I’m gay, and so are you
A carol, a meme, a reunion. On the older meaning of a word, the newer one that arrived uninvited, and the daily question of who gets told which.
An old Christmas carol puts everyone in gay apparel. That line wasn’t the original one. It replaced a verse about draining the barrel. More than a century later a card company printed it as “fun apparel,” to avoid being misread.
Nobody can ask a word what it will come to mean. Nobody can ask a child how they’ll turn out, either.
The corner
The first thing I ever admitted about myself in public was that I was a nerd.
In elementary school, while most kids were outside, I was in a corner with a pocketful of monsters I’d raised on a handheld. I was made fun of for it, but it stopped as soon as I quit behaving as though it were a secret.
Nobody calls that coming out. The shape is the same, though. You know a thing about yourself, you can guess roughly what the room will do with it, and one day the hiding costs more than the room’s opinion does.
Until then you smile. A Hungarian engineer did that for a stock photo once, and the internet decided the smile was hiding something. That’s where Hide the Pain Harold came from. The person behind the face, András Arató, resisted the meme for a while, then took the name for himself. He gives talks as Harold now.
There’s a name for the work behind that smile. Audience segregation: a different performance for every circle, and the effort spent keeping them apart. The sociologist Erving Goffman coined the term, and we all do some of it. Nobody walks into a meeting and says “Hi, I’m Sam, I’m in debt.” Or in therapy. Or gay.
Opening up about yourself isn’t one grand event. It’s a decision you make again for every new set of people, and again after that. Sometimes it isn’t yours to make. Most of it isn’t a conversation at all. It’s a split second on a street, deciding whether to hold hands.
Decided for you
A neighbor tells you about the state aid for families with children. “You should look into it.” You say you wouldn’t qualify. “Why not?”
Five minutes into knowing someone, in a corridor, and you’re settling a question you hadn’t planned to answer today.
In Hungary we use a single pronoun for everyone. English makes you choose one for the person you’re talking about, often before they get the chance to say which. The toy aisle sorts us even earlier, pink down one side and blue down the other.
People get accused of oversharing. Most of the time, someone else asked first.
Absorbed
Everybody has something they lose track of themselves inside.
A marathon. A bakery in its third generation. A costume that leaves the wardrobe one day a year. A choir. A garden nobody else is allowed to weed.
Different pursuits, one state. And whatever theirs is, people reach for the same word for how they feel about it. They call it pride.
One decision here was mine to make. This post didn’t come out in June. A month is a month, and everything else happens in the other eleven. Visibility runs on a calendar. Nothing else does.
Not a plot point
Chicago Party Aunt, created by Chris Witaske, Jon Barinholtz, and Katie Rich, follows Diane, a hairdresser who never really outgrew her twenties. Then her nephew Daniel moves in for a gap year, a nerd with no idea what he wants out of life yet. He’s also gay.
The show stages a revelation about none of that. Nothing there gets an episode of its own, or explains why a character exists. Rory O’Malley, who voices Daniel, talks about him having to find a job and feed himself at eighteen:
Those are big, scary things for everyone and I think it’s great to see it through a lens of a character who is gay, but not necessarily have that be what the entire character is about.
That’s a narrow target. Overshoot and the trait becomes a storyline with music under it. Undershoot and it reads as a box being ticked, which audiences notice and get tired of, fairly. Land it and the trait is one quality among the many that make a person.
It works the same way off screen. At JSConf Budapest in 2024, Ante Tomić gave a talk on what the web is like for a senior engineer who’s hard of hearing. A room full of developers spent that session in someone else’s seat. No checklist arranges that.
Tanár, pedagógus
We had our ten-year class reunion this summer.
One of us mentioned her side job, finished her drink, and left for it. Nobody flinched.
Then our class teacher spoke. He’d been let go in our final year, but he kept turning up unpaid until we graduated. Hungarian splits what English keeps in one word. A tanár teaches you a subject. A pedagógus is responsible for who you turn out to be. He’d only ever been interested in the second.
We already knew. Years earlier he caught us drinking on a class trip, and told neither the school nor our parents. We got a talk about honesty instead, with ourselves and with one another.
Once we grew old enough to drink legally, he invited the class to his cottage and poured nine kinds of craft beer, each with its own history, to show us how it’s done.
Plainly
Everything above was easier to write than this. Out loud it’s harder still, and it has never once been casual.
I’m gay. Take it for what it’s worth.