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UPSETTING DAY

HOW TO UNDERSTAND AND ACCEPT YOUR GAY SON

If you don’t understand or accept your gay son, you’re probably not used to good news, but I have some: there’s a book called HOW TO UNDERSTAND AND ACCEPT YOUR GAY SON (Even if you’re not sure you can). It’s the perfect guide for someone absolutely repulsed by basic human decency, but also willing to read a book on it.

HTUAAYGS(Eiynsyc) spends most of its 155 pages answering tough questions a proudly ignorant person might ask a gay expert. It’s a best-case scenario debate between the world’s most patient person and the bronze medal winner in the Gay Son Hating Olympics. These hypothetical interactions were mashed together into a vaguely book-like structure by a gay couple in… holy shit, 2015!? This wasn’t written from an Arkansas AIDS pandemic in the ’80s? It seems impossible that while we were watching the Night’s Watch and the Wildlings form an uneasy alliance, there were people driving to the suburbs and telling the Barnes and Noble clerk, “Maybe y’all can help me out. I found a penis in the boy’s mouth and, well, before I put him down I was lookin’ for the latest instruction manual on gay.”

Here are, word for word, some of the obvious questions answered by HTUAAYGS(Eiynsyc):

You probably guessed the answer to most of these questions is something close to “no,” but much closer to “no, you goddamn psychopath.” The book tries to take irrational hate and fear and respond to it rationally, which is kind of satisfying and seems like it should work, but you can obviously look around and see how it doesn’t. For instance, if you believe a 680-year-old man named Noah built history’s largest zoo on a cruise ship using year 🦴7👁☥ technology, you don’t change your mind when you enter second grade and find out everything about it is fucking stupid. And if “the God” told you your gay son was an unnatural pedophile, you don’t tell that God to fuck off because a book goes, “Actually, in several functional ways that’s not technically accurate.”

My point is, I’m not sure how effective this book will be at fixing bigot dads. Not only because of the nature of the problem, but because these authors might not be experts on gay culture. For one thing, they say in their book there is “strictly speaking” no such thing, but also look at the gay son on the cover. Are you telling me a gay teen showed up to picture day with no product in his hair? And look at how it’s been cut. That’s worse than cheap– this kid stuck his bangs in a carnival ride and told them to let it rip. The gayest thing this kid has ever done was ask his mom if he could buy the WWE 2K Randy Orton DLC. Which means the publisher did not set up a cover shoot with an out-and-proud teen model– these assholes scrolled through stock photos until they found a kid who looked kind of gay. It’s probably as tone-deaf as asking your son if he’s a bottom, and gave me more than enough bread crumbs to find their source.

The cover comes from an Adobe stock photo called “Mother and Son Smiling in an Outdoor Setting” which was also used, and this is true, by a military school for troubled teens and a software company specializing in apps that prevent truck drivers from looking at their phone. And like with all stock photo shoots, the models moved around doing weird shit for a few more pictures. Which means the rest of the article is just this: