When read­ing “Stuff White Peo­ple Like,” one of the items listed was “Gay Peo­ple” with a lit­tle aside in that par­ents try to expose their chil­dren to homo­sex­u­als at an early age. This reminded me of a dis­turb­ing inci­dent on IRC a few months ago, which has com­pelled me to write this tonight. We were in some sort of dis­cus­sion when a user started talk­ing about how him and his wife don’t know­ingly expose their chil­dren (ages 4 and 7 if I recall cor­rectly) to gay peo­ple. If there was a fam­ily event with their gay cousin, they won’t go. I was just against peo­ple would raise their kids this way. They claimed they were avoid­ing “awk­ward” moments when a kid might ask why John is kiss­ing Jack. This isn’t any more “awk­ward” then a child ask­ing where babies come from, or why John is kiss­ing Jill. We’re all humans and we’re all sex­ual beings. These ques­tions happen.

But when tak­ing a shower tonight–I do a lot of think­ing while tak­ing showers–I was reminded of how my par­ents han­dled the “gay issue.”

As long as I can remem­ber my par­ents were friends with Bruce and Kelly. They never really went into why they always came together, and as a child I never won­dered it. I prob­a­bly just assumed they lived together, and that noth­ing seemed out of the ordi­nary. Why would I have a prob­lem with it as a child? Bruce was an early com­puter user, and always had awe­some games for me to play. Kelly col­lected McDonald’s toys, Bar­bies, was study­ing to be a hair­dresser, and loved cook­ing. To a kid, they were just like any other adult, and were pretty much awe­some to me and my sister.

Never did it really cross my mind that they were not het­ero­sex­u­als. Of course, as a kid–as I expect with every other child on the planet–things like sex­u­al­ity never came up in my thoughts at all until at least 10. So when in the car one day I was talk­ing about how I had heard of a game called “Smear the Queer,” and kept repeat­ing the name. I liked how the name rhymed and thought “queer,” was, well, a “queer” word.

Then came an awk­ward moment when my parents–knowing what queer meant and what the “game” started as–solemnly informed me that they would be smear­ing peo­ple like Bruce and Kelly. Silence. I didn’t under­stand why some­one would try and tar­get these cool guys who played a pretty big part in my childhood.I still don’t understand.

They didn’t seem dif­fer­ent then, and aren’t dif­fer­ent now. Instead of try­ing to avoid the awk­ward homo­sex­ual ques­tions that come along with all of the awk­ward het­ero­sex­ual ques­tions, I was raised to treat every­one the same. There was noth­ing wrong with being dif­fer­ent, and truly, they never seemed dif­fer­ent. Rais­ing a child this way ensures that sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion is never really that big of an issue. Homo­sex­ual peo­ple were not avoided, the topic not ignored, and I did not sud­denly “dis­cover” homo­sex­ual peo­ple one day when my parent’s guard was down. At a very young age the mold was imprinted to me that didn’t treat men who liked dolls any dif­fer­ent than one who liked NASCAR. Where dif­fer­ence is nat­ural, and we have a unique con­tri­bu­tion to those around us.

When I hear and read about par­ents try­ing to avoid any sit­u­a­tion that might “expose” (which is a hor­ri­ble term, I think) their young chil­dren to those dreaded “homo­sex­u­als,” it makes me won­der. It’s deci­sions like that–a deci­sion to try and avoid any awk­ward ques­tion that prob­a­bly won’t be any more awk­ward than “where do babies come from”–that breeds intol­er­ance. As with any­thing, we only will treat peo­ple dif­fer­ently if we pick up social clues around us that say that we should. So when chil­dren real­ize that their par­ents have been avoid­ing those “other peo­ple,” they start to think some­thing is wrong with being dif­fer­ent. The cycle begins again.

Note: This seemed much bet­ter when writ­ing it in my head.