Brett Berk

The Gay Uncle and his youthful ward Tal were over at a friend’s house the other night, having dinner with her and her two kids, Lucian, 5 and Gregor, 9. The Guncles’ arrival seems to always bring out the boys…performative side. Last time they were over, the brothers enacted a musical routine with a toy drum, a piano, and a glockenspiel that was equal parts Noh, and No-Doubt. This time, it was puppets.

There were two shows. The first was pretty standard psycho-dramatic fare featuring a bullying narrative, in which an evil white paper-bag bully, after pounding relentlessly on a number of white paper-bag victims, gets his comeuppance. But it was the second show that really captured the G.U.’s attention. This one began in the 19th Century, and featured two white paper bag puppets who ruled over a crowd of brown paper bag puppets. The brown bags kept demanding their freedom, and were rebuked by the whites, until they were led into emancipation by a charismatic sack who was exactly half brown and half white. This play ended with three codas. The first fast-forwarded into the year 3016, and featured a future in which no one recognized skin (paper?) color as an issue. The second went back to January 20, 2009, and featured the half-and-half bag taking the oath of office to be the president (causing the assembled adult audience to tear up a little.) But it was the third that was the funniest. This one took place in the present day, in “Alaska, at the Governor’s office” and featured a white bag puppet with rectangular glasses and a down-home, female voice. “Servant,” the woman said to a brown bag, “can you bring around the car? I need to go shopping for some more fancy clothes? And while you’re at it, open my window shades. I need to see Russia.” The brown bag (and the audience) paid her no mind. Gunc’s friend turned to him. “Can’t wait to watch her on Dancing With The Stars. You think it’ll be next season, or the one after that?”

The Gay Uncle received a call from a Daddy friend the other day (we’ll call him Josh), asking how to retrofix a parenting situation he felt he’d just flubbed. Josh was watching as his nearly three year-old son was playing on some riding toys in the playroom of their apartment building. The boy was pretending to be a firefighter, an occupation which, apparently, involved pushing all the other kids’ vehicles out of the way and screaming “I’m a fireman!” (Maybe they were parked in front of a hydrant or a burning building?) Josh kept trying to corral his son, saying “No,” “Stop pushing,” and “That’s not nice,” but to little effect. Eventually, the rescue work escalated to a fiery frenzy, and he watched as his son got out of his truck, reached into one of the other vehicles, and firmly bitch-slapped the driver. Reeling in horror, Daddy firmly grabbed his son’s arm, dumped him in his stroller, and removed him from the scene. The boy howled the entire way back to the apartment, screaming in his own defense, I’m a fireman! I’m a fireman! “I felt like the other parents in the playroom were sort of on his side,” Daddy told the G.U. “What should I have done different?”

As usual, Gunc had a few pieces of advice.
1) Avoid blank commands like No and Stop when giving instructions: These kinds of decrees, when used alone and without further direction, strand kids in an abstract nether-zone, where the behavior they’re engaged in is being prohibited, but they’re not offered a viable replacement. Kids have a difficult time thinking outside of the proximal and the present tense. They need guidance. Use the G.U.’s patented E.A.R. method (Explain, Adjust, Redirect). For example, “Pushing other kids’ cars bothers them, and can hurt. Let them drive on their own. If you want to push something else around, use these traffic cones, or pillows.”
2) Not nice: Nice is a weak and ill-defined term. Kids often don’t understand the impact of their actions, and a word like “nice” doen’t really help. Guide their comprehension of cause and effect by being concrete and specific. Say, “Hitting hurts,” or “Pushing is dangerous.”
3) Set expectations and repercussions in advance: This is the big one. Part of why the little boy (and the other moms) responded like they did was because the dad hadn’t been clear about boundaries and responses. Provide warnings, and let your kid know what’s going to happen if they don’t adhere. Then, when you swoop in to follow through, your kid might still scream, but at least you won’t have to feel guilty. And you’ll know that you’re providing useful lessons for them (your will is law, you mean what you say, actions have effects) instead of just being reactive. Granted this is difficult in situations where your child gets violent (It hits! It’s evil!) But you need to get beyond this embarrassment, shame, and terror. Kids make mistakes. But they expect the grown ups around them to know better.

