…

And then there’s a smash cut to Ted’s friends all saying in complete shock, and in perfect unison, “FIVE YEARS?!?”

At that point it had been 6 years for me, about. Maybe 7. And I suddenly felt like I wasn’t allowed to call myself a man, especially not a gay man, because every gay man I’d seen in movies, video games, television shows, and in books, was either hypersexual, a flaming stereotype, or a pervy creeper. In any case, they were getting it regularly. Even the older gays on Grace and Frankie were getting it almost every night.

And there I was, in a committed relationship, co-habitating, and I wasn’t having sex. At all.

I had a lot of backups, excuses. Dry spells held out for about 6 months. Depression kills libidos. We didn’t have the money for the stuff we needed. I just wasn’t in the mood. The list goes on, but suddenly I felt like there was something *wrong* with me. How could I call myself gay when I didn’t want to have sex? People marched and fought and sued and *died* so that gays like myself could be with a guy sexually and not worry about getting killed and/or thrown in jail and/or put into “conversion therapy”.

Well, people did all that so it wouldn’t happen *as often*.

How It Happened

As it usually does with me, it came out through characters, creative ideas, stories and what not. I’ve been on hiatus, writing-wise, but a creative mind needs an outlet, and as a result I threw myself into tabletop roleplaying games, where my love of world-building and character development started. I’d been running a Star Wars game, set in the Old Republic (before the movies, for non-SW nerds) because it gave an open canon to play with, plenty of source material from the comics and Bioware games. It was fun, then it wasn’t, and I started a new game with new players, friends from college and online, and I had to create an NPC to keep everyone on the right track, since everyone was playing a Jedi.

So, I made Rannoch, a privileged sort from a noble house who left it behind to become a Jedi and a diplomatic liaison. I worked through his life, backstory, hobbies, music he liked, whole nine yards. Like most of my NPCs and characters now, he was male-inclined, but without thinking another trait found its way in:

Rannoch is asexual.

I went with it because I figured it wouldn’t come up. Jedi are supposed to be celibate and all that, like paladins with laser swords, putting morality and virtue above personal wants. For a while I thought I was just conveniently making him ace so I wouldn’t have to deal with any party romances.

Because pretty much everyone in the group is a writer, a couple of them would write long, winding journal entries, or write out scenes that happened during downtime to further develop their characters, and some of those scenes would require Rannoch to make an appearance. During a long stretch of downtime, I wrote that Rannoch was in a bit of a mood, down, sad, listening to the Star Wars equivalent of Morrissey kind of times, and it occurred to me that this was because he’d broken up with someone.

Naturally, my brain went into overdrive, needing to figure out what the relationship was, and why it ended, and subconsciously I began editing in details from my own relationship. Rannoch loved who he was with, but always felt it was a relationship that was incomplete, that he lacked what his lover wanted, so he broke it off feeling it was better for both of them.

That planted the seed for me, the word “asexual” to start going around in my head, lurking, examining, questioning. I always assumed that if you were ace that you were chaste your whole life, that even masturbation was a repellant activity, and that you were too socially awkward to even imagine having a stable relationship, which, I thought, asexuals didn’t want anyway.

Yes, I know that those assumptions were wrong.

It ended up being Todd from BoJack Horseman that finally got me to that moment where I tweeted out a thread that ended with “I’m ace.” See why there needs to be more representation of the LGBTIQA+ community in media than just Ls, Gs, and token Ts?

“Oh. I’ve ALWAYS Known That About You!”

The one part of the coming out experience that I never liked, mostly coming from my coming out as gay, was the sheer amount of people who’d pull muscles patting themselves on the back for “knowing before I did”. The first words my mom said to me when I came out were “No you’re not!” but now she tells people that she had suspected since I was three or four. (Do not say because of the sailor suit I wore every day, Mom. You were the one who kept putting me in it!) Friends I had in high school, social groups, people I knew in college, had “known the moment they met me”, yet the LGBT organization that prided itself on its infalliable gaydar had clocked me as a “strong ally” and even when I kissed a guy in front of them? They just figured I was super-secure with my masculinity. I was passing without trying to pass, stealth without stealth mode through most of college.

It’s only now, after a lot of soul-searching and introspection and review of my high school and college years, that I was an ace kid who thought he was a gay kid and just wanted to finish college without any complications like a relationship that would put my life on hold. Flirtations were kept at that level, anything serious was usually an LDR online that I wouldn’t have to worry about the physical or anything else getting in the way of a full course load and a 30 hour/week part time job. I didn’t even know that ace was a thing, I just thought I was overbooked and overworked. When sex finally did happen, I was more fulfilling curiosity, and curing myself of the dread blight of virginity at the ripe old age of 19. (Thanks fragile masculinized sexual behavior gender norms!)

Masturbation was more of a chore than anything else, and guys were more often than not just that to me, a masturbatory aid. When penetrative sex happened, it was, honestly, a little boring. The guy on top of me would be grunting and sweating and pounding away and I felt… Well, honestly I was wondering how long it was going to take so I could get to sleep and get him to shut up about how we’re never having sex. I loved the guys, sure (or at least liked them enough to feel I owed it to them. Thanks gay sexual relationship expectation norms!), but I could take or leave the sex. I wrote it off more times than not on being a Scorpio.

So when I realized that I was ace (or specifically, a homoromantic asexual), it was that sudden “Ohhhh…..” moment that realizing I was into guys wasn’t just quite. When I came out to my fiance, he cut me off three sentences in with “You’re asexual.” I responded, “I’m coming out to *myself* as much as I coming out to you.” To his credit, he apologized, and let me finish. He’d suspected for a time, but never pushed it, let me come to it on my own, and I love him for that.

Friends came after, some thanking me for trusting them with that “truth”, and a couple others responded, “Oh, I’ve known that about you since college.”

I know it was meant as an “Hey, it’s okay, you’re still the same person I became friends with, so it’s no big.” I know that.

But, yes, part of me wanted to scream at them that if they’d known I was ace for 14 years before *I* did, maybe they could have let me in on it? Jumpstarted the journey? I try not to go too far down that rabbit hole, that way lies madness, but I’ll give a little advice: Don’t respond with how you knew before they did if it’s going to come off in any way as self-congratulatory. Their coming out is about them, not you, and patting yourself on the back for your vigilant eye is not going to help them in their raw and vulnerable moment.

Feeling Ill-Equipped

The song “Wonder” by Adventure Club was on heavy rotation during my time of introspection, the lines, “You were after nothing I could give… And I know I should have held you closer, and I know I should have treated you better, in a perfect world. But we’re not always, what we promise to be” would always rattle me a bit. It’s a break-up song, and when you’re in a relationship and identifying strongly to the lyrics of said break-up song, it’s easy to assume that this will sound the death knell. After all, relationships come with a lot of built-in assumptions. (Yes, I know not every relationship runs this list. Blame romance novels, movies, and television for these cultural expectations.)

Step 1. Meet

Step 2. Date (Repeat as Desired)

Step 3. Kiss (Repeat as Desired)

Step 4. Sex (Repeat as Required)

Step 5. Get serious/move in/cohabitate and/or get engaged/married

Step 6. Work on the “American Dream” or a place to live and/or a family.

