A gay man has described how he was almost outed by his father who found pictures of 'beefcakes' on the computer he used in the nineties, and how he managed to deflect the subject in the best possible way.
In honour of National Coming Out Day, a writer going by the name Grant Grinder, (author of This is How It Starts and The People We Hate at the Wedding) shared a cringe-worthy anecdote about the NSFW pics his dad had found on his computer when he was a teen.
Grinder states: "When I was 13, I began collecting pictures of hot men that I found on AOL. I kept them on my family's computer, in a file called "downloads" I thought no one looked at, and I labelled them with the one word I knew to describe hot men: beefcake."
He continued: " I kept up my beefcake collecting for a good six months until, one day, my dad was driving me to a friend's house ... and [he] had a question for me. We pulled up to a stoplight (I can still remember which one) and, turning to me, he asked 'Who's been downloading all the pictures of the beefcakes?'"
However, Grinder had the perfect retort to throw his dad off his scent: "Looking him straight in the eye, I said, very gravely, "Dad, I think it was Mom."
Grinder added: "Flash forward to now: I don't know if he ever talked to my mom, though I suspect if he did it was so they could have a good laugh. I was very obviously gay ... if anything the beefcakes just confirmed their strong suspicions."
"A braver kid would've said 'f*ck it, those beefcakes are MINE.' But alas, I was 13. I wasn't ready. Coming out is hard, and it's something that as LGBTQ+ people we have to do every day, in a million different ways."
Grant is right: coming out is hard. For more information on National Coming Out Day, and how you can be a supportive ally to LGBT+ people, please check out the above link.