Your Trauma Didn’t Make You Gay
As I’m sitting across from my mom on the back patio of a restaurant in Boca Raton, Florida, picking at my fish tacos, she asks if I’m seeing anybody. I take a long sip of my margarita on the rocks, deciding how to answer this. I’m a bad liar and I know she’ll be able to tell right away. Plus, I want to tell her, just maybe not right now, in this exact moment, surrounded by 84-year-olds at what looks like a knockoff Harpoon Louie’s. The butterflies begin to bang against the sides of my stomach.
“Yes,” I say, smiling uncomfortably. I feel guilt for some reason.
“You are?” she asks, surprised.
“Um. I am.”
“What? Is he weird?” she asks. It’s a fair question. Literally every man I’ve ever dated up until this point was weird af.
“She’s not, no,” I say. I take another long sip of my margarita.
“It’s a girl?!” she asks, before letting out a short, shocked laugh. She can’t believe it.
Then she asks a bunch of questions about how I knew I was gay, when I knew. How could she have missed it? Does she really know me? Had I been lying to her? I assured her, she did know me, and I didn’t want to talk to her much about my sex life anyway, so aside from that, nothing had really changed. I told her I wasn’t lying, per se, and certainly not any more to her…
