A couple years later, while I was living back home, I started dating somebody. Fairly innocently, platonically, we'd gone to the beach one day and had come back to my parents' house and taken showers.

We were naked, snapping each other with towels, and in walks my father and sees me in close proximity to a naked man. There was no getting out of it. His head whipped away, not looking, and on he went. I heard the footsteps go to the bar.

My pal freaked. He got dressed on the way out the door and was gone. I fussed and fretted. I heard Dad not moving. He's sitting in a chair next to the bar.

I remember laughing, thinking this is so stupid; there was coming a day when we were going to have to have this conversation, but at least there could have been something really going on. I ended up going upstairs and sitting down. He'd probably had two drinks by that time. I sat down next to him and said, "Hi, Pop."

"Hello, Courtland, anything new?" I can hear it, in the West Virginia accent. I said, "Dad, we can talk about this, if you want to, but I'm not going to force it, if it's something you just want to leave alone. If you want to talk about it, I will." Dad said "Well, Courtland," (and whenever he called me Courtland, I knew I was in deep shit)

"I don't consider that a natural lifestyle, but it runs in the family, and you're just going to have to be careful about what you do in this house." What he meant was he has two uncles who are gay. They're his mother's brothers. I saw a lot of things in that statement. "It runs in the family": it's genetic; "but I don't consider it natural." How could it be both genetic and not natural? 

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