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When my da was a boy his father ran a dude ranch catering to hunters, so he grew up with horses.  Grampa had this one horse, who’s name escapes me at the moment, that was a really good pack horse.  Well, this horse broke it’s leg in a prairie dog hole but my grampa didn’t want to shoot it in hopes that it would mend and he would be able to keep riding it.  So, my da and his brother hauled it out to one of the back pastures and got it back on it’s feet.  Everyday they’d go out and feed it and make sure it was still upright.  About a week later the horse was on the ground and they had to go and haul it upright again.  Next morning same thing.  So they kept hauling it upright and hauling it upright until the horse decided it had had enough and keeled over.  The horse was left to rot in field and my da forgot about it for a good week.  One day him and his brother headed out to the field and found that the horse had bloated up from being in the sun.  Well, my da, being the highly intelligent fella he is, turned to his brother and said, “I wonder what would happen if I poked it with my knife?”  So, he walks over to the horse and had just barely brushed the skin with his knife when the horse’s belly exploded from all the gas build up.  My da, he just stands there for a moment and then takes off like a rocket down the hill towards the pond, screaming at my gramma to get him some soap.  The horse intestines were like glue and it took him a couple of hours to get it all off.  Moral of the story:  Always stand to the side when poking dead things, you never know what might happen.

As you might of guessed, my family has a history of doing odd things but you got to cut us a little slack considering we grew up in the nation’s largest superfund site.  Well, except for my ma but she grew up in West Virginia and that’s a whole nother story.  Needless to say but she refuses to watch Deliverance because it reminds her too much of home.

Anyway, the reasons I post these stories is to show that even a family as backwoods as mine can still defy expectations and be totally accepting of a gay child.  I’m proof of that.  I told my ma one night when I was 12 and while she was washing dishes that I was a lesbian and she didn’t even miss a beat, she just said “that’s ok.”  My brother found out when I was 15 when he hacked my files on the computer and found my pictures of naked women.  He stormed into the kitchen, looked at me and said “are you gay?”  I was caught a little off guard and just kinda nodded my head.   He raised his eyebrows and said “at least that explains the pictures.”   Now my da, he didn’t catch on until I was 17.  I was sporting an impressive array of hickys one morning when I got home and he knew damn well I just spent the night at another girl’s house.  So the next night atabout 2 in the morning he turned to my ma and said “they’re gay ain’t they?”  This time my ma was caught off guard so she just said “well, yes honey they are.”   He was pretty floored and ended up crying when I saw him in the morning saying how it must of been his fault .  Needless to say I was a bit at a loss trying to explain to my da how you can’t turn someone gay.  But he got over it and within the week he was giving me shit about girls and how amazed he was that he didn’t figure it out sooner.  I just looked at him and said “you think you would have caught on when I asked for a chainsaw as my sweet sixteen birthday present.”  He just smiled and said, “you’d think.”

P.S.  A year after my da found out I was gay, he sat me down and apologized for everything he had ever said about gays being the scum of the earth.  Not bad for a old miner, huh?