![]() Sometimes you can be bathed in evidence of a plain fact and not recognize it because you don’t believe you’re the sort of person that fact applies to. I’ve known folks who didn’t realize their parents were swingers despite copious evidence because it never occurred to them their parents could be swingers. I’ve had friends who took years to realize their Grampaw wasn’t allowed to be alone with them because he was a pederast. Yet that’s how life happens sometimes: you can have all the pieces, and not put them together because nobody gave you the word. My Uncle was not, but he apparently did very well with the few women who volunteered with the organization.) (I called up my Uncle Tommy to confirm they were gay. And I didn’t think that I was the sort of kid who hung around with gay dudes while I was eleven, so even though I had all these facts – a pretty much all-male volunteer squad in Greenwich Village, the stereotypical gay voice, flamboyance, great dressers all – they never coalesced into “Teenaged Ferrett hung around with gay dudes.” But nobody had specifically called them gay. That’s when someone said, “Man, the AIDS epidemic totally destroyed the gays in Greenwich Village,” and I thought, “Man, I hope all of my Uncle’s old buddies from Greenwich Village are okay WAIT WHAT” I did not realize they were probably gay until I was almost thirty. ![]() They were bold, unashamed of their lisps – which was critical to a kid who’d been to vocal therapy to lower his squeaky voice – and they all dressed super-well. ![]() After the volunteering shift we’d all go out to a bar, and they’d sneak me into the corner – very grown up – and they’d drink beers and tell theatrical stories while my uncle gave me a roll of quarters and I played Donkey Kong Junior. They were all really funny guys, flamboyant, and they treated me like a grownup – which was to say they made jokes I didn’t get, and didn’t footnote. He brought me along to help, which made me feel very grown up I was eleven, and yet here I was stamping envelopes, doing data entry, working in an office. My Uncle Tommy did volunteer work in Greenwich Village back in the early 1980s, when I was a teenager. (NOTE: Based on time elapsed since the posting of this entry, the BS-o-meter calculates this is 8.442% likely to be something that Ferrett now regrets.)
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