Fic: The Antidote for Ignorance
FANDOM: Glee
RATING: R for language and discussion of homophobia
SUMMARY: The last person Andrew’s expecting to see standing on his front porch is Burt freaking Hummel.
CATEGORY: Angst
SPOILERS: Mild for “Blame it on the Alcohol”. Intended as a missing scene for “Sexy”.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I tried to write this story as perceptively as possible, but I do discuss some sensitive issues here. If you feel I’ve done it badly, please please please explain to me where I’ve gone wrong and how to fix it. This story isn’t meant to be offensive and if it comes across that way I want to know so I can adjust it.
DISCLAIMER: On a scale of One to Not Mine, these characters are Not Mine. They belong to a lot of terribly important and official people who work for big companies and get salaries and basically aren’t me. Suing me for copyright infringement would be pointless and unprofitable, I swear. A moose once bit my sister.
THE ANTIDOTE FOR IGNORANCE
Andrew’s folding clothes when he hears the knock at the front door. He almost doesn’t pay attention to it, he’s so absorbed in his task, but then the knock comes again, a little more softly. He’s finished the big items, the shirts and pants and skirts, and all that’s left are the underwear and the socks, which are a pain to do anyway. He’s glad for the distraction, once he notices it.
He turns down the music - Bernadette for laundry, Barbra for cooking, and thank you Tom it certainly should not be the other way around - and opens the door. From the tentative nature of the second knock, he’s expecting a salesperson or maybe one of Rachel’s friends.
He is absolutely, positively not expecting Burt freaking Hummel.
“So, hi,” Hummel says after a minute, when Andrew still hasn’t said anything.
“Hi,” Andrew says automatically. Distantly, he notices that Hummel’s gone a bit soft around the middle and fat around the neck, but he’s still a huge guy and it’s still definitely mostly muscle.
He’s also still standing on Andrew’s front porch.
“Would you like to come in?” Andrew’s mouth says automatically, even as his brain is telling him to shut the door and run like hell.
“Yeah, thanks,” Hummel says. He takes up most of the doorway coming in - Andrew has to swallow hard - and stands awkwardly in the hall, taking off his hat like he’s been carefully drilled on when it’s most appropriate to do so.
He’s going pretty bald on top. Andrew fights back some probably hysterical laughter - he distinctly remembers yelling ”I hope you go bald!” at Hummel once when they were in high school - from a safe distance, of course. It wasn’t one of his best retorts and remembering it now doesn’t make him feel any better.
“Nice place,” Hummel says, when the pause gets overly awkward.
“Thank you,” Andrew says. “Can I... do anything for you?”
He winces as soon as it leaves his mouth. He can already hear it in his mind - You can go to hell. You can get the fuck out of here. You and your fag boyfriend can leave us decent people alone.
“Well,” Hummel says, turning his trucker hat around in his hands. “Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”
He’s nervous, Andrew realizes, with a dull sort of shock. He can’t imagine what Burt “Macho With a Testosterone Chaser, You Fairy” Hummel could possibly be nervous about.
Hummel clears his throat, eyes the ceiling for a moment, then focuses on a point somewhere a few feet away from Andrew’s left shoulder and says, “I need to give my son the sex talk.”
Andrew stares. “I beg your pardon?”
“The sex talk,” Hummel clarifies, as if those words aren’t permanently etched on Andrew’s reeling brain. “Guys and girls, you know, I was ready for that one, but I don’t know much about guys and guys. I thought, I don’t know, you might have a book or something. If you didn’t mind.”
“What?” Andrew says, intelligently. “Your son’s... gay?”
Hummel finally looks at him. He seems confused. “My son’s Kurt.”
Well, yes, Andrew knows this. Burt Hummel married Kate Standish and then they had named their son Kurt, which Andrew always thought was simultaneously hilarious and embarrassing. He hadn’t been friends with Kate in high school, exactly, but she’d had an amazing voice and they’d worked on a few of the school musicals together. He’d liked her, in an absent-minded kind of way, and he’d felt disappointed and a little betrayed when she married that Hummel guy.
“Kurt’s in glee club with your girl?” Hummel adds when Andrew doesn’t seem to get it.
Oh, Glee club Kurt, Andrew thinks, and then his brain promptly shorts out because dear God, Glee club Kurt? Rachel’s told him stories. Some of them involve corsets.
He remembers yelling I hope all your children turn out gay! to... well, most of the football team, actually. Looking back, he can’t believe he was stupid enough to say it. He can’t believe it actually worked.
