Amanda: This gives me Barbie animated movie vibes.
Sarah: His head is so big, and his neck is so long, and I’m also confused by the size of her head and the length of her arms.
This is giving me the uncanny valley vibes of that one Julie Anne Long Cover – not the smirking git one, the giant head lady one.
This one:
Sarah: “Head too big, arms too short” will be the name of my podcast about disturbing cover art.
Elyse: That’s similar to my favorite kitten/puppy stage “ears too big, legs too long”
Sarah: His neck is long, right? It’s not just me?
Elyse: I think it’s not long, it’s broken.
Sarah: “How.” ” How what?” ” How did you know that my father was Gumby?” ” Everyone knows your father is Gumby, my lord.”
Elyse: LMAO
Sarah: “I thought we had hidden it.”
“You thought you had hidden your lineage and connection to Lord Gumbert Rubberthwaite, Earl of Stretetshingtonshoreley?” … “Which is pronounced ‘Stretchley?’ Really, you thought that was a secret?”
Elyse: I would read that book.
From Kelly B: One-the title is Behind the Net but they are clearly in front of the net. And two-the physics required to sit on a hockey net like that.
Sarah: This is just awful on so many gravitational and proportional levels.
Amanda: Girl has got to be engaging her core like crazy.
(snip-go read it-it’s hilarious! And post your own comments below!)
ICE white supremacist gang thugs getting even more agressive attacking people. They no longer care about skin color. The gang has reverted to gang tactics of intimidation. They think might makes them right. The ones with the guns are in charge is what they have been taught. And the administration is OK with this as it helps their cause to have a frightened public unwilling to stand up to them. They are covering their faces because they understand they are breaking the laws and that if a police officer tried this they would be in prison. They know that Stephen Miller will not always be there to protect them. And tRump can not pardon people found guilty of state crimes. In this clip a woman rushes into another woman’s home. The police dispatch incorrectly tells her she must hand the woman over and she almost does, but then gains courage as ICE thugs draw closer on her property. Her neighbors come out and give her strength and support. Hugs
Most of these terms annoy me. Many more not mentioned here also annoy me. I very much dislike what we used to call “cliches,” and other trendy terms and phrases that get used as if they’re proof of membership in some sort of club, or something. It really messes up language and clarity, IMO. “Woke” is one that just irritates me so much I need calamine lotion. I remember I first saw the term in 3d grade, reading a biography of a runaway slave who used the Underground Railroad. The term started out in slavery times, with people of color-slaves, newly freed people-telling each other to stay woke, meaning be aware of your surroundings at all times because of danger. That was passed down the lines for generations, always meaning to be aware of potential danger always. Look at it now. I don’t believe woke should be retired, simply given back to those who need it. IMO! Anyway, on with the article; everyone’s mileage will vary (and maybe that phrase ought to be in here; I use it frequently) on these. Enjoy!
It’s pretty customary for humans to collectively latch on to certain words or phrases for a time, only to grow tired of them once the trendiness wears off. That’s by and large how we get generational slang in the first place. One man’s “rad” is another man’s “bussin.” The linguistic circle of life, as it were.
But the rapidity of social media has certainly seemed to make this turnover move at the speed of light, hasn’t it? It takes a fraction of the time for words to get overused, misused, change meaning, and lose meaning altogether.
2. “Also while we’re at it, ‘bombshell,’ ‘destroyed,’ ‘meltdown,’ and ‘disaster.’”
3. “Blasted. Clap back.”
“Those are telltale signs that what you’re about to read is heavily biased and was written to evoke emotions instead of giving just the facts so it’s basically trash.
Therapy speak
4. “Gaslighting. People love to use this term wrong. It doesn’t mean ‘lying,’ it means ‘manipulating somebody into believing they’re crazy.’ That involves lying, but they’re not the same thing. Also every term invented to get around TikTok censors. ‘Unaliving,’ ‘graped,’etc.”
5. “Calling anyone who does anything slightly annoying a narcissist.”
6. “Similarly, anytime someone feels just a little proud of themselves for something and/or compliments themselves, it’s ‘ego.’ Not hating and constantly putting yourself down isn’t ego. It’s healthy.”
7. “Trauma.You don’t have trauma from the Starbucks barista mispronouncing your name, Djoeffreigh. And if you do, I am not interested in hearing about it.”
Aggressively passive-aggressive phrases
8. “People who use ‘the ick,’ ironically enough, give me the ick. Now I’ve given it to myself.”
9. “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
10. “Louder for the people in the back.”
11. “‘Let that sink in.’ ‘Read that again but slowly.’ ‘I don’t know who needs to hear this, but…’”
12. “‘Just saying’ after being very aggressive.”
