When I was in high school, I had a laptop. It was the first computer in our family to have Windows XP. Up until then, we’d had Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and Windows Millennium Edition on family computers. My family was never raised around anything different, least of all Macs. Nobody we ever knew had used Macs. At all. I guess it’s just the result of being in smaller communities my whole life, but that’s how it goes. The only time we were ever exposed to Macs were in quick 30-second shots of them on commercials, and my Dad would always change the channel when they came on. Not Mac commercials, I mean. Commercials, period. He hated all commercials, not just the ones for Macs. There was honestly a large part of my childhood where I wasn’t aware Macs existed at all. Everyone was a PC. Everyone...
Then the 1999 iMac came out, bursting onto the scene with its garish purple pinstripe design, its forsaking of the traditional “tower”, and its minimal number of cords. A power cord, a phone line, and a keyboard and mouse? What about the sound cables? What about the cable that connects the monitor? What about the 32-pin printer cable? Wait, you’re saying the printer uses the same slot that the keyboard and mouse use? Wait, you’re saying the keyboard and mouse use the same slots? And where’s the floppy drive? I’ve gotta have a floppy drive! This whole business is preposterous! It’s an abomination! PC society won’t stand for this!
In high school, as the iPod was gaining tractions, my friends and I would talk before classes about how dumb anyone would be to want to own a Mac. It couldn’t play games, and it was weird, I mean, no right-click? How could anybody like that? It was entirely weird, and nobody in their right mind could possibly think that it was a sensible way of using a computer. Seriously, it doesn’t have a right-mouse button. That’s just wrong.
Then I got brought in on my high school newspaper staff, and the walls came down. The entire journalism lab was nothing but iMacs. Every single computer, lacking a tower. Every single computer, without a right mouse button. I had no idea how to react. It was a world that worked entirely differently than the one I had known before. I didn’t know how to react to it. So, naturally, I explored the more accessible parts and then railed against them for not being like Windows. I have to hold down the control button to right-click? There’s only one menubar at the top of the screen? All of the keyboard shortcuts are handled through the button with the apple on it? I hate this all, it’s so unlike the world I came from.
On a completely different note, I was in debate class since I was a freshman. If my utter fall into academic mediocrity can be traced back to anything, it’s that class, and its GPA-crushing curve. It was also, not surprisingly, one of my least favorite classes. The topics we had to prepare cases for were decided upon by some faraway consortium and argued in a style called Lincoln-Douglas. Why? Who knows. The debates were incredibly stuffy and nobody in the class ever truly cared about the topics we were given, so we never talked about them (I mentioned this class crushed my GPA?). What we did end up talking about was truly the most nefarious topic of any we could consider in the Nebraskan suburb: gay rights.
Now, there were a lot of kids in this debate class, and new ones cycled in every year, but for as many times as I can remember having an argument on gay rights, memory pushes me into a one-versus-many war of ideas. That’s probably hyperbole, but honestly, I felt entirely outnumbered in those arguments. It didn’t matter, though. I knew, no matter what those kids said, that they were wrong. Homosexuality was a sin, and it didn’t deserve the same rights as a normal lifestyle.
They kept saying my ideas were “unfounded”, but that’s ridiculous. My ideas were founded in my childhood, in my upbringing. My family was brought up by the military; For as long as my brother, myself, or my sister had been alive, my dad’s job dictated where we lived. All of our schooling up until middle school was literally on a military base. Almost all of our friends were in the exact same position, and heck, none of us knew any gay people. We knew what the word meant, sure, but to know an actual gay person? That’d be crazy. Not that we’d want to, I mean, if talk on the playground was true, then having a gay friend made you gay, too.
The only time we were ever exposed to homosexuality was on TV or in the movies, and then it was only talked about briefly and in jokes before you would move on to another topic. As a family, we didn’t know any gay people… Well, I guess that isn’t entirely true. My mom and dad knew that one of my aunts was gay long before any of us kids knew; she was married to a man later described to me as “handsome” and “rich,” and then she left him. Honestly, if my debate friends didn’t know homosexuality was a sin, they should have after learning that it caused women to leave their husbands who were handsome and rich. But I didn’t know about her until much later than that incident. The first gay person that I really knew was my uncle. A similar story: he met a woman and proposed to her (on Oprah [clue one]), then after a few short years of matrimonial bliss, he left her for reasons my parents weren’t willing to mention. Then he got a roommate, Scott. And suddenly that was all nobody talked about. I heard the word from my brother, from my mom I heard – in angry tones – talk of my uncle and his “roommate” living in “sin”.
How did I feel about all this? Honestly? Scared. I’d been having gay dreams from when I was twelve, and the constant talk of how my uncle (later also my aunt) were going to Hell for their unrepentant “lifestyle” made me fear for my own soul. Was I just that bad to keep having the dreams? To keep looking at men? My brother, through a hilarious incident involving a browser history that I won’t get into, was the first to find out. It was our secret, and so was the therapist he would take me to on several occasions to try and get better.
Lyle was a really nice guy. What you’ve probably heard about ex-gay ministries was so wholly unlike my experience. All we did those sessions was talk; talk about how things were going, talk about how I was feeling that session, talk about my childhood, about my father who – while he was certainly there in a physical sense – Lyle would assure me was not there emotionally, talk about my mother who – while she was certainly caring – Lyle would assure me was overbearing. And I’m not going to say he was wrong. Was my dad distant? Yeah, like Alaska. Was my mom overbearing? Yeah, like wearing two parkas in Alaska. But in spite of us figuring that all out and talking through it, I didn’t really feel any less gay from our talks. Maybe he was doing it wrong.
I had my first kiss when I was nearly 18. It was with a guy named Stephen. He was a Mac. It was wetter than I had expected, but it was a lot of fun. Shortly after that I got a boyfriend, kept in complete secrecy from my parents, my friends, my teachers, and Myspace, which was easy because he lived two hours away. Of course, after a long chain of hilarious events – starting with a not-so-hilarious suicide on the other side of town – I came out. First to my friends, then to my drama teacher, then to my mom, then to my parents. Never to Myspace, though, that site was already gay enough, am I right?
Thanks to journalism, I was also experiencing the Mac side of life. So, the command button is much closer to the other buttons, which makes your hand cramp less by using shortcuts. And the main browser is faster than the one on my PC at home. And you can see all of your open projects with just one button. And its control-alt-delete equivalent actually closes programs that have frozen. Okay, using a Mac isn’t as bad or as problematic as I thought it was gonna be, in fact, it’s pretty fun. But it still can’t play games!
Well, my parents had me see Lyle one last time, after my brother told them about him. At this final visit, he asked me if changing was something I really wanted for myself. I told him that honestly, no, it wasn’t. I liked who I was, and for now it wasn’t really the core “problem” in my life.
When I graduated in May, my extended family got me a total of about $1,000. I wasn’t allowed to come out to any family members at my graduation. That summer, Apple made some important changes to their operating system that let you run Windows on a Mac. In September, I bought the iMac that sits on my desk to this day (I installed Windows on it, but as time went on I used Windows less and less). I also fell in love for the first time and had the epiphany, however late, that being gay was no more a sin than buying Apple.
There’s this joke my friends make: “The hardest part of buying a Mac is telling your dad that you’re gay.” I think it’s pretty funny; I also think it’s backwards. The best part of telling your dad that you’re gay is deciding to buy a Mac.
What I’m really getting at with all this, is if you need any help with your computer or with being gay… I charge $20 for either.
