My Gay Life

This is the time of year that everybody makes their New Year’s resolutions, as if somehow the year changing is magically the time to change your life. I do not really do New Year’s resolutions, I make promises to myself year round about things I want to change. Most of the time I am not successful but then I just try again in 2 months.

However, since this is the time of year everyone talks about them, and maybe if I write them down and tell you about them I will be more successful here are my promises to myself that I am currently working on.

• First and foremost is to eat healthier and exercise more. I made this promise about 2 months ago. I have been reasonably successful on the eat healthier front, but the exercise is not going so well.
• I also have promised myself and well now you that I am going to post at least twice a week this year. So far this is not getting off to a great start, but I am just eeking this second post in the first week.
• Thirdly, is to keep my house clean. I tend to be a slob and am lucky if I sweep every other month. It makes it really hard to have friends over as I am embarrassed by how messy my house is.
• Finally, I am renewing my resolve to really dig into the dating scene. I tried half-heartedly over the past year, and even tried Chemistry.com for 3 months. Chemistry.com was a complete bust for me as the density of gay people using it in my area is insufficient to get ANY dates. This probably threw me off of online dating for a while.

Yes, I know I have not posted in forever. Yes I know Christmas was 2 weeks ago. But I really should have written this post a week ago, and well obviously I did not.

I went home for Christmas and was home for 10 days. This was the first time I have been home after coming out to my family. In general things were fine, but I have this nagging feeling it is because I do not have a boyfriend so my parents can still pretend that I am straight. Things really only got weird on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

My parents are Catholic, I am not. I think my parents have known this for several years, but it was something I never said. So my family went to Christmas Eve mass and I went along to be respectful. However, for the first time I really did not participate in mass. I did not sing, I did not do any of the sayings, and I did not go up for Communion. At least for me it was very weird, I also get the impression that it was weird for my parents too. Nothing extreme or upsetting just weird.

We also drove in 2 cars. My dad and my brother Justin went in one car and the rest of us in the other. Apparently during their drive my dad was in a brooding mood asked my brother if I had talked to him. I had not yet gotten around to coming out to Justin so he had no idea what my dad was talking about. At 1 AM Christmas morning Justin and I are talking, tells me what my dad asked, and I come out to him. No big deal.

Christmas afternoon was more interesting and demonstrated to me how my dad has a real problem with talking about sex. We went to see “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”, probably not one of the best choices for family movie. If you have not seen it there are a lot of sex scenes in the movie. Anyway my dad storms out about 2 hours into the movie because of the sex scenes. The rest of us thought the movie was great, but he was extremely upset. The rest of the night was very subdued as a result.

His reaction to this movie told me that for now he at least is pretending to have no problem with the fact that I am gay. However, when I have a serious boyfriend and bring him home, things may change. I am not worried about that day though. I have already made my peace with myself and in the end that is all that matters.