a lesbian christmas

I moved to Denver in 2005. I met and hired a great engineer named J.

It turns out J was a lesbian. She and her partner had struggled along with the whole family thing (getting them to accept that she was gay) and the Colorado thing (people aren't as open minded as you might expect given that fact that Boulder exists in this state).

Anyway, having no plans for christmas that year, I got an invite to J's house. She and her partner promised an extravaganza of Italian food the likes of which I would never experience anywhere else. The catch - J's partner, M, had invited her parents to dinner. M's parents were in total denial of the whole lesbian situation. It promised to be a night of arguments and anger.

But, I was hungry. I said yes.

I should mention here that I usually take the last two weeks of the year off and had decided, in my time off, to repaint my house since I wasn't too pleased with the grey colors the previous owner left behind. So I painted and painted, for 10 days straight, 18 hours a day. It was grueling. At 4 oclock in the morning of the day I was due to have dinner at J's I took a 14 foot fall in my stairwell when one of the bricks I was edging on crumbled as I was trying to touch up the ceiling. My bad knee was broadcasting some serious pain.

So I arrived for dinner with a cartoonish limp, my hands curled and shaking from tendonitis due to all that painting. I was probably also high from the paint fumes and had a fair bit of paint in my hair. I showed M and J my bruises from the fall which were pretty impressive. M's parents looked me up and down like "where the fuck did they find this...thing?"

Dinner was served at a rather frosty table. M's parents were astutely in denial, as if Jen and M were room mates or something. The conversation was forced and was mostly about the weather. I was trying to pick up and hold a fork in my hand without making a spectacle of myself, which was hard. I couldn't use my knife at all because my hands were so worked I couldn't keep a grip on anything. J had to cut up my food.

I had been warned beforehand not to bring up the "L" word. But, after an hour of tense conversation, when M's dad asked me, "So, are you dating anyone?" I responded "Are you asking me because you care about my love life, or are you trying to figure out if I'm a lesbian too?" There was dead silence at the table, during which Jen shot me a look that said "I am so going to kick you in the cunt" and then M's parents started laughing. Within minutes lesbian jokes were abounding. It was a nice way to spend the holiday.

And later, M's parents didn't even blink an eye when J kissed me on New Year's, when I met up with them at a party after driving 18 hours from my parents' house. Though the neighbors whose party we were attending were probably like "WTF?"

Later, someone in the neighborhood kicked in the back window of J and M's car and filled the back with broken beer bottles. There were other things done to them that would easily classify as hate crimes. They moved to Washington DC in the hopes of finding a better environment to live in.

This year J decided she was sick of being a lesbian and she is now dating a guy. M is with someone else. And I'll never have such good italian wedding soup again.