I’d come out to my fiance as ace, and I was nervous because I figured without Step 4, or at least the promise of it, he’d try to let me down in that non-confrontational Ohio fashion and soon after that would be it. He’s been supportive, we’ve had a frank discussion about it, and we’re both good, but there’s always that wriggling splinter in the back of my brain whispering that this relationship, any relationship an ace person has with a non-ace person is doomed. (Thanks depression!) Everything else has gone well, we watch movies together, cuddle on the couch, go on dinner dates and actually talk like we’re best friends as well as each other’s guy, but there’s that doubt now, wondering if it’ll truly be okay in the future. (Seriously, fuck you, depression)

“You’ll Always Be Gay to Them”

I haven’t heard about an ace kid being put in the hospital because some straight guy suffered from “ace panic” and needed to prove he was a real man by beating the shit out a guy that had no interest in having sex with him. When I was left beaten and bleeding on the side of a road in high school, attacked by 6 anonymous boys who pummeled me because “I don’t know, you were there”, it wasn’t because I didn’t want to have sex with them or their girlfriends. The worst damage my asexuality has done, given what I remember, is male friends needing justification about their desirability. (I still believe that I didn’t want to fuck any of them because they were my friends. Sorry GFY afcienados.) I’d been absued, beaten, been fired from jobs and been given the “You see… this is a *small town*…” speech more times than I can count for identifying as gay, and I refused to go back in the closet.

And then I had my “holy shit, I’m ace” moment and soon after felt like a coward. Come out as gay and to your religious family members you’re a sinner who’s going to burn in Hell. Come out as ace and those same people will congratulate you on being “half-cured” or compliment you on how your celibate lifestyle is closer to God.

A friend was kind enough to slap me upside the head and remind me that “it’s not the fucking Oppression Olympics”.

It’s easy to say, but when I was in high school, trying to make yourself come across as fucked up as possible was the way to be cool and accepted. Outsider status was coveted. You didn’t just have a girlfriend in Canada, you have a girlfriend that got an abortion. You weren’t just abused, you were a beaten, broken, and bloody mess. You weren’t depressed, you were Borderline or Manic-Depressive or a diagnosed sociopath. Whoever’s life sucked more was the person who “won”. You couldn’t blame them for being an asshole because of how fucked up their homelife was, when in reality it was just a bunch of working-class white kids with typical teenage problems and wanted to inflate their importance with attention seeking and big words that sounded important and scary, while completely ignoring people that actually suffered from those problems. Mental Damage One-upmanship was par for the course.

There wasn’t a “gay kid” at my high school, and while I was out to my friends, I figured it was nobody else’s business. I was in relationships, but they never got physical, which I ascribed at first to just being respectful to the girl (which was wrong, because she was always the one who initiated, largely due to being tired of waiting for me to make a move), and later to being a big signifier that I was gay. I never was into the physical stuff. Even with my boyfriends sex was only on the table because I assumed (correctly) that it was what they wanted, and I would just enough to get them off and shut them up. I was more into the talking, hanging out, occasionally making out, the ability to be intimate emotionally and spiritually with someone, and sex seemed like the only way to get to that kind of intimacy with a guy.

All of that makes me wonder what being ace means outside of myself, to other people, to my job, where I live, the optics of my existence, because identifying as gay affected *every single aspect* of my life. Now I’m finally seeing and embracing that I’m ace, so… now what? The same friend told me, “Don’t worry about it. You’re engaged to a guy. You’ll always be seen as gay whether you’re having sex or not.”

The Transition

Going from Gay Urban Fantasy Writer to Ace Urban Fantasy Writer is weird. Eventually I’m sure I’ll be able to write an ace protagonist, but likely he’ll have the same insecurities as I do, because you can’t write in UF now unless there’s at least a suggestion of an OTP, and even if it’s only handled in one paragraph, I’m not sure if anyone wants to read about an asexual werewolf being bored off his ass while his mate pounds away at said ass, counting the minutes or reviewing the case/adventure so far to hopefully have the epiphany that’ll solve the whole thing and give both of them some satisfaction. It’ll be funny, sure, but as I learned at a convention, the promise of a gay relationship must deliver on “the smexy times”. (God, I fucking HATE that word.) Does anyone really want that scene from the ace character’s perspective, burying his head in a pillow, wondering when it’ll be over so he can get some sleep? Do you want to read the ace character figuring, “well yeah, climaxing feels good for about… 5 to 10 seconds, but… then what? If I need that itch scratched, I can take care of myself and get back to work in ten minutes.”

I don’t know if readers want to read a protagonist who masturbates not because he can’t find a partner, but because he doesn’t want one. After all, The Joy of Writing Sex underlines that when a character masturbates, it’s supposed to be an act of loneliness, depression, an aching for physical connection to someone else, not because they just don’t want to be with someone sexually. “Taking care of yourself” is usually seen as comical as best, desperate at worst, and usually just as pathetic. If a protagonist wants to be with someone, but doesn’t want sex, there’s usually a reason, like a moral code, or religious upbringing, or some supernatural force attached to their virginity, and in any case, when a character announces that they *don’t* want something that people generally want, by the end of the story the reader expects that they’ll accept and want it like everyone else. If you don’t, you’re breaking a trope and the reader feels cheated.

An asexual character in a setting where people have sex, is seen as someone that needs to be “fixed”, that some outdated morality or psychological damage has their libido trussed up in razor-wire. After all, romantic love and sexual love are all too often seen as intricately intertwined. Sex without love is seen as pleasurable, but mechanical, unfulfillling, and usually sinful. (Thanks, Puritans!) Love without sex is seen as friendship as best, or teasing and leading on or “friendzoning” at… well not worst, but definitely leading to a hurtful confrontation. (Thanks, fragile masculinity!)

Of course there’s the point of, “Why do you feel you have to write an ace protagonist? Why not keep writing gay guys like you were before?” I can see the motivation to ask, but I’ll just say this: I became a writer because I could never see characters that were like me that got to save the world, especially in urban fantasy. My journey to coming out to myself as ace involves finding a way to express it, keep true to myself, and write a story that I want to write. Thing is, selling gay urban fantasy was hard enough without it being labeled as M/M romance, I don’t even know how an ace urban fantasy hero will get pidgeonholed, or even if anyone would want to read it. Thank god for self-publishing and a decent day job, I guess. Now I just have to figure out how to write it, but I guess that’s part of the journey too.

But, I guess that’s it. I’m Vaughn R. Demont, I’m an urban fantasy writer, I’m ace, and I want to write an asexual hero who saves the world.

We still cool?

The City Bundle

Decided to bundle my works together since I’ve received quite a few requests on where to buy Coyote’s Creed and the like since Samhain closed down and all the books were taken off Amazon. Essentially, the pricing is “Pay What You Want”, $100, a penny, $13.16, or whatever you feel you can afford. Everything in the bundle’s in PDF, including the unfinished stuff.

My apologies this took so long, had to wait on final reversion of rights, and this summer has turned out to be much leaner than last year. Royalties were never much, but you don’t realize how much you were leaning on them until they’re gone.

Regardless, I included the unfinished works for those who want a little more time in the City. The drafts for AJ and Broken Mirrors #5 aren’t included, as they aren’t finished, and I’m hoping to be able to share them with all of you someday when they’re finished properly.

It’s been a Hell of ride, Coyotes, and I deeply appreciate your fandom and your support.

You gotta laugh, right?

 The City Bundle

A collection of the works published under the now-defunct Samhain Publishing. This bundle includes House of Stone, Coyote’s Creed, Lightning Rod, Community Service, and Breaking Ties.

