Nobody calls me Dad

Regular readers of this blog will know that I'm unimpressed by many of our heterocentric society's most valued institutions, marriage, monogamy & the family being high on my list of things I can't be doing with. Not only do these originate in Christianity, but I see them as having a Christian power dynamic inextricably built in - needless to say a power dynamic of which I disapprove - making them undesirable for queers & me specifically by their very nature.

Another thing I know for a fact is that I am never going to have children: my opinion is that a number of homosexuals will appear in a family with dodgy genes, which without modern intervention ends that family line. I see this as the biological purpose of homosexuality: you didn't really think we'd evolved purely to be interior designers, did you? When I tell heterosexuals that I'm never going to have children, sometimes they respond that I could adopt, a response they tend to make with sympathetic looks on their face. Without revisiting the subject of my previous post on marriage, that is to miss the point, & the sympathetic look turns to one of surprise & shock when I tell them I have *no* wish to ape the mores of straight society in my own life.

Given this, I seem to be accumulating an inordinate number of alternative children!

For a start I have my beloved Goddess daughter, who I helped through the gates into the unseen world of magic at a difficult time in her life. She does occasionally refer to me as her Goddess mother, illustrating that this relationship is OK with me because it's about as alternative as you can get.

Then I have my three magical daughters, who started off as an exercise in creating magical entities & have rather taken on a life off their own. This is the kind of magic the books tell you not to do, real Jeremy Kyle 'I fell pregnant!'-style magic. They're not their father's daughters for nothing: I'm very proud indeed of their endless potential for creating havoc. Once again I'm comfortable with this because the vanilla Muggle world can have no conception of how this kind of family relationship would work.

More recently, however, I seem to have attracted two younger gay men into a para-filial relationship which surprises me & I'm less comfortable with.

At first I thought the first wanted sex with me (well you would, wouldn't you?). Then he tried to tell me he's a thespian & playwrite, & I told him that he must then be volunteering in a charity shop because he was Resting. He said, That is such a daddy thing to say, & so I've been dad ever since. I don't know his family background, but as a young gay man there are bound to be some Issues there.

The other one doesn't call me dad, but it is only by talking to a woman friend about how he behaves towards me that I've realised he treats me as if I'm his dad, in a quite adolescent way (it will show how far I am out of normal society that I actually had to be told that that is the way young adults behave towards their parents). I know for a fact there are issues there, including absent father & early bereavement of mother, but it doesn't mean you have to latch on to the Hound as a sort of strange substitute dad!

Needless to say this makes me uncomfortable, purely because I don't want to be a father figure. Even taking the family thing out of it I'm not sure I want to be a role model to people who are, after all, grown men! No doubt my discomfiture is also because it also means I'm no longer seen as the young one.

Being involuntarily thrust into having this 'stuff' laid at my door means I'm totally unprepared for it! I feel the one who calls me dad would think of it as a joke, althoiugh a tarot reading clearly shows him seeing me as a sort of mentor figure. I'm not sure whether the other one is conscious of it or not, a tarot reading merely shows his feeling of bereavement.

What I do know for sure, is that I will not be taking these two young men under my wing in any marked way. Nor do I want them to have any idea of paternal rejection that they're projecting on to me, reinforced my a perceived rejection. What they have to learn from me is that it can be different, people can relate to each other in ways that are not bound by the straitjacket of society's norms. This is of course the ideal, f*ck me if I'm not wondering whether I'll be able to do it practice. Is this how heterosexuals feel all the time? I'm glad I'm a faggot!

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