On pornography: “Hell, Shane, I’m not going to tell you that I never peeked at a Playboy in my day. But if you look at stuff like that, you have to remember that that woman isn’t a thing, she’s a person.”

On sex and media: “If an alien came down to earth and watched TV for 24 hours straight, they would think that all we did is have sex all day and that it was the most important thing in our lives. Well, let me tell you: It’s not.”

On “It’s Raining Men,” when it came on the radio and I changed the station to avoid seeming gay (which I very much was): “What are you doing? That song’s a classic! Paul Shaffer wrote this!”

I was a fat, closeted teenager who loved musical theater and hated my body, so hearing my father say any of this felt like a violation of the Geneva Conventions. My father — a Catholic baby boomer from Cleveland whose own father wouldn’t let him listen to the Rolling Stones because the music was too risqué — couldn’t have enjoyed these chats any more than I did.

And yet these exercises in mutually assured embarrassment continued for my entire youth. The only thing that stopped them was me moving out of the house.

But it turned out even that couldn’t end them. You can take the teenager out of the Ford Taurus, but you can’t take the unendurable sex talk out of the teenager. Sure, being an ersatz adult meant that I could do all the things my teenage id yearned to do — drink alcohol, take drugs and (try to) have sex — but it didn’t mean that I could forget the ordeals my father put me through on the highways of Chicagoland.