Live Free Or Die

Sometimes, in spite of my general reluctance to drive out to the suburbs, I feel the need to visit my mother. It's usually just to check in, make sure watching too much Rachael Ray on the Food Channel hasn't affected her ability to speak without ending sentences in chipper question marks. However before venturing out into the SUV stocked wilds, I have to take some precautions. On a recent visit to my parents' abode, I decided that, in order to ward off the homogonizing evils of suburbia, I would bring along my friend Sammy, a transguy who is obsessed with Frankenstien, dismantling electronics purchased at Goodwill, and penguins, among other things. He served as my one person gay pride parade, steadfastly and moral boostingly queer in this time of need.

Sammy is a brave soul. Having grown-up in the backwoods of New Hampshire, he takes the "Live Free or Die" motto in a direction that I'm pretty certain the independence-minded originator of the phrase, General John Stark, would never have intended. Thus Sammy did not flinch when I suggested visiting a place where the Greek family in town is touted as the population's "diversity."

The last time Sammy came with me to my parents' house was over a year ago for my town's Fourth of July celebration. When he went to buy a hot dog at a stand set up by the Boy Scouts, he began to reminisce with the scout master about his days tagging along with his brother's troop. After sufficiently demonstrating substantial knowledge of the Scouts' ways, the troop leader asked Sammy if he had ever thought of volunteering as a master. Sammy bluntly informed the guy that he was a queer - to which the scout master rejoined that it would be alright so long as Sammy kept his mouth shut about his gayness. When Sammy told me about this encounter, I felt the back of my throat start to burn with indignation. I have to say I had to suppress an urge to find the guy and punch his lights out for being an ass to my friend. But as we all know, violence doesn't solve anything. (Plus, who was I kidding? I probably couldn't punch the lights out of a firefly, let alone a full grown man in the form of a scout master.)

My mother prides herself on not being "one of those people" that make up a significant portion of my hometown. In the late 1960's she was a hippie, and lived out of a VW bus with my dad, a Vietnam vet who, upon leaving the army, grew his hair long, stopped shaving his beard, and never looked back. When you get my mother tipsy she tells great stories about seeing Janis Joplin in concert and about her college roommate who insisted on storing bales of marijuana in their dorm room. Nowadays you're more likely to find her complaining about the lady at the office who doesn't know how to correctly fill out TPS reports than get her out to a political rally for any of her supposed pet causes. I can't say I really blame her, being an adult comes with a bevy of time-sucking responsibilities. And she did manage to write a letter to her state representative for me when certain members of the Massachusetts legislature were preoccupied with notion that the sky would fall if gay marriage stayed on the books for a second longer.

That said, my friends confuse the shit out of her, Sammy in particular. Aside from being trans, Sammy is the perfect person to introduce to one's parents. He's smart, funny, and exceedingly gracious. He spent the afternoon attempting to convince my mother to take up origami as a relaxing hobby by making her bushels of paper animals. (This idea didn't fly, as no female in my family has any skills at crafts whatsoever.) She, in return, found him charming, yet butchered any attempts to use the correct pronoun to refer to him in his presence. Sammy, fortunately, smiled politely, and pretended not to notice.

We managed to get through most of the visit without my mother lecturing me on graduate schools, somewhat of a sore subject between us at the moment. As Sammy and I went to leave, she pulled out sheets of information about programs, printed off the internet, "just as suggestions" for places I might want to apply.

I didn't mind that she was trying to be helpful, but the schools she had researched seemed to fit the personality and needs of some other daughter - and as far as I know, I'm an only child. Because in the profession I hope to join, program location is a fairly significant factor in determining where you'll wind up post graduation, I was unsure as to why my mother seemed to have selected for "Alternative Lifestyles Not an Alternative" as a top criteria for my future education.

"Ummm...You do realize that there's a highly probable chance that I'll say or do something to get driven out of town by mobs with pitchforks in just about every one of these places you've printed out information on?" I asked, half-jokingly.

"Well," my mother replied, sighing heavily, "I was just trying to be helpful." Her voice pitched high in defensiveness, "You said you wanted to go someplace warm or pretty or something."

"I said I wanted to go someplace without a lot of snow that has some diversity and is high on the tolerance scale of said diversity."

"You just want to go someplace where there are gay people," she shot back, and if you could dislocate your eyeballs from rolling them too strenuously, she would have done so just then. Sammy's gaze darted between me and my mother, and I felt guilty for letting things turn awkward.

"Every place has gay people. I just want to go somewhere where gay folks can feel comfortable being themselves," I tried to explain. I looked at her, decided it wasn't worth getting into an argument about at the moment, and thanked her for her efforts.

When Sammy and I got out to the car, he asked me if I thought that my mother suspected that he and the rest of our non-straight friends were a "bad influence" on me, like simply hanging out with gay people could turn you gay.

"Yeah, probably," I answered honestly. "You're such a terrible influence on me, Sammy. It's all because you made me watch March of the Penguins with you. Everyone knows that certain penguins have been discovered embracing the gay lifestyle. It gave me ideas," I smirked.

"Do you think she's trying to steer you toward the heterosexual light by pushing schools that are in White Bread, America?" he questioned seriously.

"Oh, of course." I replied. For a person who was so concerned that being gay would mean that my life would be full of hardships, I couldn't for the life of me figure out why my mother was attempting to steer me down the path of greatest resistance. There are other options out there nowadays. And I'm certainly not going to change who I am just because it would make my life some perverted classification of the idea "easier."

Plus, I'm not sure why my mother wants me to attend schools in hotbeds of conservatism. If, by her logic, spending too much time with gay people has made me go "funny," then I'm not sure why she would think consorting with Republicans wouldn't have the same effect? While my mother may have occasional blind spots in her liberalism, I know for a fact that becoming any other kind of bush lover would quite probably get me disowned.