One day toward the end of my senior year at OSU, I sat in my shared living room with my two roommates as they played XBox while I wrote a paper on my laptop, with iTunes simultaneously shuffling through my music library. At one point the shuffle landed on Adele’s “Someone Like You,” and naturally, I turned that shit up. Almost immediately, one of my roommates stopped what he was doing and contorted his face in what appeared to be a combination of a sneer and what happens when you catch a whiff of a really bad fart. After his look of disgusted inquiry didn’t have the desired effect on me, he decided to try his words.
“What if somebody walked in here right now?”
I understood what he was implying, but when people ask me dumb questions, I like to give dumb answers.
“But there are already people in here,” I added just enough sarcasm to make it count.
“If someone walks in here right now and hears you blasting Adele,” he continued, “they might think you’re gay or something.”
To which I replied, “And?”
My hope was that he would realize his point wasn’t having the desired effect and begin to grasp just how stupid his premise and argument were, but no such luck.
“What do you mean, ‘and’?!”
“So,” I started slowly. “You think that I shouldn’t listen to music I like solely because of what other people will think about me?”
Even after I spelled it out for him so blatantly, we failed to come to any sort of a logical compromise, as both of us seemed baffled by the fact that the other one wasn’t getting the point. I don’t know if my roommate was legitimately concerned with my publicly perceived sexuality or if he thought any trace of effeminacy on my part would place his masculinity in question, but in the end, I just felt kind of bad for him. Regardless of motive, he truly believed in his heart of hearts that another person’s potentially misguided opinion of my sexual orientation would be enough to deter me from doing something I enjoyed.
For any of my gentlemen readers, I implore you, nay I beg you, to hold on a little more loosely to your pride and stop pretending that you don’t have feelings, because you’re not only lying to yourself but you’re making the rest of us look bad. The next time somebody says to you, “people are gonna think you’re gay,” please do me a favor by looking them square in the eyes, adopting your most condescending look of sympathy and replying, “Who cares?”