As you may recall, The Gay Uncle has recently been spending a butt-load of time in California for work, so it was inevitable that the issue of Gay Marriage would come up. But it wasn’t inevitable that it would come in the context of one of his colleagues expressing her theory that part of the inspiration for people voting in the evil Prop 8 was based in their discomfort with having to expose their children to the idea of homosexuality at family weddings. “I took my sons to my cousin’s gay wedding,” she told Gunc, “without mentioning anything about it to them, other than that it was a party. And it went fine. At least until the vows ended. Then my boys suddenly started screaming. They’re kissing!, they yelled. Why are they kissing?”
The Gay Uncle didn’t feel it was his place to point out that there’s really no difference between “exposing” kids to homosexuality and “exposing” them to heterosexuality, something that goes on all the time. He also didn’t suggest that the idea of not prepping the boys for the ceremony seemed a bit silly, not to mention embarrassing for her cousin. Instead he simply nodded, interestedly. Fortunately, one of his other colleagues stepped in.
“My son found out about what gay means on the school bus. From Brian Bourdanglian–a fifth grader.”
The G.U. cocked his head and wondered, were charges pressed?
“I would have preferred to be able to explain it myself,” his co-worker continued. “We’d already talked about the birds and the bees, but up until that point, I’d explained sex purely in terms of being the functional process of trying to make a baby. The whole guy-on-guy thing forced me to have to confront the idea of sex for pleasure. With my eight year-old.”
“What’d you say?” the Gay Uncle asked. He affected a clinical tone. “…You know how it feels good when you touch your penis?”
His colleague shot him a look. “No.” She cleared her throat. “I described it in terms of adult pleasure.”
“And what was his response?”
“Nothing much. He simply looked from me to my husband with disgust, as if he’d just discovered that at night, once he went to his room, the two of us sat up for hours feeding each other dog shit.” She smiled. “But a few nights later, he came into our room to ask if he could sleep in our bed–I let the boys fall asleep in there sometimes. But I was tired that night and in no mood to share my space, and I must have sighed. He got this look on his face. What’s the problem? he asked, gesturing over at the other half of the bed. You and daddy still have all that room over there for sex.” She scowled comically. “Fucking Brian Bourdanglian.”
The gays out the idea of sex for pleasure, Gunc thought. Score another one for the home-o team.

The Gay Uncle explains to The Chicago Tribune what to do when your kid says “That’s Not Fair”. Check it out here.

The Gay Uncle is now on Twitter whatever that is. Does anyone care? If you do, feel free to find him there. His code name is GayUncle.

Now that Barack has finally been elected–an objective the Gay Uncle has been actively supporting since 2006–he faces a number of extremely difficult tasks: choosing members of his transition team; selecting qualified people to run the governmental departments currently led by incompetents, antagonists, and party hacks; and burying the Republicans in a shitstorm so deep that the GOP will need to change its nick-name. But no challenge will be as large as fulfilling the immense promise he made on the stage in Grant Park the other night: getting his daughters Malia and Sasha a puppy.

Gunc usually says, if you”re considering a pet, start small. It cuts on the initial investment (cost-wise and emotionally) and if the pet dies (which it eventually will) it’s easier to replace. At the pre-school he ran, he had a policy excluding pets bigger than his hand, ones that had fur, or anything that needed to be taken home during vacations, leaving a horde of snails””all bred, hermaphroditically from a pair found under a slide at the playground–as the classroom mascot. The kids used to delight in letting the molusks slither up their arms, and watching them eat cucumber with the toothy mouth on the underside of their foot. Because they lived, mated, gave birth, and died with amazing alacrity, they were a great life cycle demonstration as well. They also make their own gravestones when they perish, leaving behind their calcified shell.

But Gunc generally feels that a living object like a pet should never be used as a bribe or reward. Such a practice, he suspects, falls into the category of Bad Karma. So he fears a bit for the ju-ju in the Obama’s new home. (Fortunately, this can be offset with some good Feng Shui. The G.U. suggests moving that quilted blue couch in the Oval Office about ninety degrees to the left, burning a smudge stick in any room Dick Cheney ever entered, and adding tons and tons of donkey figurines and fresh lilies.) At any rate, since it’s clearly too late for Barack to reneg on this canine campaign pledge, Gunc recommends–as with any new addition to a child’s life–that consistent and actionable structures need to be set up prior to the pooch”s arrival. Both girls are clearly old enough to perform daily caregiving tasks like feeding the puppy, taking it for a walk, and bathing it. But perhaps most importantly, it will be imperative to assign them the prestigious job of cleaning up its poo. Michelle has plenty of her own minefields to navigate. The Secret Service doesn’t need any additional duties (groan.) And the White House has been full of shit for long enough.

Gunc would also like to suggest that in order to get their total “buy-in” the girls be involved in naming the pet. Dogs’ names are often derived from the animal’s shape, color, or behavior (e.g. Pretzel, Goldie, Pissy-Puddles) so he doesn’t want to jump the gun on making recommendations. But he kind of likes the moniker Sarah Palin for a bitch.

The Gay Uncle is not gloating today. But he does have one thing to say: He’s extremely pleased that when Sarah Palin’s name was mentioned during poisonous toad John McCain’t’s deservedly contrite concession speech, the crowd of grotesque Republican true believers erupted into a spontaneous boo.

One more thing: Does anyone know Bristol Palin’s home address in Wasilla? The G.U. would like to send her an autographed copy of his book. Girlfriend’s going to need some good advice, and lord knows she’s not going to get it from any Secret Service mannies anymore.

It’s election day, and the future of our country (and world) is in your hands. The Gay Uncle doesn’t care what your political preferences are, so long as you make sure you get your lazy ass to the polls, carefully consider your decision, and then VOTE FOR BARACK. Gunc means it. For the sake of your children, you better vote Obama. Unless you want them to spend their formative years looking at John McCain’s mean ugly face, and suffering through his mean ugly policies. Or if you like the idea of them living in a cardboard box, wearing a barrel, and eating shoe leather soup. Or if you actually hate polar bears. And ice. We have a chance, maybe our last good onee, to make something of this country besides a mess. Take it.

