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Homosexuality and Nephews

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“Family-ship”
In 1994, the book, Waves: An Anthology of New Gay Fiction, edited by Ethan Mordden was published. The book was a collection of fourteen short fiction stories written by gay men who talked about homosexual issues within a dominant heterosexual culture. The book, saturated with homosexual ideas, was published at a point in history when homosexuality was utterly taboo and its condemnation was commonplace. Moreover, the rise of the HIV and the AIDS scare, which was peaking at this time, injected fear into the hearts of mainstream Americans, who demonized homosexuality as causing these fatal diseases. The short story, “Homo in Heteroland”, which was written by John Weir, was the first story in the book, Waves: An Anthology of…show more content…
The speaker is unable to connect with his brother or his sister-in-law because they would not talk to him about gender issues or touch any political topic where he could share his opinions and establish his beliefs.
Even though, there were times where the brother and sister-in law could have held a serious conversation with the narrator, they chose not to. The narrator says, “The secret weapon of heterosexuality is children” (Weir 5). By this the narrator means that people, in particle his brother and sister-in-law, spend all their time taking care or their children, but even when they have a free time all they would do is talk about their offspring, which led him conclude that his nephews were being raised in a homophobic family, whom were taught to hate queers, and cheer The Boy Scouts, an institution that does not permit gay members.
During the trip, the narrator spends a lot of his time taking care of his nephews, James, and John. There is a time when they play in a pond at the bottom of a hill and John starts to talk about marriage by mentioning that he wants to marry Abby, his best friend. Unexpectedly, James says that he wants to marry Ethan, Abby’s brother. John starts to make fun of his brother and chants that his brother cannot marry James. But, there it is, the chance that the narrator was waiting for to be himself and revel his own beliefs.
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