Informer.

As I was beginning to type out this entry, I was thinking about family. My uncle J's birthday was last week. My favorite cousin, E sent me an email a few days before saying she would be there, and I was just able to make it in time.

My dad's side of the family is very strange. My aunts and uncles are really uncomfortable with direct confrontation, and most of them are gossip fiends as a result. My grandfather is in real estate, and has systematically screwed over the majority of his eight adult children. My dad's story reminds me of some Macbeth-style drama redone for the 90's. Maybe I'll go into it more later.

Anyway, due to the aforementioned family drama, I was pretty estranged from my dad's family until I was around eighteen. There are a total of fourteen aunts and uncles and endless cousins - so it's not like I never saw any of them. But it was mostly on holidays or involving some sort of family transaction like babysitting. My fondest childhood memories are of our summer vacations to Coloma, Michigan, where almost everyone from that side of the family would rent cabins at a small resort for a few weeks. My "totally rad" cousin E made me my first mixtape, and I still remember a lot of the tracklist. You can't really go wrong with "Teenager in Love" "California Dreamin'" or Snow's "Informer", especially when your audience is 8.

Sometimes I wish I could have spent more time with my dad's family growing up. My uncles and aunts are (or have been) comedians, published writers, cartoonists, handymen, lawyers, paramedics, nurses, hairstylists, craftswomen, local government bigwigs, mothers, and fathers. What a huge amount of knowledge and life to learn from. My cousins are all getting older and larger. Some of them are maturing pretty fast, and I wonder what they'll be like when they're adults.

Sitting at the birthday dinner, I started looking at the faces of my aunts and uncles and wondering what they'll think of me when I come out to them as trans. I told my cousin E at Christmas that I had a girlfriend, and she is still baffled that everyone else in the family is really quiet about it. I have never formally come out to my dad as anything because I never had a name for it. I told my mom that I was into women in high school, but allowing someone to assume you're a lesbian when you feel male deep down doesn't really make anything better.

E was talking pretty loudly about my partner R at the birthday dinner, and while I love her for trying to push me a little to be more open, I felt like I was being dragged out of my personal comfort zone and "outing" timeline. I plan on telling my family about my partner when I come out to them as trans, but not before. A couple of them actually acknowledge my relationship, and I guarantee the rest know a few things about my personal life. But I think it'll be nice to address everything openly all at once - hey my identity is like this, hey my girlfriend is rad. After that, I don't care what they think. At least they'll have the right information.

While I was beginning to type this, R asked me on gmail chat if I know J and K so and so. They ended up being the uncle and aunt I started this entry about. Apparently they are clients of a gallery R's gallery works with. Hilarious.