healingmirth (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
healingmirth) wrote2022-08-30 06:15 pm
healingmirth) wrote2022-08-30 06:15 pm
I don't know where the hell else I would post this
so every week for the past few years, I've had a Tuesday morning coffee meeting with a coworker. It's usually maybe fifteen minutes of work conversation sprinkled into over an hour of anything else - my mom, who he knows; our church, which we've both belonged to since the 90s; his family, which is extensive; the latest documentary thing he watched on netflix or HBO or the podcast clip rattling around my brain; whatever the fuck is currently going most obviously wrong in the news, the world, the country, or politics.
We live in a ~progressive~ town, he's fairly liberal but occasionally agrees with a good-faith republican idea. He's almost 20 years older than I am, grew up Catholic but left it ages ago.
Anyway, over the weekend he and his wife dropped his youngest, lacrosse-playing, son off at college. At a very artsy, majority female, fairly diverse school. Something like 35% of the undergraduate population is "LGB...T...plus...(in a slightly hushed tone) Queer self-identifying," he said. Although now that I'm thinking about it again, he might've said that was the composition of the incoming class, not the total population. Anyway. It's a school one of my best friends attended, over twenty years ago. I know it pretty well. I don't think the school has changed all that much (except for the men's lacrosse team, which was definitely not a thing back then) but the world around it had a ton of catching up to do.
Anyway. I've been thinking about it all afternoon. It honestly might be the first time he's said the word queer out loud, as a polite, kind, white man, rapidly approaching retirement age.
We live in a ~progressive~ town, he's fairly liberal but occasionally agrees with a good-faith republican idea. He's almost 20 years older than I am, grew up Catholic but left it ages ago.
Anyway, over the weekend he and his wife dropped his youngest, lacrosse-playing, son off at college. At a very artsy, majority female, fairly diverse school. Something like 35% of the undergraduate population is "LGB...T...plus...(in a slightly hushed tone) Queer self-identifying," he said. Although now that I'm thinking about it again, he might've said that was the composition of the incoming class, not the total population. Anyway. It's a school one of my best friends attended, over twenty years ago. I know it pretty well. I don't think the school has changed all that much (except for the men's lacrosse team, which was definitely not a thing back then) but the world around it had a ton of catching up to do.
Anyway. I've been thinking about it all afternoon. It honestly might be the first time he's said the word queer out loud, as a polite, kind, white man, rapidly approaching retirement age.