It also includes some unfinished works, which are unpublished, unfinished, and unedited, which include:

Winter Knight: A young half-Fae seeks to prove that’s he’s better than his breeding and rise above his station

Hunter’s Moon: A human hunter of the supernatural denizens of the City finds himself the prey of a sidhe lord.

Blood and Ashes: A vampire seeks to solve a murder while attempting to keep hold of his humanity.

The City Bundle will be Pay What You Want.

Just click Buy Now, and enter the amount you’d like to pay when you reach PayPal. You’ll downloaded the City Bundle automatically once you complete checkout. Thanks Coyotes for all your support!

Hiatus

I’ve spent the last week trying to figure out how to write this entry. I figured that it would be seven days of consideration, weighing pros and cons, making sure I made no rash decisions, all that, but honestly, my mind kept returning to one point again and again that I couldn’t respond to.

Writing hasn’t made me happy in over a year.

It’s so odd to see that sentence, know that I typed it in, felt that feeling and couldn’t deny it. It feels so much like a betrayal of my identity, of my past, of the me that would write in one-subject notebooks for hours at a time, or the me who would set pen to paper to find words to describe fear and trauma in the aftermath of an abusive relationship. Writing gave me peace then, it was almost therapy, a way to take the uglier parts of my life and insert them into a story that would give them some measure of sense or meaning.

And it would give me peace, make me happy to read back over it, no matter how cringe-inducing the quality or errors might have been, because it was a part of me, my life, my story, and it helped me learned to love myself again, feel I wasn’t worthless like my ex insisted I was. It made me feel valued, creative…

And it doesn’t make me feel that way anymore.

I’ve said that I want to write heroes that are like me, where a gay man could save the world without worrying about whether he was going to get laid afterward. I even got to do it a couple of times, you might’ve read the attempts. I followed the tropes and formulas, guiding it with my own experiences and wants, wove the story of James Black and Spencer Crain, and it was fun. I would wake up eager to continue their story.

And then I wrote Community Service, and wrote a relationship between James and Ozzie, with Spencer standing on the outside looking in, realizing he missed his opportunity to be with the man he loved. It was a knife-twist, surely, but that’s how it goes sometimes. Love doesn’t mean it will be requited. James and Ozzie felt good to write, even if James was taking his time in letting Ozzie know about the uglier parts of his past. A friend of mine did the beta read and said he never thought that someone who looked like him would end up getting the guy.

A lot of the readers agreed with him. I’d received hate mail, sure, but it the general insulting my skill or parentage or implying I lived in my parents’ basement, as well as the laundry list of terms for a homosexual man. Suddenly I was getting hate mail about Ozzie, saying they loved the book but hated the character, that I had destroyed the series by not putting James with Spencer. It cast a shadow over the writing of Breaking Ties.

And then a bunch of fans rallied to raise the money to send me to Coastal Magic, the first and last con I’d ever go to, so I felt I owed my fans something, which conflated nicely with those nasty e-mails and the self-loathing all writers possess while I finished out the last chapters of Breaking Ties.

So I broke up the relationship I actually cared about, the one that had basis in my own, so I could put the pretty 23 year old white boy with the pretty and roguish 21 year old Swedish-Navajo boy (who pretty much looked white) together. Because that’s what M/M romance taught me is necessary. Characters like Ozzie can never be anything more than the “nice guy”, the roadblock standing between the OTP.

And I realized I betrayed myself. I followed M/M romance rules when I cling so tightly to the belief that I am an urban fantasy writer despite the numerous tagging and shelvings of my work as M/M romance, even Lightning Rod.

Seriously, the story opens with a man realizing for the first time just how badly his boyfriend is beating the shit out of him, he runs away, and is subsequently involved in a bus accident killing all aboard save him. A Romance probably would not start with a healthy dose of domestic abuse, PTSD, and survivor guilt. 

And now my publisher is closing and I’ll never get to fix that, because publishers don’t pick up series-in-progress. I try to work on standalones, other projects, and I only get so far until I realize I have nothing invested in the character, that I’ve been blindly following some unspoken, unwritten rule about having a gay hero, and what is expected if you want that character to get picked up, reader, and liked. I even try to work on Broken Mirrors #5, maybe self-publish or just put it up for free on the site here, but I’m always dragged back, down into the hate mail, the self-loathing, and then the file sits stale on my hard drive.

So I did some soul-searching, thought about my life, and realized that writing doesn’t make me happy, and it hadn’t for over a year, even when I was dropping smileys on tweets about my progress on Nick or Abby or any other project I was working on. The upside is I have a day job teaching, and I love it. I used to love writing because I always felt I knew exactly what I was doing with every character, every scene. I haven’t felt that way in a long time, but I know exactly what I’m doing when I get in front of my class and teach my students to find, hone, and celebrate their voices.

Some people on Twitter mentioned if I was asking for permission to quit, they would give it if I felt I really needed it. I don’t. I don’t know if this is “I quit”, but it’s definitely hanging up the pen for a while until writing starts to make sense to me again.

And as a final word to those who shelved Coyote’s Creed as “gay shifter romance”? I have news for the “gay shifter romance” fan community. The furry community (of which I’ve been part of since 1997) has been doing gay shifter romances since at least 1973. The fandom would certainly appreciate your business, and their commission prices for stories and art and pretty much rock bottom. Feel free to drop by AnthroCon ’16 and stock up.

Paladins: An Interview With Vaughn R. Demont

thenerdsofcolor

Recently I had the opportunity to meet and connect with author Vaughn R. Demont. A talented writer and an all-around very cool guy, I was more than stoked when he agreed to sit down for this interview where we cover everything from life as a gay geek, being an urban fantasy author and of course diversity in speculative media.

Upkins: For the readers at home, tell us a bit about yourself.

Demont: It’s always weird to answer this question. Do I recite the same tired thing in my bio? Go humble, be brash? I’m a gay guy, pretty much, from central New York. I’m a gamer, tabletop and PC, I teach composition, and I write urban fantasy because I love the genre and the kind of heroes it enables writing about. I would mention that I run as well but Haruki Murakami does it too and wrote that book…

View original post 2,424 more words

Podcast: LGBT in Video Games

Did an interview/roundtable discussion with an independent game developer about LGBT characters in games. We touched on Bioware’s RPGs, Gay For You, and how things can continue to improve. Had a great time doing this one. :)

It’s Not Always Just a Game

This is an odd entry to write. Most writers use their blogs to talk about current projects, or failing that, things that matter.

I don’t know how many of you feel that table-top roleplaying games actually matter, and I don’t expect to make any converts with this entry, but writing is supposed to be, in some way, telling the truth about yourself. The truth of the matter is that, yes, I’m a tabletop gamer in my off time, recently part of a group again after a near ten year hiatus. I started playing Dungeons and Dragons before I was ten years old, pulled into it by my sister who played in a game run by our uncle. My cousin had had to drop out because his mother, my aunt, was deeply Christian and had a problem with her son playing “Satan’s game”.

Her niece and nephew, it would seem, were okay to let burn in hell.

I took over his character, and even though I was a kid, I was hooked from the get go, the game providing the fertile soil for my imagination to take root. I’d look forward to every visit because it’d mean we’d get to play again, and being that I was a geeky little nerd, it was fun to play the knight in shining armor and be the hero who saved the day.

