From generation to generation
So yesterday I was talking to one of my editors about marriage equality. (No, really.) This guy is maybe a few years younger than my mom, so somewhere in his sixties, and he's a pretty liberal first-generation American.
He said, "I sometimes think a lot of people aren't opposed for religious or moral reasons, they just don't want to have to explain to their children about the two men down the street who are 'mommy and daddy' to those kids they go to school with." Then he asked if I'd yet had to have a conversation like that with SP, and had it been difficult?
And I laughed.
When SP was three or four, she would ask me questions like "Mama, when two girls get married, do dey bofe hafta wear a dress?" She has a cousin (a grown-up cousin) who brings her girlfriends to family gatherings. She had a classmate at her old Hebrew school with two moms. She has a friend at school whose parents are divorced, and the dad has a girlfriend and so does the mom. She's seen a couple of episodes of Modern Family, and her favourite characters are the male couple with the baby girl. (I'm not sure whether she thinks they're funny, or just likes the baby, but in any case the same-sex-ness mostly seems to register as a handy descriptor to distinguish that couple from others on the show.) In fact, the trickiest conversation we've yet had with her around sexual diversity was our attempt to explain why J. Edgar Hoover had a difficult personal life*, which had to begin with, "OK, so you know how when two people get married, it can be a man and a woman, or two women, or two men? Well ..." And when we explained that, yes, there are still places in the world, some of them quite close to here, where two men or two women are not allowed to get married, she made a face of great puzzledness and said, "Why not?"
Fred Clark over at Slacktivist periodically posts evidence that homophobia and its related phenomena are fading out from generation to generation. It's true, and it's wonderful and humbling to see. Alas, there are still very loud and vicious voices calling for LGBT people to be treated as sinful or mentally ill or immoral or subhuman. But more and more I think younger people are hearing that kind of vitriol and calling it out as vicious and immoral and WRONG -- or, which in a way is even better, they are hearing it and going, "Um, what?" o_O
*The conversation actually started with me saying "Wow, Leo DiCaprio is playing J. Edgar Hoover? Huh." You just never know where these things are going to go...
He said, "I sometimes think a lot of people aren't opposed for religious or moral reasons, they just don't want to have to explain to their children about the two men down the street who are 'mommy and daddy' to those kids they go to school with." Then he asked if I'd yet had to have a conversation like that with SP, and had it been difficult?
And I laughed.
When SP was three or four, she would ask me questions like "Mama, when two girls get married, do dey bofe hafta wear a dress?" She has a cousin (a grown-up cousin) who brings her girlfriends to family gatherings. She had a classmate at her old Hebrew school with two moms. She has a friend at school whose parents are divorced, and the dad has a girlfriend and so does the mom. She's seen a couple of episodes of Modern Family, and her favourite characters are the male couple with the baby girl. (I'm not sure whether she thinks they're funny, or just likes the baby, but in any case the same-sex-ness mostly seems to register as a handy descriptor to distinguish that couple from others on the show.) In fact, the trickiest conversation we've yet had with her around sexual diversity was our attempt to explain why J. Edgar Hoover had a difficult personal life*, which had to begin with, "OK, so you know how when two people get married, it can be a man and a woman, or two women, or two men? Well ..." And when we explained that, yes, there are still places in the world, some of them quite close to here, where two men or two women are not allowed to get married, she made a face of great puzzledness and said, "Why not?"
Fred Clark over at Slacktivist periodically posts evidence that homophobia and its related phenomena are fading out from generation to generation. It's true, and it's wonderful and humbling to see. Alas, there are still very loud and vicious voices calling for LGBT people to be treated as sinful or mentally ill or immoral or subhuman. But more and more I think younger people are hearing that kind of vitriol and calling it out as vicious and immoral and WRONG -- or, which in a way is even better, they are hearing it and going, "Um, what?" o_O
*The conversation actually started with me saying "Wow, Leo DiCaprio is playing J. Edgar Hoover? Huh." You just never know where these things are going to go...