“I will never tell the girl that I’m with that I need them, I’m just not that type of person. I would feel like I’m pressuring her to stay with me and that is the last thing I want is for someone to feel obligated to be with me. If you ever question my feelings for you, please tell me. So I can get my head out of my ass and work as hard as I possibly can to show you how much you really mean to me. If you ever question your feelings for me, please tell me. It’s life and sometimes shit changes, feelings fade, and even if it breaks my heart I will understand. Above anything else I want you to be happy. But god if you let me be the person to make you smile on your bad days, give you back rubs whenever your sore, and make you Mac and cheese at 12 a.m. just the way you like it, I promise you will make me the happiest I can possibly be. Because if your happy, I’m happy….its as simple as that.”
Reddit user HeMeYou was left “overwhelmed” by advice from online strangers after accidentally discovering his son might be gay.
The 38-year-old father posed the question to Reddit after finding Google searches on his son’s iPad suggesting he wanted to come out.
He said: “I found out my 13 y/o son is gay… He hasn’t told me, but I want to support him. What can I do?”
I’m 38, and a single dad to my 13 year old son, 14 in four months. The other day I asked my son if I could borrow his iPad and he gave it to me.
After my first attempt at Google searching something I noticed that he forgot to delete his history as a lot of the search terms were along the lines of “I’m gay what now?” etc…
I love him regardless of which gender he loves, in fact when I was slightly older than him I had a few flings with guys, which he doesn’t know about, so I am 100% supportive.
He has seemed slightly down recently, as in, he isn’t as cheerful as he once was, and I desperately want to tell him that I love him regardless of which sexuality he is.
What are my options? Should I wait for him to tell me? Or should I make a few hints at it?
I’m worried that if I don’t hint at it, that he will be worried about something that he really doesn’t have to be worried about… if that makes sense. Thanks.
Shortly after, he received a flood of supportive messages, with many users offering advice based on their own experiences.
One user posted: “Google ‘how to tell my son I will love and support him no matter what’ and leave it in his search history.”
Another said: “Let him come out on his own terms, just make sure he knows that you’ll support him and you don’t have a problem with it.”
The father, who wished to remain anonymous, told Buzzfeed the response to his post was “overwhelmingly helpful and kind.”
A few days later, HeMeYou posted an update on what he ended up doing:
I started off with talking about general media with him, for instance I mentioned how awesome it was that Tim Cook (CEO of Apple) came out as being gay and I asked him what he thought about it and I was completely expecting him to give a typical teenager response like “yeah.. its good” or something like that but he actually gave me a detailed response which I absolutely loved because for the first time in a good while I’ve actually held a conversation with my son that felt really… rewarding.
I also wanted to talk to him about how I’ve noticed that he’s not been acting as cheerful as he usually has and I sort of gave the cliche spiel of “I love you no matter what and I just want to see you be happy” but I didn’t get much of a response that time apart from “yeah I know..”
The next day as I picked him up from school I thought I’d ask him about any crushes he has, and I wanted to make sure I didn’t say a gender when I asked him, so instead of ‘he’ or ‘she’ I used ‘they’ etc.. Here is that conversation as I remember it…
Me: So, do you have a crush on anyone? Son: Uhm… no..m..maybe.. Me: Ohhh so who is the lucky person? At this point he sort of looked at me slightly confused, I’m not 100% sure why, but I’m assuming it is because I said “lucky person” rather than “lucky girl”. Son: Just someone from my french class… Me: Oh yeah… so what do you like about them? Son: Just.. stuff.. Me: Okay.. but.. like what? Son: I donno they’re just kinda funny I guess…
At this point I dropped the conversation but just before I did I told him “Well, whoever it is, they should be so lucky to have you as a boyfriend..” and while I didn’t see it, I certainly felt as though he was rolling his eyes at my cheesy comments.
At the dinner table the same day, while we were eating we had a couple minutes of silence, not much was heard apart from the cutlery and my son finally said “I actually wanted to tell you something in the car, but I was afraid you’d get in an accident..”
I looked up from my plate and looked at him straight in the eyes… I could see he was thinking about something and all I could think of was “OMG this is it…”
He said “Dad..” with a couple seconds of silence “..I’m gay”.
I looked at him and couldn’t help myself from smiling, and I told him “____, you know I love you so much… right?” and I got up and gave him a huge hug.
He even started to cry on my shoulder and because of that I couldn’t help myself but shed a couple tears.
Concluding his post, he said: “After dinner and after he finished his homework we both lay in our pyjamas on the sofa, while I was watching the Cooking Channel and he was playing on his iPad.
“I had my arm around him and he was leaning his head on my chest, and all I could think of was that I’m the happiest father on earth right now.”
Anyone else weep real Jesus tears after reading this?
THIS IS WHAT A TRUE FUCKING PARENT DOES. TAKE GODDAMN NOTES.
For the original ask, requesting the definition of squick, please see this post.
Squick is a fun term that was often used as both a noun and a verb. Either X was one of your squicks, or X squicked you, or squicked you out, or squicked you hard.
It was often used in fic exchanges. They would ask for a list of your squicks so that the gifting author would know not to include any hint of them. It was also used in casual conversation with fandom friends, authors, artists, etc. It could be left in comments, or as a reason you just didn’t read your best fandom friend’s latest fic. “Sorry, bff, you know I love your writing, but you have X tagged at the top, and that just squicks me out.” “Hey, no worries, best reader friend! I totally get it. Give this one a pass, but I’ll send you a note when I post my next one! I promise it will be totally X-free!”