I played from the Red Box into 1st edition proper, then 2nd, then finding a game where I played Forgotten Realms with my friends while still being part of a group that met every couple weeks. I snuck looks at issues of Dragon magazine and read the stories, laughed at the comics because I was part of the group that actually got the jokes. I continued to play into my sullen teen years, and while I didn’t play the knight in shining armor anymore, I still played characters that meant something to me.

Then my uncle took a hiatus and never came back from it, so I went into the White Wolf games that capivated me in my late teens and early 20s.

I played werewolves, changelings, a few vampires, but I eventually found Mage: the Ascension and that was it for me. Eventually, I thought it would be fun to take my notes from urban sociology class and my readings of Richard Florida‘s treatises on city planning and create my own little World of Darkness-type setting. It got played with and tweaked during undergrad and into grad school, you might’ve read a few books set in its current iteration.

The point is the importance of gaming, at least to me, so when I got engaged to someone that was a big fan of the spiritual successor to D&D, Pathfinder, I was excited and convinced him to run a game. A few friends from my old gaming group heard about it and asked to join, and for the last couple months the game has been awesome, like old times, and being a writer, I champed at the bit to fill out my character’s backstory to make him more than just a collection of numbers and an equipment list.

Something that Pathfinder will allow you to do that D&D wouldn’t is run paladins who aren’t human. For me, this meant being able to bring around a story seed that had been floating in my head, and make a Dwarven paladin, a holy knight of a god of smiths that fostered cooperation between the races. It meant playing Lawful Good, an alignment, or moral outlook, that meant your character believed in following the law, believing in honor and ethics, and wanting to work toward the greater good of all. In essence, the ultimate goal above all else is doing the right thing and putting the right thing above personal gain.

This, I’ve found, is where things started to go downhill.

You see, players in a game want to more work outside the law, occasionally reward themselves for a job well done, etc. To those kind of players, a law-abiding do-gooder who donates 20% of his income to charity is a stick in the mud and a pain in the ass, a nagging angel they never wanted on their shoulder who just won’t shut the hell up. A lawful good character, and a paladin especially, is someone to tease at least and give no end of torment at best.

So I’ll describe the party:

Dresden Firebeard – Dwarven Paladin, lawful good (Me)

Dwarven Ranger – Chaotic Good

Human Sorceress – Neutral Good

Kitsune Bard – Chaotic Good

Dresden’s job is, simply put, the tank. He gets out in front, gets the big bad’s attention, and generally gets beaten within an inch of his life while the damage dealers, now unmolested, kick its ass. Then he heals people up, everyone gets rewarded/paid, Dresden donates his tithe, everyone else suddenly forgets to visit their respective temples and donate to gods that they might want to raise them later.

I play Dresden as helpful, not lecturing, constructive in his criticism, and willing to go without if that’s what’s needed. You know, how you’d expect a paladin to act, because you have to be fundamentally decent if you want the nifty powers like laying on hands or summoning a unicorn by sheer force of will. He’s a friendly, good, and decent person, and playing him is similar to how I play RPGs with moral choice systems, how most people play them, really. We want to believe that we can be better people, so we set an example for ourselves with our characters. Dresden has the kind of decency and charitable attitude I work toward having myself.

Which brings us to the last session, which is the entire point of this entry.

A running gag we have is that there’s an in-game book series about a knight named Lord Fontleroy that’s taken the world by storm, that it’s intended for children, but adults turn out to be huge fans as well. The bard goes to a book store and finds that the new book in the series has literally just come out, so he picks it up, and immediately starts reading it. We get clues that the author is local, and our characters (or kid-friendly versions of them) are suddenly introduced into the series, so it must be someone we’ve met. Ladies and gentlemen, we have our adventure hook.

In the meantime, our group has been laboring to open a small shop where we can sell adventuring goods at fair prices as the local shops were gouging us blind. The sorceress was plotting to brew potions, Dresden was a capable armorer, the ranger had started on leatherworking, and the bard would make an excellent front-of-house. We were all pretty proud of ourselves, and the sorceress started her brewing for the day, and created a few healing potions, and, as a joke, the GM mentioned she’d also whipped up a vial of “Orcish Fly”, a potent aphrodisiac from an obscure sourcebook, by accident. It was pocketed to sell at the shop under the table later (without telling the paladin, as it was suspected he’d pooh-pooh the idea), and the game continued as usual.

Out of character we were all having a ball, as it was rare to RP that much in a session. The bard and ranger’s player started joking about having a duel over the new Lord Fontleroy, and the bard ended up going to a tavern full of bards, finding a book release party in full swing, as bards celebrate any story that captivates audiences and inspires new songs, as well as fanfiction. One thing led to another, and the entire entourage of bards made its way to our new store to celebrate the book as well as our grand opening. Dresden wasn’t wild about the idea, but no one was making any trouble, nor were any laws being broken, and the booze that was freely flowing was being consumed by adults.

Then I got up to use the bathroom, and when I came back…

I honestly do believe that they had only intended it to be a prank played on the stodgy paladin to “loosen him up”.

A little more introduction. The previous session had seen Dresden have to drink from a fountain of truth and speak a long harbored secret, as everyone else in the group had had to so they could clear the air as well as pass a trial to proceed further in a dungeon. The sorceress confessed to a fear that she might lose control of her power and kill her friends, the bard confessed he was afraid that he’d be hunted down (as kitsune are NOT common in that setting), the ranger confessed he’d broken the law and hidden it from the group, and Dresden? Dresden admitted that a local noble, a male one at that, was the first person he’d ever been attracted to.

It was a bombshell more to Dresden than anyone else. After all, we usually have the most difficulty coming out to ourselves. I was planning on carrying it through a couple more sessions, because you don’t just come out to anyone and suddenly jump on the dating circuit. It’s a bit of soul-searching, and I was looking forward to Dresden’s journey along the path to being able to say, “I’m still the same person I always was, and being gay is part of that person, and I’m okay with that.” It’s a big step, trust me.

So I come back from the bathroom to find out the group has pressured the bard’s player into using one of his Kitsune special talents, “Charm Person”, which the sorceress also had and would use in case the attempt failed. If the attempt fails? The person knows, and they’ll likely be pissed about it. If it succeeds? It’s a spell that allows you to command someone to perform an action, the catch being that you can’t make them do something’s that’s against their identity and nature. What’d they have him do? Drink.

Would a Dwarf feel that drinking beer or whiskey is against his nature? Likely not, even for a paladin, so I went along with it and started plotting ways I’d pay them back for Dresden’s hangover.

Then I find out the booze he’s drinking is laced with that “Orcish Fly” I mentioned earlier (this was also decided while I was away from the table). So now Dresden is charmed, drunk, and under the influence of a very potent aphrodisiac. The list of things he would not do has now been severely cut down. Then he’s told to go mingle with the bards who are still partying and likely have no idea the state the paladin is in.

He spends the night with one of the bards, who leaves before he even wakes up, and Dresden barely remembers what happened, only that he’d apparently gotten drunk and slept with a man whose name he never learned. When he asked the group, they lied (and passed their Bluff checks) and told him he’d gotten drunk on his own and took a guy upstairs, and they were proud of him for loosening up a little.

Dresden felt humiliated, and went to see a priest to seek absolution, knowing that he had acted not at all like himself the night before, and there was only one reason he could think of that fit with what he remembered and what his group told him. His take? Must’ve been those new urges that that truth potion had shaken loose. Admitting to himself that he was attracted to men must’ve been why he behaved like some wanton letch. Repression reared its ugly head.