Social media buzzwords and phrases that have been run into the ground
13. ”’Let’s normalize this.’ please no.”
14. “Tell me you’re Y without saying it.”
15. “I’m begging people to stop saying’”its giving.’”
Words that do not mean what people think they mean
22. “’Underrated’. Sick of seeing ‘OMG! This band/singer/guitarist/drummer is so underrated’ when they’re clearly millionaires from the musical success they’ve enjoyed for years.”
23. “‘My truth.’ I like this one because it lets me know the next words out of their mouth are going to be bullshit.”
24. “According to AI.”
Phrases that kids today use that all us olds hate
25. “The grandkids are slowing down on 6 7 (FINALLY), and I haven’t heard them say ‘sigma’ for a while, so HOPEFULLY those are both going away forever!!
26. “‘Lowkey’ we’ve run it into the ground.”
“The new ‘literally.”
“Omg it’s low key every second word my teen says.”
And finally…
Words that have lost their original meaning due to overuse
27. “‘Absolute game changer .’ I do product reviews, and I want to smack people for this one. Everything is a ‘game changer’ or a ‘holy grail.’ Bullshit, it is. That 5 star game changer is usually an overpriced piece of crap lol.”
This is an important story of growth and rejection of your core identity. The fact that those closest to you can not accept you and that which makes up who you are. I have not changed the text of the story in any way as I want the voice of the author and his agony of his childhood to shine clearly. This is the way the right wing Christian Nationalist bigots want every family member to be and all children raised. Remember this was only the 1990s. In the 30 years since great progress was made in acceptance, tolerance and education of / about LGBTQ+ kids and how to raise them in loving acceptance of how they feel inside themselves. The Christian hate groups that make their living trying to return the country to a much more regressive hateful time rolling back all rights gained by minorities. And in a very short time they have had a huge effect on how LGBTQ+ people especially LGBTQ+ kids are treated. They stated their goal of driving these kids back into hiding terrified of being outed for fear of being beaten, harassed, and ostracized. That is what they want. Several Christian lawmakers who are trying to make being an out LGBTQ+ kid illegal along with showing any media that represents the LGBTQ+ community have said that when they were kids in school they used to gang up and beat the shit out of LGBTQ+ kids. I know in the 1970s I was not out but targeted as a “faggot” and constantly harassed and attacked. How any adult would want to return to such a time, to having any kid or adult be treated that way is horrendous. Especially from those trying hard to force the country to follow their idea of a Christian lifestyle. Hugs
At 30, I’m finally living as myself. But the man whose acceptance I wanted most still can’t say the word gay.
Jan 10, 2026
Content warning: This story includes mentions of homophobia, childhood trauma and suicidal ideation.
By CorBen Williams
The seventh time I came out to my father wasn’t dramatic. It didn’t happen at a kitchen table or in a parking lot or after he’d found one of my journals. It happened casually, slipped into a conversation like it was nothing:
“As a gay man—” I began.
“You’re not gay,” he interrupted.
“Dad,” I replied. “We’ve done this too many times before.”
Even now, at 30 years old, married to the man I love, fully myself in ways I once thought impossible, my dad still can’t say who I am out loud. It hangs there, suspended between us, as though acknowledging my homosexuality would unravel something he’s built his entire life around.
I’m not sure what exactly. Control? Image? Masculinity? Maybe he simply doesn’t have the language.
Photo courtesy of CorBen Williams.
I grew up in North Pole, Alaska, in a red-sided house at the end of a gravel turnaround. It was the kind of home where the winter light never quite reached the living room and silence carried through the walls like a second language.
North Pole felt like its own universe. A 2,500 person military town where there’s snow on the ground for up to 187 days a year and the Christmas lights never come down. About 70% of the town is white and roughly 30% of the voters are registered Republican, with almost half listed as “undeclared,” which in Alaska is usually just Republican without saying it out loud.
Most families were tied to the church or the base, so you learned fast what was considered normal and what was not. People knew your parents and your business.
Growing up Black and queer made me stand out without trying and forced me to learn early how to tuck parts of myself away.
My parents had both served in the military, and even though my mother had the warmth and softness to move past it, my father emulated parental rejection. Dad demanded respect and expected excellence in the way a man shaped by the military does: loud and without room for negotiation.
You could feel his energy before you heard his footsteps because there was always a tension that entered the room with him. He yelled more than he spoke, and as a kid I was told to listen to what he was saying, not how he was saying it, even when he was screaming in my face.
My father didn’t know what to do with a son who felt things deeply, and before I ever came out to him—the first of seven times—he had already shown me exactly which parts of myself were unsafe to reveal.
