Okay folks, let’s play a game. Here are the rules. I ask you a question, and you get a point if you get it right. I’ll ask a bunch of questions and, by the end of this entry, if you have gotten them all right, you win! Ready? Let’s begin! First question: how old was I when I came out? If you said “how the hell should I know, you narcissist?”, give yourself a point. Also, if you guessed twenty years old, you get a point, too. I figured it out at a wedding. I told everyone else a few months later. Second question: how old was I when I should have realized that I had something to come out about? If your answer was between the ages of seven and nineteen, that’s another point for you! Oh, and you also get the point if you called me a narcissist again. What can I say? I’m a glutton for insults.
In all seriousness, though, there are several points in my life when a light bulb could have turned on. When I came back from summer break and spent a great deal of the beginning of sophomore year talking about the “beauty of the female form” (my exact words) in the artistic sense only (and no, amazingly enough, I wasn’t lying), I think I should have been only a few months from coming out; instead, I just figured I was a straight girl with a new-found appreciation for the human body (those exists, y’know). When I was sixteen and horribly jealous because my best friend had a boyfriend and I was in love with said friend, that could have been a moment. When I kept meeting girls and thinking “I don’t know what it is about them, and I know I’ve never said anything to them, but I really just want to be their best friend,” that also could have been a moment of revelation. Giving my second grade math teacher a valentine and then lamenting to her that I wish I could give her a valentine “the way the boys could” probably wouldn’t (and didn’t) raise any flags for me, but it could have (and probably did for the teacher). I was seven.
Third question: how old does one have to be to realize their sexuality? Answer? Well, this one seems a bit more complicated. For a long time (since I was a teenager, at least), the conventional wisdom was that, at some point, you grew into an older, wiser human being who realized that they were not actually attracted to the opposite sex. You have have had doubts, but you bottled those up. You may have been in denial, because surely if you denied hard enough things would change. You may have not had a clue; having been so conditioned by heterosexual society left you acting hetereo simply because you knew no other way to be. People like to go along with this logic. I mean, consider some of the popular questions when coming out: “Are you sure?” “Aren’t you too young to know?” “You barely have any experience dating, so how can you know what you like?” Based on all of the above, clearly there’s an age minimum; everything younger is just confusion.
Oh, oh wait. No, there’s not.
The answer is there is no age requirement. Why would there be? Children are too young to know who they’re attracted to? Explain to me, then, why we aren’t telling all those little girls who say they want to marry princes that they are too young to know if they want it to be a prince or a princess? Why aren’t we stopping little boys from chasing girls on the playground because they have crushes? They surely can’t know who they’re attracted to, right? This isn’t about the kids; it’s about us. Our three-year old says he has a crush on the boy next door and we don’t know what to do. Our seven-year old calls her “best friend” her girlfriend and says she wants to marry her and it’s a big freaking deal. We tell them they’re wrong, we tell them they’re too young, but why? Kids show elements of their personality in the things that they do, and if they happened to pick up on their same-sex attraction, why would we tell them they’re wrong? Do you know what message that sends? It’s bad for a boy to like a boy or a girl to like a girl. Gay kids aren’t just naturally gay; that shows up later in life (and don’t even get me started on the implications of what a bisexual child might be). You’re telling them that they have a feeling, which you may feel is perfectly normal in adults, is somehow bad and should be hidden. They can be a teacher or a writer or a doctor, but they can’t be gay; they’re too young to want that.
Fourth question: well, then, what should be do? If you answered “be supportive and willing to listen and validate,” great job (or, y’know, if you had something like that). What if they do get older and realize that they were mistaken? To that I shout “so?”. They had the chance to explore and figure things out without you judging them or making them feel bad about themselves. Besides, what if they get older and realize they were right? They had that much time to be validated by someone important in their lives. Kids are cruel, you may say, so what if someone teases or bullies or worse? Well, how much more well prepared would a child be to deal with horrible stuff like that if they had someone older and more compassionate that they could share such things with? They can learn how to blend in if they want to until they’re ready for other people to know. They can learn how to keep their heads up high if they want people to know. Either way, they know they have support and someone to talk to who will stand up for them, which is so important. You can be the most understanding person in the world, but if you’re shutting down instead of lifting up, kids will never know that. And trust me, they need to know.
Kids come out. That’s not a theory anymore; it’s the truth. Some kids know who they are at a young age and aren’t afraid to share it with people. Sure, this may open up some issues, but so does kids wearing glasses or being super smart or uncoordinated. They can’t control any of these things, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t aware of them, and it doesn’t mean we can’t support and help them and show them that we love ALL parts of them. There is a parent who writes the blog “Raising Queer Kids” who had a daughter come out at age seven. She is now ten and still identifies as a lesbian. She’s comfortable in her own skin and has a family that loves her. When she gets older, maybe she’ll be able to bypass some of the confusion and angst because she’s been honest with herself for so long. She might have more strength (and based on the blog, she does) to fight against those that want to bring her down. She might be more open to share other things with her family because they were so open to accepting her as she is, even if part of that is her being young. Final question, and this one’s for double the points: how beautiful is that?