The Gay Uncle’s extended family had a banner meeting this past weekend, when his boyfriend Tal’s brother Marty went down to the Keys with his daughters to meet up with Gunc’s sister and her two girls. Marty can be something of a wild card (you might remember him from this piece, and this one) and while his children are generally delightful, putting four kids in the same room always has the potential to degenerate. So the G.U. was pleased to hear that there was no name-calling, fistfights, eye scratching, or other forms of smackdown. Not that he really expected anything like this (though maybe for the sake of this column, he hoped for a bit more conflict.) The girls discussed school, activities, and recent films in a very refined manner, the only blip being an eruption over a noise-making, squishy, duck toy, the incessant squeezing of which caused the Gay Uncle’s sister Roxy to lose her shit, and scream at Marty’s older daughter. “Enough with the duck!” (This blow-up also resulted in his niece Amber taking her mom aside for a gentle scolding, “Mama. I think you went a bit overboard with the whole duck thing.”) Gunc couldn’t figure out why this summit had such a polite temper, until Roxy revealed that its wheels had been greased by the presence of the ideal (children’s) social lubricant: immense bags of Halloween candy. Apparently, the girls all had their booty-satchels with them and spent much of their together-time laying out their collections, sorting them by shape, size, color, ingredients, and brand (and presence or absence of razor blades), and then performing sophisticated swaps and trades. Though Gunc recalls the delights of this practice with his three siblings–all of whom had staked out very different confectionary preferences– he’s not exactly sure what the exchange rate is anymore on Reese’s, Snickers, Twix, and Dots. Are Three Musketeers plummeting with the dollar? Is Toblerone rising with the Euro? And what about Swedish Fish? Anyone have any ideas?

One of the Gay Uncle’s readers recently posed an interesting series of questions regarding how folks will be dealing with the spookiest of scary holidays this year. Since her inquiries truly…piqued Gunc’s interest, he thinks her missive is worth quoting in its entirety.

Whats everyone doing for safety precautions for Halloween? My husband came across an article with some info about background checking neighbors. I thought that may be a little overboard, but it had some other good suggestions for some precautions I haven’t thought about. Last year my youngest son came down with a massive fever after Halloween. I almost thought about just taking the kids to our church’s fall festival this year instead of door-to-door to prevent that from happening again. I don’t know yet. What’s your advice? Am I over-reacting or just being a concerned mom?

Since there are so many different ideas and concerns included here, the G.U. is going to try to address them one at a time.

1) Whats everyone doing for safety precautions for Halloween? Well, Gunc and his boyfriend are planning on sitting in a friend’s new hot tub, getting wasted, and watching zombie movies on a big screen using said friend’s new DVD projector. Their “safety precautions” will include having plenty of towels and robes around in case any kids drop by. They’re hoping this will keep them from spending the weekend in jail.

2) My husband came across an article with some info about background checking neighbors. The G.U. asked a brutally intelligent mom friend who chairs a commission on childhood sexual abuse about this one, and she said that folks should definitely be aware of any sex offenders that live in their neighborhood, though she cautioned–with a commendable degree of rationality–that “convicted and released sex offenders are the tippy-tippy-top of the mountain of risk in terms of children and abuse. Nearly 90% of kids who are abused are molested by family members.” She went on, “There is no way to absolutely ensure that your child is safe. Do what you can, within reason, but remember that accepting the presence of risk is part of life.”

3) Last year my youngest son came down with a massive fever after Halloween. The Gay Uncle would like to point out that there are a number of factors that may have potentially been involved in this boy’s illness other than the endemically infectious nature of the holiday. First, Halloween comes during a season called “Fall”, the time of year when children return to the Petri Dish/Germ Pool of school, when the weather often vacillates wildly between warm and cold, and when kids frequently O.D. on sugar, all of which tend to compromise their immune systems. Gunc is willing to bet that the boy wasn’t Roofied, dosed, or a victim of bio-terrorism, but that he caught a bug from a classmate, refused to wear his coat over his Wonder Woman costume, and/or simply ate one too many pounds of candy corn. Next question.

4)I almost thought about just taking the kids to our church’s fall festival this year instead of door-to-door Given the lax standards for admission to most churches, and the number of sinners that come through them on a weekly basis, the Gay Uncle would like to posit that the basements and rec rooms of such locales likely have a higher infectious bacteria count than subway poles, kitchen sponges, or gas station toilet seats combined. (While cleanliness is next to godliness, the reverse is not necessarily true.) And the whole bobbing for apples thing that often takes place at these festivals–while ultimately resulting in a lower sugar intake than T-or-T-ing–requires immersing your child’s vulnerable oral and nasal passages in warm, germy, kiddie-face water. Plus, if you’re going to a church to avoid Stranger Danger, Gunc has one word of warning: Priests.