Coming Out: To My Mom

General, Personal Bits, Queer stuff 9 Replies

I realized that in the last 10 years of this website I’ve never shared with you, dear internetz, how I came out to the world.

Mostly because it was such a non-event. What with all the drama that preceded my gay cotillion.

A bit of back story for new readers: My oldest brother came out when I was about 11yrs old. I didn’t understand fully what that meant, but I knew there was drama of sorts… my parents were having hushed conversations that were punctuated with “DeadRobot, go to your room.” Later, when I was 16, my father came out of the closet for fear of meeting up with Dan in a gay bar on one of his many business trips to Toronto. Of course the family was shocked, the town of Brockvegas was scandalized, Dad lived a quiet life of a shattered bachelor for all of 10 minutes and then took up with his lover for 14 years. Family came to accept him (including Mom, to a certain degree) and we were happy chucks all again. Okay?

There’s your 8 years or so of drama packed into 125 words or less.

Skip ahead to my 17th birthday. The year I decided that if I was to live my life honestly, I had to tell the people I loved that I was a ‘mo. I decide that I have to make a trip back to Brockvegas to tell friends and family in one fast trip. Get in, drop the bomb, get out, let them decide where their loyalties lie.

Picture my Mom’s house. She’s living with her soon-to-be new husband in a sprawling Brady Bunch style split level bungalow. Mom and I are sitting in the sunken entertainment room (not the good living room, mind you, where the china figurines and untouched furniture resides, no the “living” room where the TV resides) and she magically whips out a photo of me from the year before. It’s of all my sibs laughing as we stand in our grandmother’s kitchen.

“I showed this picture to my co-worker,” My Mom starts, “And as a joke I asked her which one of my sons were gay.”

Uh. Damn. Is my Mom…

“She pointed to you. DeadRobot, are you gay?”

Holy shit my mom just trumped me.

“Yes.” Breathe… breathe… 1, 2, 3…

“Ian!” My mom calls up to the kitchen to my soon-to-be stepfather, “DeadRobot just informed me that he’s gay.”

“That’s good. When’s dinner?” We ate roast beef and yorkie puddings soon after.

Non. Event.

Lazy Vacation Butt

Distractions, Gaming, Personal Bits, Travel 1 Reply

I’ve not been doing much lately, other than watching the clock run down until our Disney Cruise/Parks amazing vacation. I have been playing the new Little Big Planet 2, and while the game play is a notch higher than the first game, the music has been dissapoint. Here’s a game play video that makes you love the game you’re playing and at the same time think “God you people, don’t you have a life?”

The limo has been ordered. It’s a stretch SUV that SharkBoy and I will bounce around in like Backgammon dice as we ride to the airport. I chose this company because they had the least amount of grammatical and coding errors on their site.

We’re trying to decide what to do on the Saturday before the cruise and I think we’ve narrowed it down to either Gatorworld or an Airboat ride (I’ll be screaming like the soundtrack from CSI: Miami… yeeeaAAAAAAaaaahhh!!). Or both. NASA has a launch scheduled for that day so here’s hoping there’s no delays. That would be cool… vooooosh!

We need to sign up for “special” roaming rates from Rogers, so we can use our iPhones in Disney. As I type that I feel a degree of sadness, having to be forced to hand over another $75 to Rogers just so I can get text and web service …on top of the $30/mo I already pay. Times like this I relish the final few minutes of the movie Fight Club and wish it would come true. Not that I’m a terrorist or anything, but if history repeats itself, then it’s safe to say the inevitable rebellion won’t be political, it will be economical.

On other news, The Bay Optical is close to being on my shit list. SharkBoy’s glasses came in yesterday but mine haven’t even been started. After catching the receptionist out on a lie (“Oh they’re right here, Mr DeadRobot!”) I got a call from the manager saying they had not been ordered yet. I had to press for an apology. You have 10 days, Bay Optical, before I release the internet hounds.

29 days to go.

The Way Back – A four hour review

General Leave a reply

Hey Kids! Shelly here!

At the 6H:13M mark, our travellers discover that they’re sleeping beside the Great Wall of China. At this point I leaned in to SharkBoy and said “This is the worst Where The Hell is Matt? video I’ve ever seen.”

Brief synopsis: a group of men escape a Siberian gulag and walk to India. No really.

Seriously, The Way Back is a good movie, if not a bit long. Peter Weir doesn’t fail to bring epic visuals again. I’ll probably be thinking about it for a few days, which is always a good marker for a good movie.

I give this movie 4 swollen ankles out of 5.

