It took me a while to get into her in college but around junior-senior year I started to consume her short stories voraciously.
There's a story I'm trying to find now and perhaps Datalounge can help me. From what I can recall, it's set at a dinner party for extended family in someone's backyard. The narrative is mostly from the perspective of an older woman. The story concludes with the party breaking up and the guests wandering off, leaving the protagonist in the kitchen with her gay nephew. (I think he's her nephew, but he's a male relative in his twenties who isn't her son.) They wash the dishes together and the narrator makes some humanizing observation about him.
I remember how this story made me feel as a gay kid in his early twenties who still felt uncomfortable in his skin, in a much less gay-friendly America than the one we live in today. It was one of the first works I'd read where a young gay man just radiates from the page as a complete person--not as an object of desire; or a rebellious, angst-ridden ball of rage; or a character who exists primarily to be paired up with another man. The fact that I still remember it today, a decade later, is a testament to that. (I've forgotten the name and the collection it was in, though not how it made me feel.)
Does anyone recognize this story? And feel free to discuss Munro in general.