“Look, I know it’s asking a lot,” Hummel says stiffly. “If you could just tell me, I don’t know, if there’s a website or something, I’ll get out of your hair.”
Andrew’s mind presents him with the image of Burt Hummel googling ‘gay sex’ and his vision grays out for a second.
“Sit down,” he says, pointing to the breakfast bar, because he’s capable of being petty and mean and it is well within his rights to refuse to help Burt Hummel with absolutely anything, but not so much that he’s going to put some poor confused kid in the crossfire. “I’ll be right back.”
He and Tom do, in fact, own several informational volumes on the subject of gay sex and relationships - not for themselves, they figured it out the hard way, thanks, but for when Rachel got to be old enough to ask awkward questions. He tips the entire collection off her bookshelf and carries it back downstairs. On his way, he swings by the ravaged liquor cabinet and grabs a bottle of vodka, because he cannot fathom how this conversation is going to go, otherwise. He may even let Hummel have some.
He pauses outside the kitchen, leans back against the wall, and allows himself precisely thirty seconds of hyperventilation, which he feels is more than fair given the circumstances. Then he summons his scattered nerves, puts on his show face, and goes into the kitchen.
Hummel is perched gingerly on one of the tall chairs at the counter, hat still clutched in one hand. He looks almost pathetically relieved to see the vodka.
“Okay,” Andrew says, depositing his burdens on the counter and going for glasses. “This is what I’ve got. It’s mostly written for kids with gay parents, but it might still be helpful. Are you looking more for...” he searches for a euphemism that won’t make either of them break down and cry. “...Mechanics, or social implications?”
Hummel accepts one of the glasses of vodka and takes a surprisingly small sip. He sets it to one side and pulls a battered notepad out of his back pocket, followed by a ballpoint pen with ‘Hummel Tires and Lube’ printed on the side. Andrew feels his eyebrows climb.
Hummel opens the notepad to a new page, uncaps the pen, and says very seriously, “I don’t know much about either. I’m not going to make you explain the mechanics to me if one of those books would help, but what I’m looking for...” he pauses, then deliberately makes eye contact. “I need to know the positive stuff. About being gay.”
“The... the positive stuff?” Andrew says blankly.
“We get the bad stuff,” Hummel says simply. “We get the anonymous phone calls, the name-calling, all that shit. I want to know if there’s something I can give my kid that’ll show him it’s not all like that. Something he can maybe look forward to.”
Andrew remembers the phone calls. He remembers the name-calling. They still get them sometimes, even now that they’re adults and should be free from all that petty teenage bullshit, but the voices on the phone are adult now too. None of them have sounded like Hummel in years.
He breathes, carefully, around the something in his chest that’s making it hard to inhale.
“Give me a few days on that one?” He says finally. “Let me find some good sources. There are some websites - I can give you a few blogs, find some good books.” He can’t, actually, process the request adequately while the architect of his most miserable teenage years is sitting earnestly across the counter from him, taking painstaking notes on positive gay experiences.
Hummel nods sharply, writes his e-mail address down on a corner of the pad and tears it off.
“As far as mechanics,” Andrew says, and he’s mostly going on autopilot now. “The best thing is probably to go to the free clinic and get some pamphlets. They’re pretty well-written and I think they’ve got some hotline numbers, too.”
Hummel nods, carefully noting that on his pad. “Free clinic. I didn’t think of that. I tried going to the Borders, but...”
Andrew snorts. Hummel smiles a little. “Yeah. The parenting section had a book on every kind of attention problem and age group but nothing on gay kids, and the gay section was, uh...”
“Porn,” Andrew finishes with him. It also takes up about half a shelf, jammed in a corner with six-month-old discounted calendars and damaged coffee table books that no one wants to pay for. He’s surprised Hummel could even find it.
Hummel taps his pen against the countertop. He looks nervous again. “Listen... I want to ask you something, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to sound pretty ignorant. I know you’ve got no reason to believe me, but I don’t mean it... badly.”
Andrew takes a sip of vodka. “Shoot.” It’s not like this afternoon can get any more surreal.
“So, guys and sex, you know, it’s all talk and bragging. Straight guys and sex, I mean. Women, it’s real emotional, or it can be. So... gay guys, is it more like bragging, or more like emotion?”
Andrew frowns. Hummel clears his throat. “What I mean is, you get too worked up in, in the bragging part, and that’s not good for you. Women, with the emotion, it can balance it, you know? Is Kurt, you know, is he going to have to - should I warn him that - how easy is it going to be for him to get hurt, here? Or, or lost?”
