The Betty Pages sprung out of some conversations Betty Desire a local drag queen and I were having in a gay bar. These editorials may be out of context now and were written for a local audience in the Bellingham area. But I am sure readers everywhere can make some sense of parts of them.

Family Secrets

January 2005

The Holidays are a strange time for a lot of people. More so amongst people I know who are living on the edges of the sex positive community. This is the time when you return to your roots and visit families. For some of you this is really no big deal at all. You are open out and honest with them and it is really just a visit with lots of love overpriced packages and too much food. For a lot of us its not so perfect. The holidays are filled with relatives and old friends who do not really know the real you. They know you as the person who lived near or with them a long time ago and what they have extrapolated you to be since then. The you of today they know is based upon the way you appeared years ago and the snippets of your life you have let them see since then. It is rarely a complete picture.

Obviously you have grown and changed. Their image of you has not and the holiday quandary for many is how much of that growth and change do you show off and how much do you keep to your self. I have swung many ways here. For a long time in my life I was very private and terse with my entire family. Now I am fairly out but working on a medium path that I can live with easily. Sometimes my sex life can be too much information for some people.

So what is the right balance of exposure when you are sure that someone is not going to agree with your lifestyle or at least not consider it their first choice. And what is the cost of going to far either way. It is a balance we should all ponder. Especially right after we played the balancing act over the holidays.

I really spent a lot of the early part of December studying the cost to me of being too secretive about my life. There are people who I love that I always discounted because of my secrets. When I got an "I love you" or a gift I always stuck a "but, if you knew..." onto the end of it. It cost me a lot over the years. I never let my family and others close to me in because of secrets I was keeping. This was something did to them and myself not because of something they did but because of something I assumed they would do. It is not really fair to someone who is trying really hard to love you to feel you always distant and pulling back and not know why. I guess thats what I got out of this holiday season. I finally really included people who I cared about deeply in every aspect of my life.

On the other hand every thing has to have a limit. If I gave them every gory, bloody, bruising detail I would be pushing them away. but I am answering their questions with honest detailed answers and encouraging follow on questions now. I used to be vague, and discouraging when it came to details about what or where I was doing or going on the weekend. now Im not. I may not volunteer the details of a blood sport ritual involving 8 gauge hooks, but I can give explain it if asked and truthfully. I can no longer afford the price of my life being a secret.

But what about the uncle/aunt/cousin you talk to for 5 minutes every holiday and say hi to at every funeral. There I fall back on a friends advice. I have conversations about things we have in common. And if we have a conversation about sex, he or she will get answers, but more than likely we will never have a conversation about sex. As close as I've came this last holiday was a conversation about marriage rights. An uncle said he voted a straight republican ticket based upon the gay marriage movement. I had to let him know politely that I disagreed, that I had gay and lesbian friends who I thought should have marriage rights and could see no harm in giving them those rights. I asked him to look at whether his disagreeing with it meant it should not exist or that he simply should not do it himself. I gave him the right to admit in a very joking way that marrying a man was not for him. And I hope I planted the seed that thats all he needed to worry about. That conversation served a purpose, but telling him I was a polyamorous sadomasochist pornographer would not have served any purpose. It was not going to bring him closer.

And I guess thats the test. If your goal in intimacy is to bring people closer be intimate with those you want to bring closer.