While he was down in the Keys with his family last week, The Gay Uncle was invited to read aloud to his nieces’ 4/5th grade class. There are about 30 kids in this Montessori group, and it is run by a hardcore practitioner, so when he arrived, instead of the usual happy teacher chatter he usually aims for in these situations, he was instructed to sit in a hard chair and simply “observe the children”. He tried his best to be unobtrusive, though it went against every fiber of his being. This was especially difficult since a) all three of his nieces (Amber, Lucia, and Faye) are in the class; b) he’s spent his entire professional career talking to kids; and c) he’d been out drinking until the wee hours the night before and had consumed about nine glasses of water that morning in an attempt to fight off a hangover.
Instead the G.U. watched the kids work with their weird Montessori tools: a protractor, an abacus, some dangly math manipulatives that looked like the chandelier earrings his grandma wore in the 70’s. His nieces led him through their PowerPoint presentations (4th grade is so sophisticated-like!). Then he looked through the chapter book the class was being read–a memoir of a young Kenyan cow-herder who had won a scholarship to the city school and gone on to Harvard. Gunc noticed that the chapter he was to read began: “My whole life changed after my circumcision.” He could relate.
And then it was reading time. His niece Amber introduced him. “This is my Uncle. His name is Uncle Brett. He’s a writer and he lives in New York.” The teacher nodded. “Do you want to tell everyone about his book?” Amber set one foot behind the other and twisted in place. The girl is not exactly shy (not at all) but there in front of a room full of her peers, she seemed a bit concerned about letting everyone know what the G. in G.U. stood for. “Um…. Not really.” Fortunately, Gunc’s eldest niece Lucia raised her voice in the back of the room. “I’ll tell them,” she said. “It’s called The Gay Uncle’s Guide to Parenting.” She beamed. But the rest of the room was pin-drop silent. “Okay, then…” The Gay Uncle cleared his throat. He looked into the paperback. My whole life changed after my circumcision….