Here’s the thing though. In your example, you explain why X is your squick with Y. But the beauty of squick was that (at least in my experience) no explanation was necessary. Not only was it not necessary, it was rarely asked for. A squick is a squick, and there doesn’t have to be any rhyme or reason. In fact, why would you have a rational, bullet-pointed, well-thought-out argument as to why something squicked you out? Very often it’s a visceral reaction, and if you don’t like the thing, you’re likely not going to sit and do deep meditation on why not.
Squicks were respected by fandom. You don’t like the thing, okay, we will tag the thing appropriately, you do not have to read the thing, no judgments on either side. There was no fandom policing, only respect.
And this, I think, is super important, because fandom policing is a problem, especially when it comes to triggers. “Trigger” has become so overused, so all-encompassing, that people feel they have to defend their legitimate triggers. If X triggers you, it triggers you, and you DO NOT need to provide an explanation. But because “trigger” is so often used in place of “squick,” some people feel they have the right to “call out” those who use the word. They want explanations, they want you to tell them what that triggering concept does to you, so they can call bullshit and feel superior. You don’t have to explain either your squicks or your triggers, but using the correct word stops the fandom police from feeling as though they have the right to ask.
Bring “squick” back, people. Don’t devalue triggers, which are horrible, nasty, dangerous things.
the culture of justifying dislike on an ideological/moral basis in part one: chapter one of my novel, Let Me Show You My Issues With Tumblr Fandom. the requirement for ideological purity has become so impossibly strict, and is valued so highly, that tearing the thing you dislike from an ideological standpoint is the quickest way to shut it down. it’s a cheap, disingenuous shortcut that exploits social justice language for personal leverage. it’s not like we were free of wankery and ship wars back in ye olde lj days, god, far from it, but at least the insults we flung at each other were subjective: A is so bad for B and if you can’t see that you’re an idiot!!! B/C OTP!!! (i should also disclaim that we did have moral policing as well, it was just FAR less extensive.) leveraging social justice concepts is an attempt to gain a kind of objective superiority. “they’re a dark ship and i don’t like that” holds little power; “they’re abusive and you support abuse by shipping this” is a trump card to shut down the content you don’t like and the people who fan it. that kind of rhetoric is all over the damn place and it continues to be propagated because it works and it has created a culture from which a variety of problems like the trigger issue explained above consistently arise.
…i would go into further chapters on my novel but i am tired now
As an additional data point, as far as I know the term “squick” comes from the BDSM community, originally. At least that’s where I first encountered it, on BDSM message boards on usenet in the mid-90s – yes, I was on BDSM message boards in the mid-90s; long story. As such, the implicit lack of judgment is important to the meaning of the word; you need a word to mean “I really don’t want to do that, and I don’t want to watch you doing that, but I don’t judge YOU for liking that and I don’t mind if YOU do it … somewhere far away from me.”
I can’t really think of any other words we have for the same concept that aren’t judgmental to some extent. Anything I can think of to try to define “squick” using non-slangy words (disgusting, unpleasant, etc) have a judgy sort of vibe. And we really do need a word to talk about tropes and kinks in the same kind of way we can talk about how you like that ship and I like this ship but that doesn’t make your ship bad.
(Er, ideally we’d be able to talk about ships that way, obviously, in a perfect world … XD)
I was also thinking about how the original ask implies a very modern fannish mindset that’s just … not there, in the original fandom milieu that the squick concept came out of. Not that I’m saying fandom was better in the old days or anything, god no. But trying to explain why you have a squick, or asking someone else why they have theirs, is just not a thing you’d generally do. Squicks are irrational; that’s baked into the meaning of the word. Squicks aren’t something you explain. They just are. I mean, you could obviously try to figure it out, just like you can try to figure out why you have a particular kink, but in both cases, you don’t have to explain or justify it in order for other people to accept it as valid. I don’t need to explain that I like h/c for X and Y reasons in order to request it in an exchange. And squick functions the same way.
All of which makes it a very useful word for talking about fandom concepts without implying that someone else’s tastes make them a bad person!
My tired old soul reflecting on how ideas, concepts, sensibilities, can just disappear.
Squicks are not triggers. I have both: much better as I’m feeling these days, certain visuals can trigger my OCD. Once triggered, my OCD must be handled or it will fucking impair me.
This is so utterly different from encountering a squick. Look, dude, Omegaverse dynamics are a squick of mine. Stumbling over Omegaverse Turkfic will not force me to get my CBT and exposure practice going on. It will make me feel icky and I will stop reading and move on, grateful for all the kind souls who tag their Omegaverse fiction.
Now I live in this world where no one, apparently, should produce content that squicks anyone else, because squick=trigger, and triggering people is immoral. I can’t figure out how we landed here, as fans.
An important distinction like the difference between “squick” and “trigger” should not disappear in the name of protecting people from culture.
Squick is such a great word and really necessary. I have zero triggers, but there’s stuff that, as Judy said, makes me feel icky and I stop reading/watching.
I took a ten year long black out from fandom anything online (life happened) and when I got back, I was so confused. Bring back squick. Use it, own the expirence you want without the need to judge or demand or label what other people want from their expirence.
