New links

Some people have said for years I dwell too much on Topic H, and, while that's the premise of the site, I can't deny that it makes me seem more of a gloomy killjoy than I am. I don't think I'm being immodest when I say that people who know me in the flesh know that I can be as funny and witty as ... ahem ... Oscar Wilde. And obviously I have secular interests -- I'm a huge fan of both sports and politics and beer (only "chicks" are left out -- durnit). And like most guys with my issues, I was a pop-culture junkie as a boy. As a result of all this, "blending in" among straight guys has never been hard for me.

So, partly to present a more-balanced view of who I am and maybe come across as a more attractive human being, and partly to make regular blogging psychologically easier -- I've decided to let myself write about other topics.

I've removed some dead or radically changed sites from my link list at the right. And I've also added a new category -- "homocons," a couple of whom I've come to enjoy reading and interacting some with on Twitter. It should go without saying that these are sites of people who practice the lifestyle and/or identify as gay (which is why they're in a different category than Catholic and Same-Sex-Attraction sites. They're not pornographic but the morality of the homosexual act and derivative conclusions are assumed and/or argued for. The over-scrupulous should consider that your warning).

Accidental outing

Though I can console myself that it was a self-inflicted wound under the best of circumstances. What happened was the 2nd-biggest fear men like myself have -- outing himself via a slip of the tongue in an otherwise innocent situation.

I was having dinner with a fairly well-known conservative blogger (whom I'll call "K"). By the time the subject rolled around to Andrew Sullivan and his infinite wickedness, we were both on our third beer, and I mused aloud, "the guy makes me ashamed to be gay and Catholic."

Ooopsie ...

My face went red, though I will go to my grave uncertain whether K immediately caught it and registered it. Perhaps if I had not drawn attention by my reaction, it would have passed in one ear and out the other, like the lyrics to a pop song you've heard a thousand times.

All I said was "oh, man."

But K's reaction is what I want to share with others -- partly because it gives the lie to the "homophobe" narrative, both in the Christian religion and political conservatism. The fact is that very few conservatives, even those of a religious sort, really care what someone does in the bedroom as long as, as they say, we don't do anything to frighten the horses. (The public issues that surround homosexuality are ... well, public issues.) And I have never personally been treated badly by a religious or conservative person who knew about my homosexual attractions or behaviors (though I have seen the anti-gay hate in online or otherwise impersonal situations).

K was raised Southern Baptist and still hews to that ol' time religion (he's always been suspicious of my ties to the Beast of Rome). But his dominant reaction was to feel sorry for my embarrassment at that moment. He immediately referred to the lesbianism of one of his favorite link-buddies, whom I knew about, and said "we went back and forth on this and it never affected anything." He assured me it didn't matter and he didn't care, though he professed some surprise. When I asked K whether I tripped his gaydar, he said "no, but my wife did ask me" after one of the several occasions we met. "And I said, 'no, he's Catholic and just a celibate'," K told me.

However, in an unrelated context a long time ago, K had once told me that women had better gaydars than men. I asked him how he knew that, and he said that his 16-year-old daughter had surmised upon a single meeting that an adult friend of K's was gay (and not because the subject came up). K said his wife backed the daughter up, saying that the friend tipped them both off via his eyes. He was not scoping them out, not checking them out as eye candy. The wife said K's friend also apparently gave no detectable hint of interest in his interactions with other women to which she was witness. Women are so used to being visually assessed by men that they can spot it right away when it's not happening, K told me back then. It's much easier to fool a man, I guess, with overt behavior. I'm pretty masculine acting and have no difficulty "picking up" (if that's the right term) drinking buddies and single-serving friends.

So if we wanna stay closeted, guys, we gotta have to practice at scoping out the chicks. Otherwise we're only fooling half the human race. Here's a photo of Kim Kardashian for practice.

One of the happiest days of life

A few weeks ago I got a call from Dale Price who, in a bout of temporary insanity (I swear I didn't threaten the guy) told me that he and Heather were expecting a fifth child to be born in October and "we need a Godfather." (Heather has already made an announcement, and Dale let it slip en passant in his combox, though I can't find it very quickly.)

I was frankly so nonplussed that I didn't handle it well. The very notion of me as a father of any description is not something that's been in my head for decades. But once I had accepted and talked with Dale for a bit, I was beaming with the same sort of humble pride (if that makes any sense) that I imagine affects men when they find out they'll be biological fathers, though they generally have a little more of an inkling that such news is potentially in the cards.

Goes without saying, of course, that the Prices will be the primary religious educators and parents and authority figures and whatnot. But in several months there will be a human being for whom I have some responsibility before God, a kind of parentage. I can't even type those words in without welling up. I even said to my confessor that "I now have a reason for living," though he (understandably) didn't care for those precise words and said, "you always did, this just makes it clearer to you."

And please forgive the joke pic ... too obvious too pass up.