On Bringing Home Your Man

TNG is taking a much needed break from Dec 19-Jan 4. TNG will return with new content on Jan 5. Until then, please enjoy this post from the past year. Original publish date: 4/1/2008

I brought my boyfriend home for Easter this year. This was actually the first time I'd ever brought a boyfriend home. (Well, you already know how I feel about my parents' house, but I'll use the term "home" for convenience.) I'm just now recovering from the experience, and time has finally provided enough emotional distance that I can write about it.

Easter, the holiest of Catholic holidays, was celebrated at my parents' house this year by my middle brother and his new wife, an uncle and aunt, my parents, myself, and my filthy sodomite heathen butt-buddy.

It seemed a bit odd that my Roman Catholic mother was so insistent that I bring my Jewish boyfriend home for such a holy holiday. One that holds absolutely no significance to me anymore. (And the only significance it ever held was the day we got all the candy without having to dress up and go out and ask for it.) My mother has quoted the pope to me before, something about loving the sinner but hating the sin, but I still wonder whether her big heart and her rational brain have fully adopted the "hating" part of policy. Who knows, really, how torn up she is about having a gay son. The one thing I do know is that I have the unconditional love of my parents, and for that I am unspeakably blessed.

One of the highlights of the weekend visit included perhaps the most dry and forced dinner conversation I've ever experienced. The conversation was a slow staccato, like the sound of an ancient tortoise lumbering across a massive drum head: sentences were offered up into the silence, and perhaps a minute later someone would come up with some kind of semi-appropriate reply. The bulk of it centered around home repair tips, including the multiple uses of Bond-o and how one might prevent a brightly tinted paint from bleeding through subsequent layers of white. Honestly, I would have rather watched paint peel than listen to a conversation about how to reapply it. Some excitement came about, however, when my aunt giddily instructed her husband to relate a story about a string of workplace illnesses, including a colleague's diabetic coma and my uncle's near carbon monoxide poisoning.

Perhaps the most dramatic part of the weekend was the figuring out of the sleeping arrangements. My mother has a policy that her sons can sleep with their significant others in the same bed under her roof only once they have been joined in holy matrimony. As such, my mother offered me a queen sized bed and suggested that the boyfriend could either sleep on a couch in the living room, or we could blow up an Aerobed in the room where I'd be sleeping. Considering the fact that people were going to church at 7:15 the next morning, we decided upon him sleeping in the bedroom with me. My mother looked hesitant and dubious, and watched over us as we inflated the mattress. I told her we could take care of it, and sent her off to bed. We looked at each other, signaling with our eyes to one another that we knew we were in the process of concocting a big rouse. Once the teeth were brushed and faces washed, we returned to the bedroom and locked the door. I instructed the boyfriend to get in the Aerobed, roll around in the covers a bit, and then join me in the real bed. As he was climbing out of the believably slept-in-looking sheets he asked, "Did you remember to bring the lube?" I shot him a "whachu talkin bout, Willis?" look, which he took as a satisfactory reply to his joke. I was willing to break the bed-sharing rule, but I had no interest in staining her sheets.

I'm sure there is a whole spectrum of parental reactions to gay kids and their partners. What's been your experience? Do your parents even know that your "good friend" who spends holiday weekends with them is really your lover? Or do they put you in the same bed together with a handful of condoms and some of your dad's Viagra?