Blue Cheese Blues (And Later, Rainbows)
Bleu cheese has a distinct taste. It’s slightly bitter and sharp, the sort of no-nonsense cheese that might serve the community better as a literary critic than a salad dressing. Due to my and my mother’s undying love for this soft cheese, it should come as no surprise we were both greedily gobbling it down on a lukewarm day in the middle of August, 2006.
I was in the Garden State Plaza at Ruby Tuesday’s, a restaurant I unofficially recognize as the king of bleu cheese. They have bleu cheese dressing, bleu cheese crumbles on their salad bar, and I was busy stuffing into my face into a blue cheese burger. My mother sat across from me, a pillar of politeness countering my eighteen-year old slothly slouch.
“Josh, you know if you ARE gay, you could always tell us. It won’t make us love you any less.”
My reply was somewhat garbled as drops of bleu cheese mirrored my self-confidence and swan-dove towards the plate. I had stopped keeping a running tally in my head after the first fifteen, but I was fairly certain this was the thirty-second “it’s ok to be gay” speech my parents had given me since I started high school. Looking back on it now, after thirty-two speeches, I probably should have realized they already knew. Parents don’t make the same speech thirty-two times on the off-chance that it might be needed.
This time was different, though. This time I’d tell her. This time, I’d stand up loud and prou-actually, this time, I’d chicken out again. My mom went on to talk about my (ex)best friend Mike’s mother, who had been showing up at her church asking my mother to exorcise me or something. I had told my best friend my secret, he had told his mother, and his mother believed she was telling God to help. It was a fairly messed-up game of telephone we were playing, but the message of my sexuality reached my mother intact.
I poked my fork through the half-eaten remains of my second salad and glanced doubtfully at the remainder of my cheese-oozing sandwich, dubious of my stomach’s ability to accept anymore bleu-cheese sacrifices. My mother still sat across from me, plowing on through her message of love unabated, if somewhat crestfallen by my reticent role in the discussion. At that moment, I felt ashamed of myself-not because of my sexuality, but because my mother had spent the past year and a half being accepting of it and trying her hardest to make me feel welcome while I acted like a teenager and kept my distance from her.
I reached across the table and grabbed my mother’s hand, smiled, and said the “Mom, I am.”
My mom, true to her words of acceptance, smiled at me. “That’s nice. Do you want to go shopping?”
Ten minutes later, three bleu cheese salads, and two bleu burgers later(we’re both addicts), we were in H&M looking at scarves when my mother made a gay joke about me, and I felt that all was right in the world.