I am Matt Thomas.

The Three-Dollar Bill

January 23, 2006

For a long time, I’ve skated around an issue with what I feel was considerable grace and aplomb. Since the early nineties, there’s been a bit of something different about your humble author that, in hindsight, should have been painfully obvious to anyone within earshot, yet always seemed to either go unnoticed or chalked up to my startling level of intellect as a child. That’s how I imagined it, anyway.

As the years went by, though, I began to feel cheated as, rather than assuming correctly that my curiosity in the opposite sex was on a purely academic level, my friends and family attributed my lack of a girlfriend to a complete lack of self-esteem and prowess with the ladies. This was probably, they surmised, an unfortunate side-effect of my notable weight.

Well, that explains a lot.
— Practically everyone I’ve ever known

In high school, with a great amount of trepidation, I had a conversation with a friend, Jenny Parker, in the parking lot of St. Ignatius Catholic Church in Mobile. Mine was the classic case of playing out the morbid possibilities in one’s head—I was sure that friend and foe alike would be united in their scorn for me once they learned the awful truth. To my complete shock, not only did Jenny—nor any of the subsequent friends who I had “the conversation” with—not particularly care about my deep, dark secret, her most prominent reaction seemed to be “well, that explains a lot.”

In my later years, the one thing keeping me from fully embracing and accepting this aspect of my life was the fact that I hadn’t yet found a way to tell my father. I knew that, once I told my mom, dad had to be next, followed by my brother, John. In light of recent events, however, my father’s opinion regarding my life has dropped considerably on my list of priorities, freeing me to tell the last must-know person: John. And now that he knows, I’m done. My secret is no more. I am a hermaphrodite. Just kidding. I’m a homo.

To many of you this is not news at all, but to the rest, there you have it. It’s not that I ever really felt the need to announce it to the world, but on the other hand, saying it like that frees me to assume that anyone who even remotely knows who I am also knows that I am a big fat Whole-Foods-shoppin’, Mac-usin’, VW-drivin’, David-Sedaris-readin’, Queer-as-Folk-watchin’, Joe-Clark-lovin’ fagatini. Express shock when you overhear me calling someone a rice queen or raving over Rufus Wainwright? Not my fault, brother, if you read my web site you’d have known. It’s an easy way out; much easier than telling everyone you meet information that there’s hardly ever a good moment to interject.

Nonetheless, it’s out there now, and honestly I can’t imagine I’ll have a great deal more to say on the subject. First and foremost, I’m just glad that I’ll finally be able to tell gay jokes in public without feeling guilty about it.

That said, stop me if you’ve heard this one—how do you fit four queers onto a barstool?

What’s that, you’ve heard it?

In fourth grade?

Alright then.