Today is Sunday. I’ve been looking forward to today for weeks. I’ve got a week off work. A week off being chained to the CT reporting desk from 08:00 to 17:30 Monday to Friday. A day to sleep in. A day to hear the city slowly waking up, or whatever that bloody tapping sound is coming from next door. A day to stay in bed until the sun is actually up. This Northern Hemisphere Christmas is really doing my head in; it’s cold, it snowed last week, the sun isn’t up at 5am but closer to 8am. I had great plans of rest and relaxation for this morning. Our printer has an automatic wake-from-sleep-and-make-printing-noises-function that it does every day. It woke me up. Knowing I’d likely not get back to sleep I flicked through my emails, chat notifications, and Facebook updates. Somebody had liked some empowering picture, real or not, of maternal support: My 7 year old son is gay and [blah blah something supportive]. I thought, “That’s supportive.” What a warm and fuzzy way to wake up! Then I read the comments. Never read the comments.
Three hundred thousand people had liked the picture. Forty eight thousand people had commented. The comments varied but a lot cried out: “He’s only 7! He can’t have a sexuality! He’s too young! He shouldn’t say things like that! Stop him! This is wrong!” Great. I’m not sleeping in today. My stomach immediately secreted gastric acid. And, just like Ignatius J. Reilly, my valve slammed shut. I remember being seven years old. I moved schools. I was in the playground. I had a crush on a boy. Unlike the vitriol expressed in these comments I didn’t have any sense of shame or abnormality foisted upon me. It just didn’t exist in the framework I’d been taught. One had to have a girlfriend. So I declared to the playground that I liked his sister, Vicky. Unfortunately Vicky had had a previous claim by an older boy called Simon, who promptly found out and threw a basketball at me. Somehow this soon escalated into my parents driving over to talk to his parents about sportsmanship or something about not throwing basketballs at younger kids. I may or may not have been disabled too, still in abduction splints for Perthés disease, another reason not to have a basketball thrown at me. I remember adults would often say, “He can’t defend himself,” referring to my legs being held in abduction by an A-frame that would cause pressure sores on my bare skin underneath during summer. I had a bottle of methylated spirits and cotton buds that I religiously had to clean the wounds with, so they didn’t get infected. I knew that I wasn’t without defence; the last kid that picked on me within kicking range got a metal buckle to the shin as I round-house pivoted from my left foot. I was not defenceless. I made him cry.
During Primary School I invested myself completely in courting my almost randomly chosen “girlfriend” who sadly had no interest in me whatsoever. She did like all the presents I saved up to buy her. Nobody ever tried to stop me though. Nobody said, “You’re too young to think you might have a girlfriend!” Nobody shrieked, “Do you even know what a girlfriend is!?” My identity of wanting a girl to be my “girlfriend” never actually changed my feelings for her brother. When I was old enough to distinguish the difference between feelings, behaviour and identity and realise that there was incongruence between the expected identity I’d been conditioned to have and the congruent identity I quickly learned existed in the High School playground I started to look for a boyfriend instead. My childhood identity did not make me straight. Neither did it sexualise me or make me think of sticking my penis into anything. I just wanted to write a Valentine’s Day card. So what if a 7-year-old boy identifies as gay and then grows up and has to come to terms with being straight? It’s the reverse of what gay people go through growing up and I doubt it would be anywhere near as awful for him. People wouldn’t ask, “Well, did you at least try to have sex with another guy?”
Why are these comments so offensive to me? Nobody ever expresses concern when even younger children observe gender roles in their family members, and copy heterosexual behaviours or identity. Nobody told me to stop kissing the girls in the play house in Pre-Primary. Actually I think my Mother might have told me to stop kissing the girls in the cubby in Pre-Primary. I was kissing all of them. I’ve seen pictures in shopping malls of tiny little children dressed as man-and-wife posing in cutesy “Let’s get married” giant posters. Is this a sexual thing? Are the people that produce or consume this imagery paedophiles? Of course not. Where are the vociferous advocates for children not being able to identify as wanting to have a boyfriend/girlfriend or husband/wife? Probably watching their children play and reinforcing any heteronormative behaviours. I’ve seen mothers with babies put a boy and girl together and declare them to be boyfriend and girlfriend. Nobody calls that wrong. Why? They are babies and can’t even talk!
I find it really interesting to read the experiences of Amelia on Huffington Post. If I were age 7 in 2013 I would probably have had the vocabulary and real-world examples of homosexual relationships to declare a non-heterosexual identity. Maybe I should start going to my family gatherings and cry out at any child displaying heterosexual behaviours: Should he/she be doing that? Are you going to stop that? Isn’t he/she too young to identify as that? Do you think this is just a phase? I’ll offer the same arguments as explanation: I have no problems with heterosexual people. I have family members that are heterosexual. Friends even. They just shouldn’t be allowing their kids to grow up thinking that they might be heterosexual. The kids will get confused later on when they find out they’re not. Sound familiar?
If I were to write an Arts PhD I would create social media images like this one and evaluate the responses. Why is this image so threatening? It’s a gold mine for responses. People really let their values and feelings shine through. It’s probably not even real. A parent who would make a supportive statement like that is not going to stick that quote on a face pic of his/her kid and then post it online. People are eager to be baited. Alternatively, I’d just misspell something and see what happens:
Links:
Stop Waiting for My Gay Son to Change
http://www.sosuave.com (a website that claims to reveal “Secrets to Meeting, Attracting and Dating Women”) has an entire thread devoted to the topic with a representative caliber of mouth-frothing commentary : http://www.sosuave.net/forum/showthread.php?p=1928025
Glen's Travel Blog 
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