David Sedaris: "Lou Sedaris, who invited her?"

Most nights, before I go to sleep I like to read something by David Sedaris.
Last night I read Road Trips, which is about how Sedaris didn't come out until he was 20.
That was way back in 1977 - and my how things have changed.
A little while back David goes to visit his father, Lou, who takes him round to meet the family that's moved in next door.
There's 'a high-spirited fifteen-year-old, who threw himself onto the sofa with great flourish and referred to my father as a she, as in "Lou Sedaris, who invited her?"
"My son is gay!" the boy's mother announced, as if none of us had figured this out yet. He may have attended one of those magnet schools for the arts, but still it floored me that a ninth grader in Raleigh, North Carolina - on the street where I grew up - could comfortably identify himself as a homosexual. I felt like someone in a ten-pound leg brace meeting a beneficiary of the new polio vaccine. "She just happens to be my father, young man, and I'd appreciate it if you'd show her a little respect."
"Yes, ma'am."'

This afternoon I saw a kid who looked about 16 or so in a charity shop with his mother, trying on a top.
He looked like the kind of boy whose mother wouldn't need to make an announcement, you could see it just shining out of him.
I felt happy for him, living in a world that's so much easier than before, but also - and not for the first time recently - I felt a bit sad and old and out of time.
And then I wondered if it was just me, and if his mother even knew.
Perhaps there's still no vaccine, and there's still no known cure.