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I found this blog about a 7 year old who identifies as gay, pretty interesting read (and not as dramatic as it sounds from the description) so I wanted to share it but not doing so in the asylum or OoT to avoid a lame as all hell done it a million times OMGGAYZ! debate.

Having a sexual identity at 7 is the most disturbing part. I mean seriously a 7 year old kid all ready thinking about sex.

Go play with toys for another six years then maybe we can have this talk.

Little hard to take a story about a seven year old boy saying he identifies himself as gay serious when most seven year old boys think girls are icky because of cooties.

If my two year old came up to me and told me she was gay I'd have a real long talk with my wife on where she learned the term and how she got it in her head. As a teenager I'd be accepting that it was her own conclusion, but as a kid I'll sooner believe there are outside sources manipulating the situation. Now, I wouldn't admonish her over it (end of the day, she's either going to love me or hate me, but she's going to be herself regardless), but I wouldn't buy her dock martins, flannels, and a strap-on either. She's two.

I mean, the kid in the story is seven. How many boys and girls has he even interacted with to be able to come to the conclusion that for the next sixty~seventy years he's going to find women icky and boys dreamy? Like I said, he shouldn't be admonished and treated like a leper or anything, but I don't think the parents should do anything that could influence the kid further into a life style that very well could have been a phase after all. Don't paint his room pink, don't buy him dolls (allowance, he buys dolls on his own, that's fine). Just be supportive but remain neutral. Teenager and had time to figure it out? Hey, break out the glitter.

Edited, Feb 17th 2012 11:13am by lolgaxe

Didn't mean offense. Just artistic license to say to not suddenly change how you raise a very young child based on what could just as easily be a phase. Children are easily influenced, and if one says they're gay and suddenly the parents are all over it the kid might just as easily continue to do so and be miserable because it was after all that time just a phase after all. As far as sexual identity and such, I think parents should remain neutral through those formative years. They should be neither overly supportive or overly invalidating.

Or easier: Let the kids figure it out, don't figure it out for them.

Edited, Feb 17th 2012 11:42am by lolgaxe

This I agree with, but I also think that if your kid maybe being gay means you suddenly need to change how you raise him/her you were doing something wrong in the first place.

One thing that I find really interesting about this story is an aspect of the gay identity that's kinda been ignored or forgotten in recent years, primarily because of the "Born This Way" political campaign that the movement has taken, which I actually don't agree with.

I'm biologically disposed to be attracted to men, and I'm honestly able to say I've never been attracted to a woman.

But being gay means having a gay identity, not an attraction to men.

Even thirty-forty years ago, it wasn't terribly uncommon for men to identify as gay even if they had no sexual interest in men, primarily because of the fact that there was a specific part of the culture in gay ghettos that they would become a part of, if they happened to live there. It wasn't until the seventies that gay firmly became defined as men who have sex with men, and those "gay" heterosexual men eventually became labeled as metrosexuals (or other things).

But there are plenty of homosexual men who don't identify as gay. Not because they are closeted, but because they don't connect to anything related to the term "gay" that people outside ***** communities don't often see. This is actually one of the reasons that the Bear identity formed--originally, it was a lot of men who were openly homosexual, but didn't identify with gay culture. They've since met and blended, but that was the root.

And there are still heterosexual men who identify as gay (and, again, aren't hiding their sexuality). But that has become a lot less common, mainly because of the way mass media has altered public consciousness of the gay identity.

So when a seven year old says "I'm gay," in the truest sense of the identity, he can be speaking completely accurately. Because it's just not true that "gay" and "homosexual" are interchangeable. We often think of them that way, but when you critically examine what it means to be one or the other, they only correlate. A child can be gay because being gay doesn't actually have anything to do with your sexual preferences, we only think of it that way. In reality, there's a whole slew of subtle cultural contexts attributed to the identity, much the same way that ANY identity does--sports fans, dancers, etc. All of these are about self definition, though we link them to a particular desire. I dance a lot. Doesn't mean I identify as a dancer (possibly a bad example).

Better example? I had a friend in high school was black--she was born in the UK, spent a third of her life living in Jamaica, and the last third in the US. She strongly identified as "black" but didn't identify as "African American" at all (note she had double citizenship, and did identify as "American," "British" and "Jamaican"). We tend to think of those as interchangeable. In reality, they aren't.

While ***** identity isn't directly the same as racial identity, they are very similar in practice. There's a strong correlation between an intrinsic fact about you that ends up expressed as an identity. The major difference is that, ultimately speaking, there's a much stronger sense in which there are racial cultural identities, which are connected to your familial identity, where ***** identities don't solidify until later in life (and for maaaany ***** peoples, never do settle completely). The other difference is that you will carry a marker (generally, your appearance) with you that speaks to a racial identity, reinforcing it in ways that ***** identity doesn't necessarily experience.

There's a good chance this kid will grow up to drop the gay identity. But that's because of outside influence, not because he'll end up feeling like it won't speak to him. It's fully possible he'll end up with one of the similar, though heterosexual, identities that have been created in recent years.

Funny thing is that the conservative argument that gays are making other people gay is, when properly defined, somewhat true. The establishment of the gay identity has caused it to propagate by leading other people to adopt it. But that's not because they are making them attracted to the same sex, it's because people who are attracted to the same sex are being told they are gay and pushed into the community.

When a conservative is caught sneaking off to a gay bar, we say he's closeted. In reality, it's likely that he just doesn't identify as gay at all, and what he's closeting is his sexual desire only.

So, yeah, this kid is gay. He's gay because he identifies himself as gay. Other people who try to tell him he's not, because he can't know his sexuality, are trying to define a cultural identity in a way it fundamentally doesn't exist. "Homosexual" is a scientific term. "Gay" is not. We often find ourselves in situations where the are definitely interchangeable for the purposes of the conversation. But they are not, nor have they ever been, the same thing.

Gay people didn't exist in the year 1800. That's a fact. There were, however, different cultural identities that had some correlations to same-sex desire, and there were certainly peoples with sexual attraction to the same sex. But none of those were defined by sexuality as we tend to think of "gay" today. New York City had a strong "Fairy" culture for a few decades. Definitely a lot of homosexual men were a part of it, but probably just as many heterosexual men were too, for instance.

Wasn't he a stuffed bear and cassette tape player combo, that would read stories to you and had really creepy facial expressions to go along with it?

Thing scared the bejeezus out of me as a kid.

So Gov. Christie vetoed NJ's gay marriage bill, that our state legislature passed.

I'm angry and drinking.

Lol, don't know if I'll get that far.

We will see.

Well hopefully it's at least a good bottle.

That's really rough. Luckily, I escaped the bulk of that. Primarily because I distanced myself from my parents' church really quickly.

If she ever feels a need to really destress, there are some really solid free hotlines she can call for support. I can give numbers if you don't feel awkward about passing them along.