I think it was January 2000. Michael and I were attending an anthropomorphics convention in the Bay area. As I was walking to our hotel room I passed a room that reeked of a strange smell. It was a scent I had encountered before, but I had never learned what it was.

When I got to the room, I told Michael about the smell. He described a part of the hallway and asked if that’s where it was.

When I confirmed, he smiled and shook his head in a manner that clearly indicated I was a silly person.

“Honey,” he said very gently, “that’s pot. Someone is getting extremely baked in a room there.”

“Oh!”

In other words, I didn’t learn how to recognize the smell of pot until I was 39 years old.

I’ve never been one of the cool kids…

Now, one can argue about what the true meaning of “cool” is, and whether in the long run one’s experience of actually partaking or not in certain illicit substances qualifies, but I believe everyone will agree that when one is 39 years old and does not at least know what pot smoke smells like, one was definitely never fallen within any of the definitions of “cool.”

Throughout the 1990s I slowly became accustomed to the notion that people will leap to the conclusion that I know something about pot. On a rather large number of occasions people I barely knew asked if I might have some to share, or might know where to obtain some. This assumption seemed to be entirely predicated on the knowledge that I was a gay man. A rather large number of people, both gay and not, seemed under the impression that all gay men were regular users of cannibis, and even if we weren’t, people believed we all were very well acquainted with someone who did.

After I finally learned what pot smoke actually smelled like, the number of casual acquaintances and the like who asked me about weed dropped off. Part of the reason was likely the fact that, in contrast to my late husband Ray, Michael is not at all fond of dancing or otherwise hanging out in clubs, and so we stopped going to those kinds of places.

Then the initiatives to first legalize medical marijuana in our state came up, and passed. And a some years later, an initiative to completely decriminalize marijuana possession and recreational use was put on the ballot. Suddenly, people are talking about pot, often, and I find people I barely know making comments and inquiries to me about the substance.

Make no mistake, I voted for the state initiative legalizing medical marijuana, and I voted for the city initiative making simple possession the lowest priority of the police, and I voted for the initiative to decriminalize marijuana entirely. I voted for each of those things because I see the statistics about use and dangers of this substance in comparison to alcohol and tobacco, and can’t find a rational basis to put it in a separate category from those legal substances. And I can look at the true cost of the so-called war on drugs and see that most of the damage to society is a result of the legal prohibition, rather than the production and consumption of the substances in question. And finally, I see the statistics about enforcement, and it is clear that young people of color are disproportionately arrested and charged for these offences.

The racial thing particularly bothers me, because I have seen how young white people are let off without even a warning for minor drug offences, while black and hispanic kids get arrested, put into the system, and then for the rest of their lives that arrest follows them around. So I want our federal government to quit wasting tens of millions of dollars on the war on drugs, and I want state and local governments to stop enforcing drug laws on people of color when it almost never enforces the same laws on white folks.

None of which adds up to what a rational person would call a pro-marijuana stance.

But now that those initiatives have all passed, I suddenly find myself, once again, in the situation of people presuming that I indulge myself. Or if I don’t indulge, that I am intimately acquainted with the process.

I’m not. I don’t have a strong ethical, moral, nor philosophical reason not to. I just don’t happen to partake. Part of it is precisely because I grew up in that conservative religious background and didn’t either know nor was very interested during my formative years, so I didn’t acquire the habit. Another part is a result of being a nerdy introvert. I’m just not temperamentally inclined to success in a world of clandestine exchanges, you know?

It’s not as if I have any right to feel morally superior. I do indulge in alcohol. I used to smoke tobacco. Quitting the latter was good for my health in ways that became obvious very quickly (I stopped coming down with bronchitis each and every time I caught so much as a sniffle), which leaves me very apprehensive about taking up the habit of smoking anything else.

But I keep finding myself in this weird position of explaining that I don’t know much about this thing, am not very interested in it, but don’t feel particularly judgmental about it either.

It’s all very weird and awkward. Which I ought to be used to because, as I said at the beginning of this, I’ve never been one of the cool kids.