Reply #127: Storytime? Got a strange letter from a summer job co-worker once. Sort of did the right thing.

[DirkGently]

College years, with summers spent wearing funny hats and name tags at a "World" famous theme park in fact known for its gay-friendliness. He was a bit of an odd, moody guy generally, part of which may have been to do with a struggle over his orientation, but I think there may have been more going on. Big ginger kid from the Pacific Northwest, into the martial arts, and as mentioned, kind of generally peculiar. People who went out with him said he was deeply depressed over the loss of a girlfriend, actually, and prone to moping. If anything, I'd probably been a little rude to him because I found his moods kind of off-putting and vaguely threatening. It never occurred to me he might be struggling with his sexuality.

I didn't recall exchanging info, but he wrote me at school that Fall with a lot of heavy innuendo about what may have been "going on between us." I was maybe 20, basically graceless, and while I had enough of a clue about life not to have a homophobic meltdown, I felt compelled to write back for clarity's sake, and worried about contributing to the confusion or misery of someone who was maybe a little "different" in ways beyond his orientation (autistic spectrum, maybe?).

I wrote back, acknowledged that I knew what he was getting at, but that I "wasn't," and included a lot of probably-too-calculated-and-neutral language about not disliking or judging him, but that we didn't have "a relationship," and suggesting he speak to someone he could trust if he was depressed as our co-workers had suggested. Looking back, for all my careful disclaimers, I was probably still a chilly @ss to a confused kid going through God-knows-what in addition to working out his sexuality. I saw him at the park the next summer, but we didn't speak. He seemed alright. Still remember sometimes and wish I'd had the maturity to be a bit more supportive to a confused kid and less worried about getting roundhouse kicked by a personality I found slightly bewildering.

Then there was the polyglot British tour guide with the scar from the moped acccident who made some inapposite remarks about whether my "bits" had "dropped yet" when I was 17 and taking a bus tour through Europe on the cheap. That incident, and he in general, were both actually fairly hilarious, and I was neither mortified nor angry, nor considered it anything to somehow hold against future gay people I would meet. Not super-professional of him, but neither was getting hammered on cherry schnapps and blowing through the headcount (One ... twoooo ... Okay, Pierre, letzgo!") when our bus left the Swiss tourist-trap restaurant (alphorns) we'd just been to. Great tour guide though. Could cuss at traffic smoothly in Italian, French, and German.

No normal hits from your workaday homosexuals. Guess I'm either oozing with obvious heterosexuality or not as irrestible as I like to think.