Recognizing Art

I'd been in the Navy about five years before I got a chance to come home and visit, and then it was only because the boat I was on happened to stop off in Seattle on the way to Olympia. There were some changes, of course, but for the most part it seemed like the same old place. A lot (and I do mean a LOT) of the people I knew in high school were still there, and most were working the same menial jobs they'd always had. Not that my career scraping paint was all that better than waiting tables, but at least I'd got to travel some while doing so.

I brought some guys from the boat home, and we sat around drinking beer with my dad. He'd been in the Navy about 20 years by then, and was salty as a mermaid's taint. At one point he mentioned he had last Monday's game on tape and asked me fire it up. There were about twenty VHS tapes stacked up around the TV, and none had labels, so I resorted to holding them up at random intervals and asking "This one? How about this one?"

I was about halfway through the stack when my 14 year old sister happened to wander by. "What's on this one? " I asked.

"Oh, that's that FAG tape!" she exclaimed. The rest of us slowly turned and look at my dad. No one asked, but we were clearly curious.

"I don't know what she's talking about." he finally said, after an awkward pause.

"What do you mean?" I asked my sister.

"It's totally gross. It shows two girls doing it!" she explained.

There was another long pause, then everyone started laughing.

"When it's two guys, then it's gay" I told her "When it's two girls, it's art."