Oh My God, What About the Kids?

I was kicked out of Boy Scouts because I was gay. What I did to get kicked out wasn't overtly gay, but it was an end result of my confused state of mind back then. Growing up in the nineteen fifties and sixties I had never heard of anything like what I was feeling. I was thirteen and I thought I had invented a new thing that adults were completely ignorant of. For over a year I spent a lot of time showing my friends and acquaintances what I had discovered. Interestingly enough, I had no trouble getting them involved, and despite that almost all of them grew up to be heterosexual. It wasn't until eighth grade that somebody finally clued me in. A kid named Tom, the toughest kid in our class, came up to me in the school yard one day and asked me, "Are you a homosexual?"  That was the first time I had ever heard that word. "Homosexual," I asked, "what do you mean?" Tom proceeded to explain, "You give boys blow jobs, you like boys and not girls." The tone of his voice sent the message loud and clear, it was not acceptable. "Umm... no.. Uh, I don't think so." A few months later Life Magazine, which my family had a subscription to, published a lengthy article about

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"Homosexuality in America". It was not a very positive story. It included such things as how homosexuals dressed, how homosexuals met up with each other in sleazy bars and parks, and it described what kind of entertainment homosexuals enjoyed. Movies where men dressed like women, that's what the article said gay  men liked to watch. I read that article from beginning to end. That wasn't me, I was not the way Life Magazine described homosexuals. So for the next four years, my high school years, I concluded that I was not homosexual. I dated girls, and tried to pay no attention to the fact that I seemed to like looking at boys so much more than girls. I was screwed up in so many ways, my hormones were raging, and I was constantly  trying to prove that I was not gay. This resulted in my exhibiting some strange behavior. It took me four years to fully come out after high school, four wasted years in my book.

            Yes, there were kids watching Michael Sam kiss his adorable boyfriend. Straight kids and gay kids all seeing a man, a good man, showing love and affection to another human. Horrors. I only wish I could have had that kind of role model when I was a boy. When the 'birds and the bees' were clumsily explained to me by my father while poking his forefinger through the fingers on his other hand in the shape of an O, I was only more confused.

           

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I don't care if your religion says homosexuality is a sin. It isn't my religion. I don't care if seeing two men kiss upsets you. I have to put up with the movies I'm watching being gratuitously peppered with coitus scenes between men and women all the time. I don't sit there and make disparaging comments, I fast forward through those scenes. I've never been a fan of protecting kids from reality, of telling them there is a fat man in a red coat coming down the chimney, telling them that there is a heaven and hell. I believe in letting kids learn from real life so that they aren't confused, and don't turn out all twisted around by the lies. I was twisted for a good part of my young life. So I would like to thank Michael Sam, and Jason Collins, and all the gay celebrities who are living their lives unashamedly. If they can keep just a few kids from being confused and ignorant of what they are feeling, they are heros.