I’m down in Eugene to help Ben with his car. We ordered Indian, watched a David Cronenberg movie, and then went out for drinks. On the way home, we were standing at a corner waiting for a light when a woman in workout clothes standing maybe ten feet away and a little behind us said, “are you alright?”

We turned and looked at her, I said “sorry?” and she said again, “are you alright? Are you safe?”

The first time she asked the wheels had already started turning, so Ben and I realized about the same time that she was talking to him.

I laughed a little, and he said “this is my dad.”

She leered, and her tone shifted from “concerned bystander” to salacious.

“Uh huh. Is he your dad, or is he your ‘dad’?”

Ben said, “no, he’s my actual dad. Jesus!” as I said “I’m his real dad. Get the fuck out of here, dipshit.”

She turned away from us and yelled over her shoulder, “sor-REE!”

Ben tells me that part of his visible queerness involves a lot of people projecting a lot of things onto him, whether it takes the form of a kind of false and patronizing familiarity, or a darker suggestion of their own sexual neuroses. And now the experience we shared together, where a putatively “concerned” person flipped from “attempted intervention” to leering asshole when her little rescue drama script didn’t go off quite right.