And the thing is, to practically everyone else, it was funny. Most third parties I’ve told about it since thought it was hilarious. I spent the next few days letting it fester in my mind until I tweeted about it and wondered, “Why didn’t I say anything?”

Then I thought it through and realized something chilling: My character was charmed, plied with alcohol, and given a little “help” in loosening up around guys he hadn’t shown interest in, then sent into a throng of bards to bounce between them until he found one that was at least bi-curious (without any input from me). Because the group thought it would be funny. Because they felt the lawful good guy needed to “loosen up”.

So they got him date raped.

And then they lied to him and told him he’d brought it on himself, and let him believe that it was all because of his newfound sexuality.

And why didn’t I say anything?

I keep running through the events of that session, trying to think if there was an opening, or if I’d ever implied that I was cool with it, and remembering specific instances and asking myself why I didn’t say something THEN.

And then I felt stupid, because we’re talking about a tabletop roleplaying game here, and if you look at the previous paragraph, yes, I know EXACTLY what it sounds like and that only makes me more ashamed to even think for a second I could ever liken it to something like that.

But then I thought back to the games I played with my uncle running the game, where if you took a wrong step, a favorite punishment of his was dumping your character bareass naked in a jail cell surrounded by large men and let you do the math as to what was going to happen before you were allowed to leave. I remembered running my first Mage in a game run by a highly rated storyteller where I had to describe my character, and he’d tell you how your character awakened to magic. I told him my character’s history, and added in at the end that he was gay. The storyteller told me then that my character had awakened to magic after a gang rape from the high school football team. I thought about the games where the group would go to bars or taverns, and the guys would see a girl they liked or found attractive, and instead of going up to talk to her like a person, they would just cast Charm Person or use Mind magic or whatever to take a shot at getting her okay with following them back to their place. Invariably someone in the group would lament that they were playing a character that couldn’t do that, so they’d have to blow a bunch of cash or gold on getting her drunk first. I would get teased because my character wouldn’t take part, mostly because I was keeping my gayness on the DL because often the last thing you wanted to do in a game was play a gay character.

However, when the person running the game is your fiancé, you feel more comfortable playing a gay character. There’s a downside to being in a relationship with the person running the game, however: they’re either going to play favorites with you, and make the whole group hate you both, or they’ll be terrified of being seen as playing favorites and come down harder on your character than anyone else’s. My fiancé fell in the second category, and the group is comprised of people who are friends of mine, and he’s still nervous about thinking of them as his friends too.

So when the charming and roofie-ing of my character was happening, he felt just as uncomfortable as I did, but didn’t want to bring the GM hammer down on something it seemed the group was okay with doing. Much like myself, it wasn’t until a couple days later that it all sunk in what was done to my character without his express consent, and he literally become physically ill. The first instinct, after apologizing to me for a day and a half, was to retcon it.

Retconning is using in RPGs and comics, book series, movie universes, etc. and the simple meaning of it is this: Whatever you’re applying a retcon to? It never happened. Ever. Not that it happened and everyone forgot about it, but that it was wiped from history, and another instance was put in its place. The event, character, whatever, vanishes from existence and canon.

And it’s tempting, to say “it never happened, and that’s the story from here on out”, and move on with the game. I asked the group about it, said we were planning on retconning the event, and their reaction was summed up as “Uh, okay, whatever. *shrug*”. Because like a lot of people that are likely reading this, they don’t see the big deal. It’s just a game, it’s not like they got me drunk IRL and slipped me a laced drink and tossed me at some gay bar. This isn’t a group, after all, that has characters charm women or men in bars and take them home. As far as they’re concerned, it was a harmless prank that most people have found hilarious (especially when mentioned that it was a guy that took the paladin home).

I think it was the reaction to the retcon suggestion that got me, was that they didn’t care. In an odd way, I felt the retcon was letting them get away with it all over again. My fiancé and I worked out a way to keep Dresden’s virtue intact without the retcon, as it was never explicitly said that Dresden went to bed with the guy. Instead, the guy, who was an NPC (controlled by the GM, my fiancé) decided he wasn’t going to take advantage of a drunk paladin and potentially reap the whirlwind the following day, and put him to bed, locked the door, and left via the window to make sure no one else snuck in. Why? So that a paladin wouldn’t bring righteous fury down on a guild full of bards because one of them had slept with him without informed consent.

I guess the point all this brought to light for me is this: in tabletop RPGs, rape is only seen as someone who’s chaotic evil snatching women and using physical force, and it’s only male on female that counts. Male on male is a gag or a punishment, female on female is entertainment, and God help you if you’re playing someone androgynous or someone who used magic to change themselves into their preferred gender identity. Good-aligned people, accordingly, don’t rape. It’s not that they don’t do it, it’s that what they do isn’t seen as it. Good-aligned parties usually cap off a successful adventure with celebrating at the tavern and finding companionship if they aren’t already involved with another party member or NPC. Using magic to make women more pliable and open to “seduction” is seen as normal, and no way a violation of their alignment. When someone in the party is a victim of a love spell or potion, or a charming spell, and are taken advantage of, it’s a joke. A prank. And you’re supposed to laugh too, because most of the time, it’s your friends that are doing it, or people you’ve gamed with for a while, or as is often the case, it’s the only game in town and you feel you have to go along with it if you want to keep playing.

In the time since I’ve done research into similar game situations and uses of the spells that were used on Dresden, and, as expected, it’s the minefield you’d expect, with people one on side (all male players) claiming Charm Person is no different than lying to a woman to get her to sleep with you, and if that were rape, Barney Stinson would be one of many terrifying serial rapists stalking New York City, with the other side (nearly all women) claiming that Charm spells, love potions, Dominate, and the like are no better than magical roofies that instantly void informed consent, and are therefore an evil act. The arguments turn out like one would expect: a flame-war that results in threads getting frozen or shut down with no real progress even when in a game like D&D or Pathfinder picking someone up at a bar is as simple as rolling dice until an NPC finds you charming enough, but then, that always leaves the chance for rejection, doesn’t it? And then complaining about rejection, and finding ways to circumvent that rejection and get away with it.

But hey, that’s nothing we should be concerned about. It’s just a game, after all.

Right?

JMED: We Alive, Dammit: The Unbreakable Survivors of Kimmy Schmidt

The Show: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

Principal Actors: Ellie Kemper, Tituss Burgess, Jane Krakowski

Creators: Tina Fey & Robert Carlock

Synopsis: Rescued after 15 years in a cult, Kimmy Schmidt decides to reclaim her life by venturing to New York, where she experiences everyday life with wide-eyed enthusiasm. On a whim, she rents a room from Titus, a gay wannabe Broadway actor, who makes ends meet as a street performer in Times Square. The unlikely pair find they’re well-suited to help each other out, with Titus reintroducing Kimmy to modern life, and her providing him with the inspiration that you should never give up. Together they’ll make it through whatever life throws at them.

