A younger colleague at work, Brian, is new to the department and occasionally grills me about the age and marital status of other staff members. The other day, he was firing questions at me as we whiled the afternoon away at our desks.
Brian: “Gareth’s gay, right?”
Me: “He isn’t. He has a wife, he’s mentioned her to me”
Brian: “Get lost! He’s gay. Have they got kids?”
Me: “No, they haven’t”
Brian: “EXACTLY! He’s gay!”
Me: “For god’s sake, what? etc etc“
I felt myself get prickly and defensive when he said this: not over his notion that Gareth is gay, but over the regressive idea that a married man without children can’t just be a married man without children. How often do men without kids feel insecure or an object of lurid curiosity in the eyes of their more conventional peers, I wondered.
But I didn’t really have a retort ready for Brian, a new dad from the ‘burbs, because it felt pointless. What do you say to a comment like that, and does it make any difference at all?
Send Brian my way.
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It’s hard to know what to say in the moment because the idiocy is often so staggering it requires recovery time. I think men are another hidden group in the generalised chat that erases the validity and diversity of people’s lived experience of family configurations and fertility. By people, other people mostly mean women. You’d hope an eye-roll might lodge itself somewhere in their awareness.
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It’s true: men get overlooked in those arenas all the time
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I have met in my office world way to many silly & nosy Brians and Janes. It is pointless to say anything back.
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Ugh. I don’t say anything. Mainly because people like that, I will never be able to change their minds.
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Ugh. What a crap comment. I don’t know if people like that can be swayed to believe that you can be married, not have children, and not be gay, and that more importantly — NONE OF THAT IS ANY OF HIS BUSINESS. I think what Bryce comes up against more often than not is the whole “You’re so lucky” and then the “JUst you wait…say goodbye to everything you enjoy when you guys have your baby.” I feel like it becomes a competition of how awful fatherhood can be in some ways, which I do not get. I wish there could just be an end to the supposing, to the judging, to the butting noses into private business.
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OMG! In that situation, my initial reaction would have been running to the bathroom and cry! 😦
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Stories like this just leave me speechless.
This is so very wrong, yet what can we do about it?
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