Coming out to my Mom is here. I’m continuing on my carpet bombing trip of telling friends and family that I’m gay…

I’m sitting in Joan’s back yard. She’s got her signature can of Coke in hand and she’s fretting about some grade 13 essay that is due later that week but she’s not making any effort to actually work on it. Typical Joan. She could knock a solid 90% out of the park 10 minutes before the 1200 word essay was due. I drop the bomb.

She takes a long pull off her Coke and looks at me. “I was wondering when you’d get around to that.”

Non. Event.

Dave sits on the swing where we once waited out the effects of a stupid LSD experiment. We shared a common love of gorey horror movies overflowing into practical jokes – when we met he threw a bag of ketchup at me trying to make me look “bloodied”. He was the first person who I could relate to on a nerdy level; that it was ok to like science fiction.

“That’s cool. I guess. What’s it like?” He was always curious. Not “gay-curious” but curious in general – hence I thought it appropriate to tell him on the “LSD swings”. If I had said I tried recreating the Jack the Ripper killings, he’d probably ask the same thing.

Non. Event.

My best friend Rick and I were walking towards the school when I told him. In high school hierarchy Rick was an anomaly – the football jock who liked to hang around the “Theatre fags”, just like Fynn off of Glee. I am sure he caught hell from the rest of the football team over it, but he never let on. Rick was highly intelligent but reveled in pretending to be stupid – it was his schtick that made our circle of friends love him more. After dropping the bomb, he didn’t said anything for 20 or so paces, then muttered: “What do you say when your best friend tells you he’s gay?” It was the last thing he ever said to me. We walked the rest of the way back in silence and at the school he waved his hand dismissively when he yanked the door open. Brockvegas Collegiate Institute swallowed him whole and I never heard from him again.

I suspect he was struggling with his feelings for me. That or he could sense that I loved him a tad bit more than “a friend” and I had dragged our relationship across the border into “inappropriate”. Either way, I’ll never know. Rick became a cop in some remote Northern Territory and last I heard was married off.

So… Sort of not “non event”.