Abuse should be a tricky thing to portray on television and in film. Often, it’s employed as a cheap way to cast someone as a villain, or give unearned emotional depth to a character that’s enduring it. Usually by the end, the abused becomes empowered suddenly, likely inspired by a new love interest, and stands up to their abuser, probably punctuating the moment with a physical strike or in the case of some movies, a bullet. Obviously, for those who’ve survived it outside of TV Land, it’s never quite so simple.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is, at first glance, one of those shows mentioned above, attempting to work through the pain of surviving trauma… with a comedy? It should be insulting, mocking, and ripe for plenty of angry letters about cashing in on someone’s pain for easy laughs. Instead, its comedy functions, as always, as the sword, the scalpel, the blade to cut deep and bare the truth to light, easing the pain with laughter, and it does so both with its stellar writing and fantastic performances from series leads Ellie Kemper as Kimmy, and Tituss Burgess as her roommate Titus Andromadon.

The series opens with Kimmy in an underground bunker with three other women, Cyndee, Gretchen, and Donna Maria, as well as the Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne preparing to celebrate Christmas with apocalyptic carols to mourn the world they believe they lost fifteen years before. Seconds later, the titular Unbreakable Kimmy is freed, brought up into the light by a SWAT team and ends up on the Today Show, where she and her fellow survivors have been dubbed “The Indiana Mole Women”. They reap the charity of the nation, being the latest viral giving craze, and Kimmy decides to stay in New York City rather than return home to Indiana like the others, and it all starts from there.

Thank You, Victims!

“Everybody in Durnsville is always going to look at me like I’m a victim and that’s not what I am!” – Kimmy

Abuse, assault, rape, battery, the word “victim” gets used a lot to describe those who live through it, because in the beginning, that’s what you are. The four women who survive the bunker all see their experience differently, the way that survivors often do, though the four outlooks are hardly the only ways. Gretchen, the true believer, reached a position of comfort in the cult by devoting herself fully to the Reverend’s teachings, and near the end of the season, is eager to return to the bunker with a few new converts to continue enjoying the Reverend’s favor. Donna Maria, the Hispanic maid, found opportunity in her new fame, and embraced the infamy if it allowed her to start selling mole sauce to the masses. Little development is given to the character, otherwise, other than her method of coping by pretending she didn’t speak or understand English simply so that she’d be more likely to be left alone. Cyndee elects to return to Durnsville where everyone already knows that she’s a victim, and are willing to shower her with more charity and preferential treatment, knowing that after the Hell she’s endured, she deserves to be happy, even if it means having to fake being straight. She embraces that treatment, even when she’s confronted by her friend, because surviving horrible treatment should be balanced out by happiness, even if it’s fake and out of pity, at least it’s there and doesn’t require any effort.

It’s Kimmy who endeavors to shed her victimhood by remaining in New York City, where she’s just some woman who makes a big deal out of running outside and riding the subway and dancing in a fountain that wasn’t actually on Friends. To Kimmy, and to some survivors, new beginnings aren’t frightening, they’re alluring, a chance to leave everything behind and either pick up where you left off, or simply treat the trauma as a thing that happened to someone else. The “victim” label only serves as a reminder of the trauma, and can often be more damaging than the pity it elicits.

It runs counter to the tone of the opening, but critiques the way society sees them. The Mole Women are repeatedly referred to as victims during their brief time in the media, and even though the rest of the country pretty much moves on (the trial of the man who imprisoned them is only available through a shoddy webcam), the survivors are forever defined by that trauma. Victims are to be pitied, after all, and often little else.

Surviving Victimhood

“People love hearing terrible details of tragedies. One, it’s titillating like a horror movie. Two, it makes them feel like a good person because they care about a stranger. Three, it makes people feel safe that it did not happen to them.” – Titus

The transition from victim to survivor isn’t as simple as correcting someone who mislabels you. A common method of coping is simple avoidance, getting away from anything that reminds a survivor of the trauma, steering conversation topics away from anything that might drift into uncomfortable waters, and often doing as much as possible to avoid bringing up one’s past trauma… or bringing it up to everyone.

Kimmy and Cyndee represent opposite methods of dealing with it. Cyndee returns to where everyone knows she’s a victim, but an incredibly sympathetic one, so there’s no need to talk about it and simply bask in the comfort of pity. She casually mentions in conversation that she’s still dealing with nightmares and attacking people in her sleep, but she’s generally okay with it as long as the Reverend goes down for his crime.

Kimmy chose a place where people know of her, but not that she’s one of the bunker survivors. She takes a new name, and revels in the ignorance and indifference of New Yorkers, particularly Titus, her new roommate, who first senses something off about Kimmy, but then simply ascribes it to her being from Indiana. Much like Cyndee, it’s avoidance, just a different method, and all it takes is one bad night for her to confess her past to Titus, a gay black man who left Mississippi to pursue a dream of singing on Broadway as well as escape having to be a gay black man in Mississippi. But, as Titus tells Kimmy, “Escaping is not the same as making it.”

Getting away from your abuser doesn’t mean you’ll automatically be okay. The aftermath can be brutal as well, leading to night terrors, hypervigilance, mistrust, emotional outbursts, or, in my case, getting home after dark and grabbing a steak knife from the kitchen and moving room to room through my apartment, terrified that my ex was waiting for me, being terrified of people in white jackets (as he had worn one often), and developing a fear of dogs.

Over the course of the series, Kimmy limits the people she tells about her past to only two people, her roommate/friend Titus, and her boss Jacqueline, but by the third episode, it’s made clear to her that she needs to talk to someone about what happened to her, instead of just telling someone what happened. The questions she asks, “Do you think going through something like that makes you a better person? Or deep down, does it just make you bitter and angry? Do I ever get to be normal again?” they all have answers that survivors seek, and those answers are as hard-won as they are subject to change.

Even survivors have their moments where they feel like victims again, sometimes even years afterward. At Coastal Magic, I was signed up to snark at Cinema Craptastique with Damon Suede and a bunch of other authors, but I was already in a bad mood before I even got there. It was my first convention, I was surrounded by people I didn’t know, and I had no idea what I was supposed to do. As a result, my stress was right about at the breaking point, but I knew from past experience that all I had to do was push through the first few minutes and I’d be okay. I’d left my power brick for my laptop up in the hotel room, so I ran up to get it, alone, leaving Chris, my fiancee, down in the ballroom where the event was planned. On the way back, I got in the elevator, and the next person to get on had a dog.

Cynophobia is the *irrational* fear of dogs. Let me underline that for all the dog owners and enthusiasts that might be reading this. When I see a dog, I see a creature capable of lethal violence that I can’t control, and can tell that I’m terrified. It also didn’t help that the dog’s owner told me that dogs can smell fear so I needed to calm down. To a cynophobic, that’s the equivalent of telling someone they had it coming.

Regardless, I didn’t make it more than 20 feet from the elevator. I saw someone else from the con, and asked them politely to look for Chris in the ballroom and send him back to the elevators to see me. They were confused, but did it, because when Chris found me, he later told me that I was babbling, incoherent, and absolutely refused to let go of him. The memory of it is pretty hazy, but the issue was that even over a decade after the abuse, I was in the exact same state as the night my ex left. Even looking at the words I just typed, I ask myself, “Do I ever get to be normal again?” I’m sure someone out there is saying, “Well, what’s normal, anyway?” The answer is, “I don’t know, but it’s not this.”