Proto-Homo

Queer stuff 8 Replies

My brother (the Gay Historian of the Soviet Era Russia) says that we now live in a “Post-Homophobic World”.

I agree wholeheartedly. I think that slowly, slowly, monkey monkey we (as a gay species) have crossed over a singularity of acceptance that transcended all religions and political boundaries. Don’t get me wrong, they’re still killing gays in parts of the world, but hey – Canadians are still allowing seal clubbing… I can proudly and ironically say “We’ve come a long way, baby!” And I mean that in a “look where feminism is today” kind of irony. With shows like The A-List: New York, we now can be accepted as douchebags, like those Jersey Shore douchebags.

My brother’s statement seems a bit dark to me. I prefer to call us living in a Proto-Homo society. Where homosexuality is evolving into main stream acceptance, not being shoehorned defiantly. Watch as some gays mesh into the middle class norm of two dads and a couple adopted kids while others who see themselves as the defenders of a gay culture, sit outside, mocking inward. See: Sky Gilbert. Oh sure, activists got us here (cheers Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence! ACT UP! Westboro Baptists Church!) but we with the money will take it from here.

You may use “Proto-Homo” if you like. I may make it into a t-shirt.

A Device to Enhance Your Testing Experience

Gaming, You Magnificent Bastard Leave a reply

When Portal was released amongst Valve’s “The Orange Box” set, I was utterly shocked that they jammed three games into one disk, for the price of one game… Now it seems they’re going to go a little further with the stand alone PS3 release. Get ready to spooge your geek organ…

Via GayGamer.net:

The PS3 version will also feature Steam cloud support for game saves. This seemed to me like an odd feature at first, until I read one of the other features of the PS3 version: a download code to unlock Portal 2 for Steam play on PC and Mac. Yeah, you get a free PC/Mac copy of the game with a purchase of the PS3 version.

In an age where game developers are nickle and diming you to death, Valve continues to say “Frag you!”. I’m loving how the console wars keep on giving and giving. Seriously if PS3 was alone in the gaming world, you’d be paying big time, like a LucasArts game or something.

I don’t know how they talked Sony into it, but I can’t wait!

Jon Erik Hexum

Celebs and Media 5 Replies

A while back I mentioned Jon Erik Hexum on Twitter and I got a response (ahem) “Why exactly do we care about this Jonah Hex dude who died when I was in Grade 9?” Oh dear. Someone missed out on the hairy 80s beefcake era. I think I was in grade 8 (Ha! Take that old man!) when the whole parade of hairy leading men came out: Gil Gerrard, Lee Majors and Jon, to mention my faves. But Jon was my first “tragic dead celebrity” crush.

He was borne of fine European stock and discovered by John Travolta’s manager. He had one season on a time travelling sci fi show called Voyagers! where I first took notice of him, being the pasty gay sci fi geek I was. Nobody else watched it because it aired beside 60 Minutes (remember kids, pre-VCR days!) and he was let go. However with his blue eyes that could cut through steel, Hollywood thought they could use him. He was picked as the male lead in Making of a Male Model alongside Joan Collins. I recall several scenes were shot sans shirt and alluded to nudity. Luckily I got to watch it alone, a miracle in a house of 5 kids, and nearly fainted at these scenes.

After that he had a walk on role in HOTEL and a major part in a movie called The Bear (I know… I know… fate!) working with Gary Busey. So you can see he was climbing past these people on the ladder to stardom. After that he was given the lead in a male model as CIA spy show called Cover Up.

Rumour has it when Jon Erik got bored the fateful day he put that gun loaded with blanks to his head, his last words were “Let’s see if this will do it.” I am sure he was referencing the actual one round he had in the gun, not alluding to any suicidal tendency. The charge was strong enough to send fragments of his temple into his brain. He remained on life support for days until his mother pulled the plug. Parts of his perfect body was donated to a long list of people (see Wiki, take it as you will). I’d love to be that kid with the 3rd degree burns who got some of his skin. I imagine they harvested off his perfect hairy pecs for some unrelated body area on the kid: “Mommy? Why is my left shoulder so much more hairier than my right?”

When he died my brothers couldn’t understand why I was so forelorn for weeks. Like a school girl weeping into her pink David Cassidy pillow, I clipped out news articles and saved them under my bed.

My first website I ever made was a ironic Jon Erik Hexum memorial, replete with animated GIF torches and tears that dripped from a rose. It was green for some reason. If you want something similar, you can go over to Find-a-grave.com and leave digital flowers on his cyber-plot. No seriously, you can.