Gay sex and emotion, Andrew thinks, cattily, and just barely manages not to say it out loud. My, this certainly is a banner day for Burt Hummel.
“Well,” he says instead, because if popular culture wasn’t so keen on disseminating information about straight relationship dynamics it would probably be something he’d want to know about for Rachel’s sake, too. “It depends on the person, I guess. Sex for sex is a thing, sure, but then you have guys like me and Tom. If Kurt’s more into romance then yes, I think it’s something he should watch out for. I mean, there’s all kinds. I don’t really have any books for that,” he finishes, lamely.
Hummel sighs. “Yeah. Nobody has all the answers, right?”
“Right,” Andrew says automatically. “I think most of these books aren’t actually going to be helpful with any of the things you want to know.”
“No, you gave me some really good stuff,” Hummel protests. “You’ve been a big help. And I, I know it’s way past late for it, and there’s no way a few words can make up for it, but I wanted to apologize. For high school. I was a homophobic dickhead and you didn’t deserve my shit.”
Andrew takes a deep breath. His teenage self would either be cuttingly disdainful or looking for the hidden cameras right now. He can remember himself, in a hundred different miserable daydreams, standing victorious above his tormentors and grandly refusing their groveling apologies.
For the first time in a long time, he finds himself fervently, unapologetically grateful for the fact that he’s not that kid any more. For the first time ever, it’s not because of what that kid had to go through.
“Tell you what,” he says finally. “Do it right with your son and we’ll call it even.”
Hummel scrutinizes him for a long moment, then nods, firmly. “Thank you,” he says, holding out his hand for Andrew to shake. “I’ll let myself out.” He pauses once, at the doorway, and looks back.
“Would you mind keeping this conversation between us?” he asks. “It would really embarrass my kid to know I’m talking to people about this without his permission.”
Andrew waits to be offended. It doesn’t come. Either he’s in too much shock right now to feel anything, or... he actually believes the request might not be because Hummel’s afraid of what people will say.
Huh.
He smiles a little. “I’ve got a teenager too. I understand.”
Hummel smiles back, tentatively, and then leaves, notebook and pen still clutched in one hand.
Crossposted to Archive Of Our Own.
RATING: R for language and discussion of homophobia
SUMMARY: The last person Andrew’s expecting to see standing on his front porch is Burt freaking Hummel.
CATEGORY: Angst
SPOILERS: Mild for “Blame it on the Alcohol”. Intended as a missing scene for “Sexy”.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I tried to write this story as perceptively as possible, but I do discuss some sensitive issues here. If you feel I’ve done it badly, please please please explain to me where I’ve gone wrong and how to fix it. This story isn’t meant to be offensive and if it comes across that way I want to know so I can adjust it.
DISCLAIMER: On a scale of One to Not Mine, these characters are Not Mine. They belong to a lot of terribly important and official people who work for big companies and get salaries and basically aren’t me. Suing me for copyright infringement would be pointless and unprofitable, I swear. A moose once bit my sister.
THE ANTIDOTE FOR IGNORANCE
Andrew’s folding clothes when he hears the knock at the front door. He almost doesn’t pay attention to it, he’s so absorbed in his task, but then the knock comes again, a little more softly. He’s finished the big items, the shirts and pants and skirts, and all that’s left are the underwear and the socks, which are a pain to do anyway. He’s glad for the distraction, once he notices it.
He turns down the music - Bernadette for laundry, Barbra for cooking, and thank you Tom it certainly should not be the other way around - and opens the door. From the tentative nature of the second knock, he’s expecting a salesperson or maybe one of Rachel’s friends.
He is absolutely, positively not expecting Burt freaking Hummel.
“So, hi,” Hummel says after a minute, when Andrew still hasn’t said anything.
“Hi,” Andrew says automatically. Distantly, he notices that Hummel’s gone a bit soft around the middle and fat around the neck, but he’s still a huge guy and it’s still definitely mostly muscle.
He’s also still standing on Andrew’s front porch.
“Would you like to come in?” Andrew’s mouth says automatically, even as his brain is telling him to shut the door and run like hell.
“Yeah, thanks,” Hummel says. He takes up most of the doorway coming in - Andrew has to swallow hard - and stands awkwardly in the hall, taking off his hat like he’s been carefully drilled on when it’s most appropriate to do so.