But that didn’t stop me from trying. The first time I came out, I was in first grade, sitting in the parking lot of a McDonald’s on Geist Road, right beside my future high school.
“Dad, I think I’m bisexual,” I said.
I knew my ass was gay. But I also knew enough about my father to try to ease him into it. He asked if I knew what that meant, and even though I did, I told him “no.”
“It means you like sucking penis,” he spat harshly.
I was six.
People think kids don’t understand things, but children clock everything. That moment didn’t confuse me about who I was. It clarified who he was. It showed me that there were parts of me he couldn’t handle and wouldn’t protect. I didn’t leave that day understanding my sexuality better. I left understanding the risk of telling the truth.
The second time, I was forced out when my father found my journal. I was 10 years old, and in those pages, I’d written unpolished thoughts about men, about how I felt around them, questions I didn’t yet know how to ask anyone.
He burst into my bedroom and tore the journal up in front of me, little pieces of paper flying around me as I sat in my bed. I tried not to cry.
“As long as you’re a kid in my house, you don’t get privacy,” I remember him barking. It showed me that I need to be wary about how much I trust people and what information I give them.
This rejection led me to the darkest part of my childhood.
“I am tired of living,” I remember muttering to my sixth grade teacher.
I was exhausted by my dad, exhausted from hiding, exhausted from feeling wrong in my own skin.
I should have stopped writing after that, but writing was how I survived. When you don’t have anyone to talk to, you talk to the page.
By 13, I had another journal. This one had drawings of a classmate and fantasies about kissing him. When my dad found it, he brought it up on the car ride home from school, saying “the correct way” to feel about other boys was “brotherly love” and nothing else.
But the third journal set off the biggest explosion.
It was filled with details, drawings and fantasies about my first hookup with a boy. The way I wrote about them, at 15, was more adult. The kind of writing he didn’t want to believe his son was capable of.
“I fucking told you about this shit,” he shouted, with the journal gripped tightly in his hand. “This isn’t appropriate. This isn’t what we do.”
My mom was sitting next to me, shocked, both of us caught off guard by how quickly he had gone from discovery to explosion. I almost cried, but I swallowed it down. My mom guided him into the other room to calm him down.
He didn’t speak to me for seven days. He couldn’t look at me. Each day felt like another nail in the coffin.
Photo courtesy of CorBen Williams.
I kept coming out to my dad anyway. At 17. At 22. At 24. Nothing changed.
Part of me used to think that I was an embarrassment to my family. I felt for so long that I needed to apologize for being the mistake. But in my late teens, I started to see it differently. I realized I just wanted his acceptance and his love in a way that I was never gonna get.
Because of this, I don’t think I ever really got to be a child. Even in first grade, when other kids were talking about Barbies and Legos, I felt like I was always bracing for impact, performing a version of boyhood that never fit. My childhood was spent preparing for adulthood and a career. People would always say to me, “You seem so much older. You seem so mature.”
I left North Pole for good and moved to New York City when I turned 19. I became a performer, a traveler, someone who learned to build softness and resilience, where my childhood had taught me to live in fight-or-flight mode. And then, almost when I wasn’t expecting it, I met Travis.
He was older. Wisconsin-born. A wildlife biologist. Patient in a way I didn’t even realize I needed. My mother said he softened me, brought grey into my black-and-white worldview. With him, I don’t brace for criticism. I don’t edit myself. I don’t shrink. I don’t hide my journals.
We’ve been together five years now, married for three. He’s met everyone in my life, except for my dad.
Photo courtesy of CorBen Williams.
Now, when I think about my upbringing in North Pole, I think about the path through the woods that led to my house, hoping someone on the other side would understand me. I think about how many times I tried to hand my father my truth, and how many times he handed it back to me with rage.
Even now, with the life I’ve built and the love I’ve chosen, acceptance is still complicated. I wish I could say that learning to love myself erased the sting of not being understood, but the truth is I still wrestle with where I fit—inside my family, inside Black spaces, inside queer spaces, inside the places that were never built with someone like me.
I’ve learned to be confident, to be gracious, to be the person who makes others feel seen, maybe because I know exactly what it feels like not to be. But some days, even as a grown man, I feel an instinct to shrink.
I’m learning that acceptance is a practice, one I have to return to again and again. I don’t have it all figured out. But I’m trying. And maybe that’s the real truth at the end of all this: I haven’t just been coming out to my father all these years—I’ve been slowly, steadily learning how to come home to myself.
Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES reached out to CorBen’s father for comment, but he did not respond.
Sam Donndelinger assisted with the writing and reporting in this story.
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