dyer@wivax.UUCP (Stephen Dyer) (01/08/84)
I spend my holidays out of state with my family. My family really *wants* to see me at holiday time. I take the holiday as an opportunity to enjoy myself with my family while playing the "dutiful son" routine. I find that I do have to plan ahead so that I can have a good time. I recognize that when I visit my family I become pretty much non sexual. My mother is aware that I hang around with gay people, but she and I agree that such information would serve only to confuse and hurt my father because of the way he is. I do not really discuss either my romantic life or my sex life with my parents. At this point I am willing to let ride the notion that I, being primarily career oriented, have not settled down with anyone, and that I do not have that much of a romantic life. This is the purposeful intention to not confront my parents with the possibly painful fact that most of my romantic life during this period in history has been with members of the same sex. Mother is content to know that my heterosexual options remain open. (I intend to keep such options open, since I do consider myself bi-sexual.) Father would fry. When I spend time with friends of mine local to my parents, I notice that sometimes I over compensate my silence to my parents about my romantic life. I find myself talking a lot about it to my friends; perhaps more than if I talked to my parents about it. Even though I do very little if any romancing or sexing while visiting my parents for holidays, my time is spent doing other things. I visit and talk about other topics. My life is busy enough so that I am rarely at a loss for topics. Although I live an asexual existence I do not find it a strain. Instead I focus on doing other types of things with my parents when I visit. There are enough other things to do so that I am not bored. This is because my parents and I get along quite well together. We are comfortable together. An outside observer would be quick to point out that I practically erase part of myself when I visit my parents, and that I should instead seek to be completely myself with them. I want to reserve my romantic and sex life as something special, exclsively for my friends and lovers. I do not want call attention to them for political purposes or to prove myself coldly and tastelessly honest. From this viewpoint, I look upon some aspects of my personal life as things that are tasteless to inflict upon my parents who are not as liberal in their beliefs as I am. This ultimately results in the following paradox: friends and acquaintances hear a lot more about my sexlife than my parents do, since I choose to be less tasteful to people I care less about. Occasionally I will use a bit of history from my sexlife for shock value on people who I feel the need to shock and who I really don't care what their preconceptions about me are. Since my parents are out of state, and in a completely different social structure, there is an acceptably tiny probability that they will hear the possibly painful things about me that I shock other people with. Also, there are friends and lovers who I am closer to sexually than my parents. This is a direct consequence of the fact that my parents do not accept the ideas behind my romantic and sex life. I have to ask the advice of other people who do accept and understand my ideas. This turned out longer than I expected. I hope those that made the extra effort to read through it found ideas of value even beyond the topic of holidays. love, "Felix"