He’s going pretty bald on top. Andrew fights back some probably hysterical laughter - he distinctly remembers yelling ”I hope you go bald!” at Hummel once when they were in high school - from a safe distance, of course. It wasn’t one of his best retorts and remembering it now doesn’t make him feel any better.
“Nice place,” Hummel says, when the pause gets overly awkward.
“Thank you,” Andrew says. “Can I... do anything for you?”
He winces as soon as it leaves his mouth. He can already hear it in his mind - You can go to hell. You can get the fuck out of here. You and your fag boyfriend can leave us decent people alone.
“Well,” Hummel says, turning his trucker hat around in his hands. “Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”
He’s nervous, Andrew realizes, with a dull sort of shock. He can’t imagine what Burt “Macho With a Testosterone Chaser, You Fairy” Hummel could possibly be nervous about.
Hummel clears his throat, eyes the ceiling for a moment, then focuses on a point somewhere a few feet away from Andrew’s left shoulder and says, “I need to give my son the sex talk.”
Andrew stares. “I beg your pardon?”
“The sex talk,” Hummel clarifies, as if those words aren’t permanently etched on Andrew’s reeling brain. “Guys and girls, you know, I was ready for that one, but I don’t know much about guys and guys. I thought, I don’t know, you might have a book or something. If you didn’t mind.”
“What?” Andrew says, intelligently. “Your son’s... gay?”
Hummel finally looks at him. He seems confused. “My son’s Kurt.”
Well, yes, Andrew knows this. Burt Hummel married Kate Standish and then they had named their son Kurt, which Andrew always thought was simultaneously hilarious and embarrassing. He hadn’t been friends with Kate in high school, exactly, but she’d had an amazing voice and they’d worked on a few of the school musicals together. He’d liked her, in an absent-minded kind of way, and he’d felt disappointed and a little betrayed when she married that Hummel guy.
“Kurt’s in glee club with your girl?” Hummel adds when Andrew doesn’t seem to get it.
Oh, Glee club Kurt, Andrew thinks, and then his brain promptly shorts out because dear God, Glee club Kurt? Rachel’s told him stories. Some of them involve corsets.
He remembers yelling I hope all your children turn out gay! to... well, most of the football team, actually. Looking back, he can’t believe he was stupid enough to say it. He can’t believe it actually worked.
“Look, I know it’s asking a lot,” Hummel says stiffly. “If you could just tell me, I don’t know, if there’s a website or something, I’ll get out of your hair.”
Andrew’s mind presents him with the image of Burt Hummel googling ‘gay sex’ and his vision grays out for a second.
“Sit down,” he says, pointing to the breakfast bar, because he’s capable of being petty and mean and it is well within his rights to refuse to help Burt Hummel with absolutely anything, but not so much that he’s going to put some poor confused kid in the crossfire. “I’ll be right back.”
He and Tom do, in fact, own several informational volumes on the subject of gay sex and relationships - not for themselves, they figured it out the hard way, thanks, but for when Rachel got to be old enough to ask awkward questions. He tips the entire collection off her bookshelf and carries it back downstairs. On his way, he swings by the ravaged liquor cabinet and grabs a bottle of vodka, because he cannot fathom how this conversation is going to go, otherwise. He may even let Hummel have some.
He pauses outside the kitchen, leans back against the wall, and allows himself precisely thirty seconds of hyperventilation, which he feels is more than fair given the circumstances. Then he summons his scattered nerves, puts on his show face, and goes into the kitchen.
Hummel is perched gingerly on one of the tall chairs at the counter, hat still clutched in one hand. He looks almost pathetically relieved to see the vodka.
“Okay,” Andrew says, depositing his burdens on the counter and going for glasses. “This is what I’ve got. It’s mostly written for kids with gay parents, but it might still be helpful. Are you looking more for...” he searches for a euphemism that won’t make either of them break down and cry. “...Mechanics, or social implications?”
Hummel accepts one of the glasses of vodka and takes a surprisingly small sip. He sets it to one side and pulls a battered notepad out of his back pocket, followed by a ballpoint pen with ‘Hummel Tires and Lube’ printed on the side. Andrew feels his eyebrows climb.
Hummel opens the notepad to a new page, uncaps the pen, and says very seriously, “I don’t know much about either. I’m not going to make you explain the mechanics to me if one of those books would help, but what I’m looking for...” he pauses, then deliberately makes eye contact. “I need to know the positive stuff. About being gay.”
“The... the positive stuff?” Andrew says blankly.