Ten Seconds at a Time

Can you get through the next ten seconds? For most of us, it’s a question that’s easy to answer. Of course you can make it through ten seconds, you’ve been through more than that just reading to this point. Ten seconds is finite, measurable, something you learn how to count out in preschool or earlier. Ten seconds is always ten seconds whether you’re riding a roller coaster or standing in line for it, it’s the perception of that ten seconds that makes it vary, can make it flash by in an instant or become the most agonizing eternity in your life. In the second episode, Kimmy reveals the coping technique that kept her going in the bunker: get through the next ten seconds, then start on the next ten seconds, because anyone can handle anything for ten seconds at a time. It’s simply a matter of counting it out, dragging one’s perception back into the finite, forcing the mind to accept that those ten seconds of pain and stress are now over, in the past, and can no longer hurt.

It’s powerful, and it chops the day into microtasks anybody can handle, but at the same time, it reduces your span of hope to ten simple seconds. Eventually, you learn to look past the next ten seconds, and one Kimmy passes on that method, she needs it less and less, but it moves into searching for other methods.

Much like her boss, Jacqueline, a rich housewife in a loveless marriage living in terror of being left alone, Kimmy looks for the quick fix, the way to skip over the painful parts of recovery and just get to the return to real happiness as quickly as possible. A common gag in the series is a riff on Febreze, and their campaign of putting blindfolded people in dirty rooms and misting it all with Febreze, having the people describe their surroundings with florid and enticing imagery, only pull the blindfolds and see they’re in a festering slum rife with garbage and rats. It’s symbolic of the way Kimmy sees her life, as a collection of ugliness and garbage, and needing to mist it over and lead people through it blindfolded to her past before she can let people in.

Of course, quick fixes don’t work, but it doesn’t stop Kimmy from trying, because we’re convinced that everyone is different so maybe this method which hasn’t lasted more than a day for everyone else will work for *us*. When the quick fixes fail, it hardens Kimmy’s already unbreakable resolve to her own path of recovery, which only serves to piss her off when she sees Cyndee’s means of faking her way to a better life.

It’s Dangerous to Go Alone

“I had to call for backup, you won’t talk to me. You say I don’t understand, but I knew who would understand is another one of you.”

It’s understand why survivors try to go it alone. After all, it was another person who abused them, who in their right mind would let another person in after that? At least, that’s how it feels at first. Going it alone is different than being alone, of course. Kimmy finds Titus on her first day, Cyndee returns to an entire town of people who sympathize, but what they lack is someone they can talk to about it on a professional level. Jacqueline, on the other hand, has the opposite. She has a wealth of therapists and doctors and spin class instructors to give her the easy answers, but she doesn’t have anyone in her life that she believes would stick around if her money ran out. It’s what pushes her initially to stay with a controlling and philandering husband until Kimmy, her sole friend, informs her that even if Jacqueline were flat broke, she’d still be her friend. It’s that revelation, that human contact, that pushes her to leave her husband, not the assurance that the money won’t run out on her.

It’s what Kimmy needs as well, as even though she attacks Titus in her sleep, he’s been made aware of her trauma and is brave enough to tell her he’s not equipped to handle it and she should talk to someone about what happened before it eats her alive. Titus is likely one of the most important members of the supporting cast because he represents, at first, the person who doesn’t know who you are, and gives you the reaction you can expect from other people when they find out, as Titus is the first person that Kimmy tells about the bunker. He’s the friend who picks up on the fact that something’s wrong, and tries his best to be supportive even though he has no idea how to handle it, and doesn’t want to say what’s probably already been said.

And that, I believe, is one of the issues that Kimmy Schmidt subtly addresses but never says out loud: Kimmy is never told what happened to her was wrong, and wasn’t her fault. It’s likely because it seems obvious to anyone that being imprisoned by a lunatic for fifteen years is wrong, and the blame should never lie with the victim. It’s assumed that a survivor would know that, and they do. It’s just that there’s another little voice in their head that sounds a lot like their abuser speaking to the contrary. It’s seen when Kimmy breaks down, calls herself “garbage” as the Reverend did, and constantly needs to talk to herself to psyche up. She’s trying to drown out the voice of her abuser with her own strength, and that’s not always a lock.

“I’m actually doing what I said I was going to do back in the bunker. You were going to see the world and get an education and a great job. But you’re a 29-year-old babysitter who lives in a basement!”

Ironically, it’s Cyndee, who draws her strength from the town’s sympathy, that restores Kimmy’s resolve in her lowest moments. Cyndee is, at first, appalling to to Kimmy in that she’s simply wallowing in the pity lavished on her by the public for being a Mole Woman. Whenever she wants something, she puts on a sad face and admits to having been abused and traumatized, and people fall all over themselves to help her. It pisses Kimmy off, understandably, as she’s trying to make her own way, on her own, trying to put her past behind her, while her best friend revels in the attention. Only in a confrontation between the two is Kimmy given a hard truth: She hasn’t changed. Kimmy is shown she’s essentially the same 15-year-old who was taken by the Reverend, working a teenager’s job, and living in a shitty apartment you should have moved out of by the time you finish your twenties. It’s what pushes Kimmy to better herself, pursue her GED, and realize the only way to leave the past behind is to move forward.

The difficult truth of surviving abuse is that you can’t just pick up where you left off and continue on. Time was taken away and it’s not going to be recovered. Much like the ten seconds, one it’s passed, it’s in the past, and you can’t go back. The method Kimmy uses is to resume her education and maybe become more than a “glorified babysitter”, open up more possibilities and paths in life than simply moving forward.

It’s the method that I used after my ex left, I threw myself into college to pursue my degree, narrowing my focus on obtaining my degree so that I’d fare better the next time I had to face the real world. Academia started first as my ladder out, but quickly turned into a safe haven that I didn’t want to leave. In college, I was just another student, someone looking to better himself. Outside, I was an unemployed abuse survivor, it was just easier to stay in school where there were easier answers. It’s a trap that Kimmy falls into late in the season.

Confrontation

A few years after he left, I didn’t have much of an idea where my ex was, mostly because I didn’t care, and trying to keep him out of my life was a priority. Then something happened, I won’t go into details, but let’s just say I had to have a conversation with a police officer about my ex because he might’ve seen something while he was in NY, and they wanted to talk to him, and wanted my help in tracking them down.

It took me five minutes of Googling to get an address, which angered me because I figured it would’ve taken that long for the police to do the same, but then, they didn’t know all the little things that I did that made the search only take five minutes. The police agreed to keep me out of it when they contacted him, but it renewed the fears all over again. Mostly, I got into World of Warcraft and utterly devoted all of my time to leveling a character to 70 in 9 days, which allowed me to think about, well, nothing.

When Kimmy is finally presented with the opportunity to face her abuser in open court, she resists at first, seeking refuge in a spin class that offers easy answers and ways to avoid stress while convincing yourself you’re just getting a lot of good exercise. She comments regularly about how blank and clear her mind is, which would seem like a good thing if she wasn’t running away from the confrontation.

It’s running away that is the common trait amongst all the characters of Kimmy Schmidt. Kimmy’s running from being a victim, Titus is running from his past in Mississippi, Jacqueline is running from being alone.

The transition for all of them is when they recognize they can run away from their problems by running toward something else. Kimmy runs toward her education, Titus runs toward a job where he can sing for money, and Jacqueline learns how to run toward independence. Kimmy learns this lesson from Dong, her boyfriend, who’s running from immigration while he runs toward learning proper English and eventually becoming an American citizen, and everyone in turn takes the same lesson from her.

