oh, and ps I love my monster! While reading, I’ve often wondered what my monster would look like if I ever actually posted, and it’s perfect – all purple and dragony!

As to the OP, I, too, am an older queer ecstatic that younger folks have so much more to work with as they explore their sexualities and identities!

When we accept that the categories we’re accustomed to are not best described as X and not-X (straight and not straight, thin and not-thin, etc.) but as X and Y and probably Z too, we see that X was only considered “normal” because it was important to people who are X to view it that way. When we look from a standpoint of celebrating human diversity, it seems bizarre to think of Z as abnormal or the “opposite” of X: Z is its own way of being.

This applies to me where religion is concerned. I started to question the existence of a god(s) in 2005, and by 2006 finally admitted to myself that I simply didn’t believe. The binary scale has been SO prevalent with religion in most of my experience — you’re Christian, or non-Christian. So, as an atheist, it’s easy for people I know (especially contacts via my uber-conservative family) to oversimplify atheism as anti-God. Nope, not against god…just don’t think it applies.

Anyway, I try to expose my children (5 and 18 months) to ideas as often as possible. It seems highly unlikely that my all-things-pink-and-princess daughter would ever turn out to be anything except straight, but if she is, I want her to understand that her mom will celebrate WHO SHE IS, no matter what.

Jealous… in that they don’t have to hide their sexuality from their peers anymore…

Dismayed… in that kids these days can’t seem to interact without hiding behind texting on their cell phones…

It feels like a double edged sword, life is out there and can be accessed freely. Yet so many kids are unable to have normal conversations with people who are more than two weeks older or younger than they are…. freedom in some parts of life opens, even as it splinters into smaller and smaller subsets of humans being able to interact…

I attended junior high between 1975 and 1977 in the deepest part of the bible belt of Virginia. I had a pretty decent time of it all, but my gay side lay deeply hidden. By that age my sexual interactions were mostly with much older men. Society would label them predators today, while I still consider them saviours…

I don’t think anything has changed much in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia since I left in 1984.

Personally, I recollect no possibility of having sex with the many young men I found attractive in junior and senior high. I knew the story of a kid at a neighboring school being killed after making a pass at a classmate. Our teachers were also openly hostile whenever subject matter inadvertently brought homosexuality into discussion… I still recollect an otherwise favorite teacher getting irate when boys snickered at the use of the word gay…

Not because we should be sensitive to gay people… but “because the word has been stolen and appropriated by sickness and evil depravity”

I was deathly afraid of being discovered by the wrong sort of classmates. Even though I had been sexually active with many of the same classmates in elementary school, by junior high they all had girlfriends. We no longer even dared share glances in the hallways. Every once in a while one of them would find me… when they were between girlfriends, or wanted something their girlfriends might have grossed out about…

I always obliged… reveling in the brief moment we’d have to enjoy each others company… but never in a million years could I have imagined talking about “our special relationship” … much less dating any of them openly… as far as I know, they are all married with children now…

I am happy things are changing… I also love Kera’s mom… how I wish mine had been remotely like her… mine was positively evil…

And to be honest, I do think that that point can—and should!—be made accessible to teens, and without reference to Butler, partly because the pressure to ‘pick’ or ‘find’ a sexuality and stick to it can be pretty damn damaging (as a number of commenters have kind of alluded to, in relation to issues that could come up because of people ‘picking’ too early). I think it’s pretty clear from dreamingcrow’s awesome story about her son that kids can grok this stuff, and often (if they’re given the space and encouragement, and wow I love Mrs. Kera!) in ways that make more space for themselves than the fixed-sexuality-premised-on-a-binary idea might imagine exists. I guess my real point is that I’m so impressed with teens who manage to do this in a world that wants them to fix their sexuality, and I don’t want that to get lost as just ‘confusion’.

But oh! this post made me so happy. I’m so glad that there are kids out there growing up unafraid of the diversity of their own desires, and with communities which glory in and honour them! And yeah, I’m with the other commenters who kinda do wish wish wish this had been their high school experience! There’s a ways to go, but it’s so encouraging that we are going!

I think I got in there early enough with that message. I think it was just always a core part of my daughter’s reality, but I also know that other ‘realities’ get layered over it. For example, in early high school, my daughter and her friends were very accepting of gay boys… they all wanted to be friends with them… there might have been an element of exoticizing in that, actually, but at some level they did genuinely ‘love’ gay boys. Gay girls? Not so much. Not nearly so much. There was a surfacey lip service paid to acceptance, yes… but underneath that, gossip and… social segregation, I would say. Maybe less so with bi girls… and definitely less so as they got older. But to be a 14 year old lesbian trying to fit in with the popular girls at my daughter’s school… oh, not so easy.

I myself went to catholic school and was clueless. I had those ‘intense friendships’, yes. I had boyfriends too, but they were less important, less intense, less real to me than my female friendships. I thought that was because I was in an all girls school. I was somewhat attracted to boys, and I thought that solved the problem of identifying my orientation. More important, probably, boys were attracted to me. I say ‘more important’ without irony. Unfortunately.

Some guardian angel of queer led me to a copy of The Kinsey Report when I was 18, and I read about the Kinsey scale, and went “ahh hahhhhh!”, and thought I understood.. and I did, in a sense… but I was deep into my thirties before it dawned on me that I was anything other than a rather unenthusiastic straight girl.

Seriously. That’s how it always felt, and what I always thought. I was oriented toward the hetero norm, yes. Just… less than enthusiastically.

Oh good grief.