chilluns

in the flurry of post-lube-wrestling exhaustion i nearly forgot that a new column came out today in gay life! baaarum pum pum pum (that was a drumroll):Kids These Days


I've always been a little afraid of kids. I guess it's more accurate to say that I've always been uncomfortable around them. Kids lack the filter that adults have--if an adult doesn't like your shoes, for instance, they're not likely to come out and say, "What are you doing in those shoes?" OK, so maybe some of my friends would. But a kid will just tell you flat out, "Your shoes are weird." It's this unpredictability that worries me. Kids have always seemed a little bit like cats to me—wily and dexterous and completely erratic.

But now that my job now requires that I work with kids, I've surprised myself. I've found an easy rapport with most of them and have even started thinking about having kids of my own. I tell my friends that I want to adopt someday, and they remind me that I'm the guy that spent his early adulthood glaring at people who dared to bring babies to restaurants, movie theaters, or anywhere else out of their houses for the first six years of their childrens’ lives. Now that I see kids every day, though, I know how to handle them.

But last week at work I came across a young man that I just couldn't get through to. After he went home I asked a coworker if she'd had problems with him.

"Oh, I thought he was fine," she said.

"Really? Because I couldn't get two words out of him," I told her.

"Maybe he doesn't like gay guys," she responded.

Um, excuse me? I took a moment to process what she'd just said. "Why do you say that?" I asked her.

"Well, when I went in to see him he looked really pissed off, so I just said, 'Hey, what's your problem?' He didn't say anything, so I said, 'What is it, you just don't like gay guys?' And he just smiled a little and nodded."

I've made a concentrated effort not to come across as "too gay" to my kids at work. Don't ask me what I think being "too gay" around a kid means--it's not like I'm going to tie them to a chair while I blare Madonna and do their hair. I don't mean that I'm stepping back in the closet, either. It's just that it's never come up—until now.

"Why should it matter to him that I'm gay?" I asked. I don't talk about my personal life with my kids and I don't see why it has any bearing at all on the job that I do.

"Listen, Robert," she told me. "It's just a fact of life. Some people just don't like gays."

She just said GAYS, I thought.

"You have to just accept that and move on with your life," she said.

Since I only surround myself with queers and people who are queer-friendly, I don't often hear opinions like this one. I've never once had someone tell me that homophobia is just a part of life--that some people have the right to hate me for who, or what, I am.

I wanted to ask her, "What if I were black? Would you have asked him if he just doesn't like black guys? If I were Jewish would you be telling me to get over it because some people hate Jews?" I wanted to tell her that attitudes like hers--pandering to homophobes and bigots, allowing them their ill-informed opinions--are part of the reason that gay people still don't have the same rights as everyone else. I wanted to tell her that no matter how gay-friendly she considers herself, attitudes like hers are part of the reason that gay people are still dragged behind trucks and ridiculed and hanged. I wanted to tell her that my straight girlfriends are the strongest fighters for gay rights that I've ever met, people who have fought alongside me. It's not good enough to be gay-friendly. You have to speak up when you hear injustice, not just laugh it off and tell me to accept it and move on.

Since she's just my coworker, I tried to shrug it off like it meant nothing, like I wasn't upset that this is how some of the kids I work with see me. I tried not to show her how surprised I was that outside the queer bubble in which I live there’s still homophobia and bigotry, and that it's accepted and laughed about.

I refuse to accept that some people are going to hate me for who I am. Because as soon as I've accepted that, I've accepted that I'm less of a person than they are--that what they think about me is right.

But they're wrong.