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by Topher Payne
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February 17, 2012 00:08 |
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 My Aunt Trish was passing through Atlanta, and stayed in our guest room for the night. I had to work late, so by the time I got home, she and my husband Preppy were already pretty deep into their second bottle of wine. The conversation had turned to big ideas, as the second bottle of wine tends to dictate.
Trish was reminiscing about her mother, my Grandmama, a fiercely loyal, funny, incredibly opinionated, strident woman. She was the sort of person who always let you know exactly where you stood with her, and if you stood in the wrong place, it would send a cold chill down your spine. I long ago made my peace with how much I take after her.
Grandmama died before I came out, and I’ve always felt that was for the best. She was a Depression-raised churchgoing conservative. My wanting to kiss other boys would have probably stuck in her craw, even if I did marry a nice fella from Mississippi.
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by Topher Payne
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February 03, 2012 00:00 |
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At some point in every relationship, you have to learn how to fight. The stereotype is that women talk about feelings and men talk about issues, but I don’t think that’s true. In a guy-girl pairing, that just means she’ll talk about the feelings she has about the issues, and he’ll talk about the issues he has resulting from his feelings, so ta-da, now everybody’s on a level playing field.
In our house, I’m the one who likes to discuss how I feel about things, because I think feelings are fascinating, and also because they’re handy when you’re totally in the wrong. If you can’t argue based on fact, you can always argue based on feeling. Because a feeling is never wrong. And I prefer never being wrong.
But discussing the minutiae of your relationship can be a bit like describing individual blades of grass — while each is a marvel of creation, no doubt worthy of close examination, you could exhaust yourself with the task for months without covering much ground. After you’ve settled into a life with someone, you tend to look at the whole yard and determine whether it’s time to do some serious work, or if you can wait ‘til the weekend. Or maybe the weekend after that.
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by Topher Payne
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January 20, 2012 00:00 |
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Mitt Romney is just frustrating the hell out of me these days. The part of me that craves a two-party system, with the possibility of having more than one option in a presidential election, gets all excited when he appears in a debate and says things like, “not that we want to discriminate against people or to suggest that gay couples are not just as loving and can’t also raise children well.” Whoa! Yes, baby! The Republican presumptive nominee publicly acknowledges our relationships can actually be based in love, and that we don’t automatically destroy the children we raise. This, sadly, can be considered progress. But then he gives us this: “But it’s instead a recognition that, for society as a whole, that the nation presumably would be better off if children are raised in a setting where there’s a male and a female. And there are many cases where there’s not possible: divorce, death, single parents, gay parents, and so forth. But for a society to say we want to encourage, through the benefits that we associate with marriage, people to form partnerships between men and women and then raise children, which we think will — that will be the ideal setting for them to be raised.”
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by Topher Payne
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December 23, 2011 00:00 |
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We haven’t actually spoken to our schizophrenic next-door neighbor in about six months, save for one afternoon when I was in the back yard, on the phone with my sister. I made the mistake of looking in the direction of Crazypants’ house, which prompted her to scream, “Don’t you look over here!”
I was theoretically happy to oblige, but it’s incredibly difficult to not look in a particular direction when one is standing in one’s own back yard. Go on, try it. It is a challenge.
For the past two years, Crazypants has been convinced that we are sneaking into her home and disabling her security system, garbage disposal, and other home electronics. It’s a blind faith usually reserved for religious fanatics — the difference being when something bad happens, she doesn’t think it’s part of God’s master plan, she thinks it’s a couple of gays with too much time on their hands.
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by Topher Payne
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December 09, 2011 00:00 |
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Bryan posted a message on his Facebook wall last week, with a question: “What would you do if doc says you may only have a few days left?”
The inquiry was not theoretical, or meant to inspire discussions of ideology. It was a scheduling question. That morning, he was informed by medical professionals that he should prepare for the ending of what any of us would call a life. Just because your vitals can still be measured as functioning does not mean you are living. I don’t know what you’d call that. Existing, I guess. But frankly, even that’s debatable.
Bryan and I are the same age: 32. The idea that he should even be considering what his final acts will be is monumentally unfair. But cancer isn’t terribly concerned with fairness. We met because of the disease. I meet a lot of people that way, kind of like how guys who’ve dated the same horrible ex have something to chat about.
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