“We get the bad stuff,” Hummel says simply. “We get the anonymous phone calls, the name-calling, all that shit. I want to know if there’s something I can give my kid that’ll show him it’s not all like that. Something he can maybe look forward to.”
Andrew remembers the phone calls. He remembers the name-calling. They still get them sometimes, even now that they’re adults and should be free from all that petty teenage bullshit, but the voices on the phone are adult now too. None of them have sounded like Hummel in years.
He breathes, carefully, around the something in his chest that’s making it hard to inhale.
“Give me a few days on that one?” He says finally. “Let me find some good sources. There are some websites - I can give you a few blogs, find some good books.” He can’t, actually, process the request adequately while the architect of his most miserable teenage years is sitting earnestly across the counter from him, taking painstaking notes on positive gay experiences.
Hummel nods sharply, writes his e-mail address down on a corner of the pad and tears it off.
“As far as mechanics,” Andrew says, and he’s mostly going on autopilot now. “The best thing is probably to go to the free clinic and get some pamphlets. They’re pretty well-written and I think they’ve got some hotline numbers, too.”
Hummel nods, carefully noting that on his pad. “Free clinic. I didn’t think of that. I tried going to the Borders, but...”
Andrew snorts. Hummel smiles a little. “Yeah. The parenting section had a book on every kind of attention problem and age group but nothing on gay kids, and the gay section was, uh...”
“Porn,” Andrew finishes with him. It also takes up about half a shelf, jammed in a corner with six-month-old discounted calendars and damaged coffee table books that no one wants to pay for. He’s surprised Hummel could even find it.
Hummel taps his pen against the countertop. He looks nervous again. “Listen... I want to ask you something, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to sound pretty ignorant. I know you’ve got no reason to believe me, but I don’t mean it... badly.”
Andrew takes a sip of vodka. “Shoot.” It’s not like this afternoon can get any more surreal.
“So, guys and sex, you know, it’s all talk and bragging. Straight guys and sex, I mean. Women, it’s real emotional, or it can be. So... gay guys, is it more like bragging, or more like emotion?”
Andrew frowns. Hummel clears his throat. “What I mean is, you get too worked up in, in the bragging part, and that’s not good for you. Women, with the emotion, it can balance it, you know? Is Kurt, you know, is he going to have to - should I warn him that - how easy is it going to be for him to get hurt, here? Or, or lost?”
Gay sex and emotion, Andrew thinks, cattily, and just barely manages not to say it out loud. My, this certainly is a banner day for Burt Hummel.
“Well,” he says instead, because if popular culture wasn’t so keen on disseminating information about straight relationship dynamics it would probably be something he’d want to know about for Rachel’s sake, too. “It depends on the person, I guess. Sex for sex is a thing, sure, but then you have guys like me and Tom. If Kurt’s more into romance then yes, I think it’s something he should watch out for. I mean, there’s all kinds. I don’t really have any books for that,” he finishes, lamely.
Hummel sighs. “Yeah. Nobody has all the answers, right?”
“Right,” Andrew says automatically. “I think most of these books aren’t actually going to be helpful with any of the things you want to know.”
“No, you gave me some really good stuff,” Hummel protests. “You’ve been a big help. And I, I know it’s way past late for it, and there’s no way a few words can make up for it, but I wanted to apologize. For high school. I was a homophobic dickhead and you didn’t deserve my shit.”
Andrew takes a deep breath. His teenage self would either be cuttingly disdainful or looking for the hidden cameras right now. He can remember himself, in a hundred different miserable daydreams, standing victorious above his tormentors and grandly refusing their groveling apologies.
For the first time in a long time, he finds himself fervently, unapologetically grateful for the fact that he’s not that kid any more. For the first time ever, it’s not because of what that kid had to go through.
“Tell you what,” he says finally. “Do it right with your son and we’ll call it even.”
Hummel scrutinizes him for a long moment, then nods, firmly. “Thank you,” he says, holding out his hand for Andrew to shake. “I’ll let myself out.” He pauses once, at the doorway, and looks back.
“Would you mind keeping this conversation between us?” he asks. “It would really embarrass my kid to know I’m talking to people about this without his permission.”
Andrew waits to be offended. It doesn’t come. Either he’s in too much shock right now to feel anything, or... he actually believes the request might not be because Hummel’s afraid of what people will say.
Huh.
He smiles a little. “I’ve got a teenager too. I understand.”
Hummel smiles back, tentatively, and then leaves, notebook and pen still clutched in one hand.
Crossposted to Archive Of Our Own.