I was in a restaurant yesterday, and I was explaining to the Pirate about how Rufus Wainwright has that kind of voice that's the epitome of the stereotype of gay men - a drawl wherein his lips never meet, he hisses every "s" and he uses too many superlatives. As I was explaining this, a gay couple was seated at a table next to us and I noticed that one of the pair was shooting me dirty looks. Or, he could have been looking innocently around the restaurant with his naturally beetle-browed, frowning expression, but considering that he actually made eye contact, I think he wanted me to know that he didn't appreciate my talking about a gay man while he was sitting there with his boyfriend being a gay man.

I've seen this reaction before. I'll be talking about something, and someone who feels some identification with that thing steps forward to claim ownership of it and challenges my right to even speak of it. It happened once when I was telling the story of how, at a work bonding event, I was asked to eat an unfamiliar food which turned out to be gefilte fish. I'd never had it before, and it turned out to be as innocuous as a processed fish product could be - sort of a vienna sausage version of fish. But someone who had been half paying attention to the subject leapt forward and asked me "Are you Jewish?"

"No," I answered, thinking that if they'd listened to the story, they would know that. We only figured out what it was because two of the people at our table were Jewish and told us, and with a familiar name attached to the food, we were less reticent to try it.

"Well then why were you eating gefilte fish?" she demanded.

I suppose I could have snarled "None of your business" at her, but I get the feeling that it would only have added fuel to her fire, so instead I re-told the story. At the end of it, she expressed horror that anyone would have offered non-Jews gefilte fish in the same tone of voice that one would use when contemplating a person who offers guests cat food smeared on crackers. I'm sure if she were reading this, she would assume that I am equating gefilte fish with cat food, and I'll go on the record as saying that I'm okay with that.

I've had the same reaction from my older child. I'll be having a conversation with the Pirate about something and, if she recognizes the name of a place she's been or a person she knows, she will demand to know why we're talking about them.

I can understand wanting to know why other people are talking about you in particular. I do that all the time - friends say "I was just talking about you!" and I have to stop myself from demanding a complete transcript of the conversation so that I can judge whether it was sufficiently complimentary. I am forced to remind myself that other people's feelings about me are none of my business, and that if my friends lie to me when relating their conversations about me, telling me that they were entirely complimentary and glowing, I'm probably better off.

But I don't get this ownership of other people, much less of insubstantial concepts like "gay" or "Jewish." I can't imagine overhearing a conversation wherein someone expresses an opinion about a particular Mexican or middle-aged woman or redhead who is not me that I would care one way or another about, even though I belong to all those categories. I don't have any illusions that everyone in the world is out to get me. I don't even have any illusions that the rest of the world thinks about me at all when I'm not right in their faces making noise. On an ongoing basis, this means that I'm pleasantly surprised when someone I know remembers my name and that I don't like coffee, which means that I'm pleasantly surprised by most social interactions.

The Pirate postulates that it's an extrovert thing. Extroverts live outside themselves and tend to project themselves onto everything and everyone. Extroverts anthropomorphize their pets and can't imagine that there's anyone on earth that doesn't like the same things that they like. "I already ordered for you - I got us a large pepperoni, anchovy and green olive and a pitcher of Coors." In the mind of the extrovert, it's not that the entire world should be like them, it's that the entire world already is like them.

Since everyone is already like these extroverts, the way that people think of and use different words and concepts is identical. The man at the restaurant looked like an athlete and bodybuilder, and if he hadn't been sitting at a table with another man holding hands and popping tuna rolls into the other man's mouth, I wouldn't have assumed he was gay. Perhaps he disliked people who sound like Rufus Wainwright, thinking that they reflected badly on gay men. Maybe that Jewish woman thought gefilte fish disgusting and was embarrassed that other people were eating it and possible judging Jews based on their gefilte fish consumption.

I think I owe a lot to the assumptions of extroverts. If no one believed that others might think like themselves, we wouldn't have music or literature at all. And in a broad sense, we do all have the same basic emotions - love, hate, fear, hope. But it's the fine gradations that define us as individuals, isn't it? It's the fact that I completely and unreservedly love Rufus Wainwright, moreso because he talks like a dissipated laudanum addict, while that image horrifies a certain man in San Jose. And in the meantime, I'll take a certain measure of delight in seeing others expose themselves in their reactions.