For a survivor, confronting an abuser is terrifying, but sometimes necessary. That confrontation comes in the form of a trial to punish the Reverend for kidnapping and unlawful imprisonment, which for most people would mean life in jail. In the show, the trial is played up for laughs, and Jon Hamm plays up the Reverend’s craziness and oily charm with perfect comic effect. The jury is easily swayed, the judge is indifferent, the prosecutors are grossly incompetent, and the Reverend is able to dazzle them with idiotic placation and blame-shifting with “aw shucks”, down-home charm.

It’s done for comedy, but it’s the way a lot of survivors see the system: incompetent, indifferent, ignorant, and easily manipulated. Through both real experience as well as the portrayals of popular culture, survivors often believe that the system is not going to help them. One of the most chilling things I ever saw in a movie was in John Grisham’s “The Rainmaker”, where a woman is beaten severely by her husband and ends up in the hospital. When asked what happened to the husband, the answer is, “He spent the night in jail. His family bailed him out. He’s due in court in a couple weeks, nothing’ll happen.” It’s the tone that makes it chilling in that how casual and “I dunno, what can ya do? *shrug*” it is. That feeling pervades the reaction for survivors. In the Reverend’s trial, Kimmy soon finds herself on the defensive, her abuser resorting to victim-blaming and being wholly successful, getting by on his charm and good looks to convince the crowd he’d never be capable of such a thing. In order to win, she has to return to the bunker, relive the Hell she endured for fifteen years, symbolic of when a survivor has to take the stand and suffer the slings and arrows of victim-blaming and prove it’s not all lies even though the evidence is obvious and overwhelming. The survivors of the bunker actually have to prove they were being held against their will, and end up winning solely because of a hard-won detail when it should’ve been open and shut from the day of the arrest.

But Kimmy is allowed her moment, the one she feared, avoided, and ran away from through the entire first season. She’s able to stand in front of her abuser and show him she’s not afraid, that she’s not weak, she’s not garbage, and she’s going to move on with her life with his approval not desired nor required. It’s a powerful and triumphant moment amidst the silliness of the trial, a hard-fought victory that *shouldn’t* be hard-fought, but it’s at least a victory all the same. It grants the promise of the series open, where Kimmy stands in the middle of Times Square, awash in a sea of new possibility and convincing her new friend to see the wonder that she’s finally able to see:

Life beats you up… You can either curl up in a ball and die, or you can stand up and say, “We’re different. We’re the strong ones, and you can’t break us.” – Kimmy

The open ends with a joyous chorus from “The Circle of Life”, the exultant lines promising a leap of faith to the path of hope, where we’ll all, including the survivors, find our place on the path unwinding.

And why? Because we’re unbreakable. We alive, dammit.

Communities (Coming Out)

Coastal Magic was definitely a good time, both for meeting readers as well as other authors, and one of authors I had the opportunity and pleasure to meet was Damon Suede, who, let’s face it, is a hell of a lot more known than me, funnier than me, and… I’ll put it this way, a conversation with Damon is a sudden ride, and you can either try to keep up, or just sit back and ride along. I attempted the former, ended up doing the latter, it’s like a taste of what elevated conversation at a society party would be like. He shines bright and big, that’s the best way to put it.

And before I went to CMC, I did some reading on Damon, read the bit of his bio that starts with “the right wing anus of America”, which I guess is Texas, and as a gay New Yorker, the only thing I really know about Texas is to never fucking go there unless I go to Austin. That’s the rep the Lone Star State has here, you know? New York, well, we’re New York City and a bunch of real estate and parks and a few colleges and stuff, but we’re New York, the Democrat stronghold, a bastion of liberalism. If Damon Suede was ejected from a right-wing anus, than I was ejaculated from a set of genitals that leaned heavily to the left.

And I’m guessing Damon and I had… different experiences when we came out. You would think that coming out in Texas vs. coming out in New York would have a clear winner. It does, it’s just not NY in this case, and community is the big difference. Community is the difference, let’s be honest, between whether you come out knowing you’ll be accepted and that a whole bunch of people have your back the moment someone gives you shit, and being thankful that Ricki Lake had a talk show.

I was seventeen, in Central New York, which isn’t Brooklyn or Queens, it’s north of Syracuse, and you’re raised to think that people from New York City are assholes because they believe by virtue of living in NYC, they’re better people than you. The town I lived in was poor, in the poorest county in NY, and being on any sort of public assistance made you an easy target for bullying. A fixed income plus “child support” (from a deadbeat dad) put me in that category, so I’d endeavored to look as working class as possible. My mom was on disability, so she watched soaps and a lot of daytime talk shows, in particular Ricki Lake, who I only recognized as a “that girl” actor. I wasn’t doing fantastic, my sister was already off to college and it was looking like I had the test scores to get me into a lot of good schools, which didn’t mean anything because I didn’t have the money to afford them. (Luckily SUNY Oswego had a great Writing Arts program.) As a result of that and being seventeen, I was, let’s face it, pissy and bitchy and not the greatest of kids, but I wasn’t a criminal, doing drugs, drinking, smoking, skipping school, or anything like that. Part of it was having a crush on one of my best friends, and sorry, but there was zero chance of him suddenly going all “gay for you” upon finding out I was into him.

I was also going to a high school where “smear the queer” and “bag the fag” were acceptable games in gym class, and the track team that I was on was the athletic haven for nerds, geeks, and outcasts, because running away from aggressive men was something we had a lot of practice at. There was one kid who was known to be gay, and let’s just say it was a public hell and he was too bug-eyed and weird for the girls to take him in and protect him. Having a gay friend wasn’t “in” yet, it was better and easier to hang around the girls and let the guys think I was trying to get them to go out with me. It also meant, to sell it, I’d have to ask one of them out publicly. She’d be embarrassed, I’d get shut down hard, it’d be humiliating for both of us and get around and I’d be tormented, but I’d be tormented for asking a girl out, and that’d buy me a few months out of the critical eye.

And after one of these instances, I got into a fight with my mom, and it was looking like I was going to be kicked out. Most gay guys, if you ask them, plan their coming out, or blurt it out from a place of frustration, or make it funny or entertaining or tearful or something. I don’t know how many come out as a Hail Mary to avoid getting kicked out of their house. But it worked, well, sort of.  My mom’s first response was actually, “No, you’re not!” It was incredulous, complete with eyeroll, and then she noticed I wasn’t laughing, I was crying, and it really started to sink in.  She stumbled and fumbled through a few sentences and paragraphs, and eventually found her way to an episode of Ricki Lake she’d seen a few days before. The episode had kids coming out to their parents, and the parents that were accepting were applauded, the rejecting ones were booed. Yeah, in the 90s, coming out to your parents was worthy of a talk show episode.

That wasn’t that, though. A few weeks later, she took me aside to ask me if I was still gay, but it was the hushed, secretive way she’d said it that I remember, even though everyone in the house knew. It took her some time, I could mention where she grew up, the year, the attitudes, but if there’s one thing I learned, it’s that everybody’s different, and I came out into a pretty nonexistent community until I got to college. Coming out to my friends was a little easier, and I never told my one friend I was into him, because by that time I was more interested in someone else. The more people I told, the easier it got to tell people, but from what I understand that’s par for the course. Time’s moved on, I guess it’s supposed to be easier now, but one thing I have to give my mom credit for is that she never treats my being gay like a choice. I’ve said out loud that no one in their right mind would choose a life like this, given how you’re treated, but there’s still an element of choice involved: the choice to come out. And I don’t know, isn’t it a better choice to be honest?