After my parents, they were among the first people I came out to, and boy was that scary: What if they thought I had a crush on one of them? As grunty teenagers to whom conversation didn’t come easy, we could spend hours on the Nintendo GameCube in my family’s back room. My three best buddies in high school all played. I suspect that’s why so many of my closest male friendships have evolved at least in part around gaming. The common objective gives you something to talk about, and not having to face each other means you don’t have to lay the full weight of your emotions on each other. All of the classic “male bonding” activities are like this-when you’re hunting, or working on a car, or shooting free throws, you can look together at the deer, or the transmission, or the basket, and talk. We get along well when there’s a project in front of us-when we’re side by side looking at some third thing. Men are good at relating to each other in this way.

The task of swinging on webs through Spider-Man’s pixelated streets absorbed enough of our attention that, looking at him with my peripheral vision, I could tell him this raw truth. He took it great, as I’d predicted, but I think we were both glad to have something in front of us that we could look at while we talked. Crying would have been utter humiliation. It would have been intolerable to tell him face-to-face I almost certainly would have choked up, as I had while telling my mom earlier that day. I still felt icky using the word gay about myself (“I’m … not straight” is what I said). The game also gave us something to focus on, so we wouldn’t have to look each other in the eye. The normalcy of that ritual was comforting to me. Video games were something we always did together-half an hour or so every weeknight. We were playing Spider-Man 3, and somehow, that made it easier. At the very least, that vision would have to be radically reconfigured once I told him I’d only ever had romantic feelings for other boys.

He teaches and shows, you watch and learn, and a vision of your future life emerges, a picture of successful manhood that is in some ways the most cherished thing you and your dad share. Marrying a nice girl and getting her good and pregnant is part of that, just like playing catch in the backyard is. Sons want to be like their fathers-they just do-and fathers want to see their sons become men. I was pretty sure he’d react all right.īut it was still hard, because coming out to your dad is hard. On social issues, he takes a laissez-faire stance: Live and let live, just don’t hurt anyone.

My father is an artist from a family of New York intellectuals. People ask me if it was hard-he’s a political conservative and a Christian, and they wonder if I was afraid he would condemn me. I came out to my dad while we were playing Spider-Man 3 on PlayStation 2.

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