in your new life...

When a gay man or lesbian comes out, friends and family sometimes ask lots of questions. Many of the questions are fairly innocent and just want clarification or explanation. When I came out, no one asked many questions. In fact, my best friend from high school had the typical response "I know."

My husband David's grandmother had a different type of question. To give some background, David and I started dating the summer between his junior and senior years of college. The next spring, his grandparents said that they were driving from their retirement home in coastal North Carolina to California for David's graduation. David didn't want a scene if they figured out our relationship, so he wrote a coming out letter to them in the spring. As is so typical of his stoic German family, nothing was said about the letter or his coming out (come on people, don't just brush issues under the rug again, get things out there and talk about them!)

The trip and graduation seemed to go well. Then his grandmother got David alone and pounced with her question. She asked "In your NEW LIFE, who does the cooking?" The question confused David, and he thought "Why does she care about cooking?", so he answered the literal question she was asking by saying "Whoever is hungry." She got a puzzled look on her face but didn't ask anything more. A day or so later David thought back to the question and realized what she was really asking. He thought 'Oh, she wasn't really asking about the cooking, she wanted to know which one of us was "the woman" in the relationship and therefore does the cooking, and who is "the man"'. Because for a woman of her generation, there had to be a man and a woman in relationships, so one of us had to be a man and the other had to play the role of a woman. She was the dutiful housewife, doing the domestic work and supporting her husband's career. She couldn't conceive of the much more equal relationship that David and I have. I think David's answer was perfect, since we don't have roles like that, and we do share the cooking.