Credit where credit is due; I was inspired to write this by Garrison Keillor’s Column on the subject.

I have always preferred the company of women to men, as long as I can remember. It was difficult before college, when I was shy and awkward around girls, but my lovers fixed that, and it’s been women first for me ever since.

I say a daily gratitude prayer for the people in my life; the list is top-heavy with women: my wife and daughters, friends, lovers, teachers.

I suspect this preference resulted from two things: a strong female role model and parts of my character that were (and who knows, maybe still are) considered effeminate.

My father enjoyed a 50-year marriage to my mom and was a great role model in many ways. But he was an introvert, I was an extrovert, and my mother was an extrovert, so I ended up modeling on her in many ways.

Mom was smart, funny, well-educated and loquacious, a voracious reader, an enthusiastic traveler, a writer and a photographer. She was empathetic, and her emotional intelligence was genius-level.

I mentioned once before that I was considered effeminate, and I know from the reaction that most of my adult friends find it surprising, but I was considered effeminate until I got to college. Since I grew up in a working class neighborhood, it could simply be that I was on the wrong end of expectations about masculinity.

I was not interested in watching sports or reading about them, and I was not good at them. “I’ll be Willie Mays,” I said once during a pickup baseball game; it was pointed out I was pigment impaired for that role model. I never could remember the school colors or mascots of the University of Oregon and Oregon State: one is the beavers, the other the ducks.

I was clothes-crazy, and started wearing French-cuff shirts in high school because I noticed all the politicians and movie stars wore them. You can imagine how that went over at my all-boys high school, where a tee-shirt with no writing was considered formal wear.

In the 1960s reading was not as gendered an activity as it has become (boys no longer read). I read continuously and voraciously, a habit facilitated by the fact that I lived in a house full of books, magazines and newspapers. That was more reading than a boy was “supposed” to do in my neighborhood.

I also had my hair razor-cut while I was in high school because a) I liked the way it looked on Clint Eastwood and b) it reduced my natural curl.

In high school, I never participated in the locker-room braggadocio about conquest of, ill treatment of and sex with women. It disgusted me, but I knew better than to say anything about it, given how far in the hole I already was, in terms of social standing.

It didn’t help that most of my best high-school friends were gay, something that was obvious to my classmates and my mother, but not to me. I always assumed it was just stereotyping, the same as the assumption I was gay. In my case, it wasn’t true. In their cases, it was, as they came out to me one by one over the years.

I was pretty self-confident, and mom helped when she said of the people who bullied me, “They’re idiots. Who cares about the opinion of idiots?”

I have known some wonderful men and some awful women, but as a rule, I find the women easier to get along with and more fun to be with.