My parents were good friends with David Goodstein, the publisher of The Advocate (I still have the silver cup he gave them when I was born). I remember him coming to brunch with his partner when I was in elementary school, and my mother telling me that they were gay, but I already knew what it meant. I also remember visiting their house and being a little overwhelmed by some of their artwork (they were serious art collectors, but some of their collection had a definite Birdcage vibe).
I knew about being gay at a very young age, and became a gay marriage advocate in middle school, but I didn’t understand all of the mechanics of gay sex until I found a copy of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex when I was in college.
Interesting question. Like the OP I can’t for the life of me recall a time when I didn’t know about it, though I have no idea how I came about the knowledge. Knowing my parents, I have a hard time picturing them explaining it to me.
I do remember watching an episode of “Life Goes On” where the main girl has a boyfriend who is HIV-positive and people tease him for being gay, leading to an impassioned speech about how HIV/AIDS is not just a gay disease. That was not the first time I learned about homosexuality, but it’s one of the earliest memories I can think of.
And on that note, I probably picked up the knowledge of what homosexuality was because of the AIDS crisis - that must be it. I was born in 1980 so the crisis was big news, especially in the gay community. Even if my parents were mostly silent on the subject any exposure to the news over those years would have presented the idea that some men liked men.
I was kind of upside down in this, I accidentally outed my dad and his partner all over the place, I had no idea it was secret and none of the grown ups realised that I recognised and accepted that they loved eachother without ever having it pointed out. I had no idea that it was odd. Mum had a new bloke too.
The poor guys even left unread playboys in the room where I slept at their place and mussed up the other spare room when I was over pretending they hadn’t shared a bed all to no avail. I was always talking about them as a couple from age 4 onwards.
Exactly 8. I told my mother I wanted to dress like a boy because girl clothes werent comfy. She nixed that idea in the bud by telling me that would make me a lesbian. No google so I dictionaried it. Informative but not really logical imho.
I was 7, maybe 8. The concept of “dirty old men” trying to have sex with us was absolutely hilarious to us although we didn’t get the mechanics at the time. Around the corner there lived a kid called Ciarán, that some of the kids called Queerán and everyone knew he liked boys rather than girls.
I was probably about eight when I was told at school that “faggot” meant “a boy who marries a boy”. I actually did look it up in the dictionary, but I must not have got past the “bundle of sticks” definition. I also thought that the “cock” part of “cocksucker” was a meaningless intensifier.
When Elton John (in 1975 or 6) said he was bisexual, I assumed he meant he had both boy parts and girl parts. His comment “we all are, at times” or some such, though, did confuse me. I got smarter a short time later when I got The People’s Almanac, which included a fairly thorough dictionary of sexual terms. I guess that makes the official answer for me "elevenish. Not very precocious of me, I suppose, but when I was asked in junior high school what a rubber was, my answer of “a pill” (which I had heard somewhere) was considered acceptable.
I was out of high school by the time I knowingly knew anyone or even of anyone who was gay, excepting Liberace and Truman Capote.
I was about 10 when I heard that someone was protesting Lesbians and didn’t understand why anyone would be against the Lebanese Danny Thomas on Make Room for Daddy. Really, I was a dork.
I was 12 when boy I had been friends with since we were 6 started being called faggot and queer at school on a regular basis. It bothered me a lot because the basis of it seemed to be that he hung out with us girls too much and liked gymnastics and I could not figure out what either of those things had to do with liking boys. He moved away two years later, without it becoming clear to me whether he was gay or not, and we lost touch shortly after that.
If I learned that the guy next door was having sex with his female dog, I wouldn’t consider that man “straight”. No more than I would consider a man who had sex with a male dog “gay”. It doesn’t matter what the gender of the victim is at that point. These are not the same as consenting relationships between willing partners.
Those people are simply mentally effed in the head. That’s not a sexual orientation, that’s a sociopath who abuses animals for jollies.
In a similar vein (I’m not suggesting it is equivalent):
A person who forces themselves upon a **minor **is not doing so because of a sexual orientation, they’re doing that because they’re not interested in consenting adult relationships, so they prey on whatever helpless person they can find, and usually, children too young to be able to resist or even understand what is happening to them.
Pedophiles are unfairly conflated with gay people, even though there are plenty of adults abusing children of the opposing gender. And they give gay people a bad name in the same way some random kid who shoots up a school gives a bad name to people who play first-person shooter video games.
In both instances, the motivation is misunderstood.
The kid who shoots up a school does it because they have no regard for human life and they want to hurt people. The kid who shoots up imaginary characters on an electronic screen does it because it is a fun way of challenging oneself and testing things like dexterity and reflexes and strategy. The two things are unrelated, and only the laziest observer would make the two things equivalent. The motivating factor is not the game that the two disparate people both enjoy, but the mind of a sociopath versus one that respects others. You take away the video game, and you still have a sociopath, because it is not the causal factor.
The rapist who attacks a child of any gender doesn’t do it because they’re straight or gay, otherwise, pretty much every straight and gay person would find children to be attractive. Unless you sit around all day thinking that your dream woman is a 5 year old girl, your being straight doesn’t cause you to become a predator of little girls, because it’s not your preference of gender which is the issue. It is your preference of a consenting and healthy adult relationship, or not. In the same way, gay people don’t sit around dreaming up molestation scenarios. Again, the causal factor isn’t which gender they find attractive, but what they seek, which in this case would be an abusive one-way action without consent. Not a relationship at all.
The sociopath who shoots up a school isn’t interested in normal relationships. The child molester who abuses children isn’t interested in normal relationships. Instead, they are fascinated with being in control of their victims, violence and the sole gratification of themselves.
Only to the least discerning eye would the two things resemble one another. But then, those who conflate homosexuals with sociopaths often have an intense personal bias against gay people, and have no interest in fairness or anything besides intentionally conflating the two; one is already accepted as despicable to society, and the other is someone they intend to render as despicable, because they want the world to share in their viewpoint.
This is a common theme in battles of public opinion, when someone wants to demonize something, they point out the similarities between it and something that everyone already agrees is terrible, whether the similarity has any relevance whatsoever or not. The public’s attention span is usually just long enough to recognize the similarity, and won’t think critically long enough to care that the two are dissimilar enough that they shouldn’t ever have been dishonestly conflated to begin with. That’s why such tactics are popular, because they appeal to those who cannot be bothered to use reasoning.
Yet another reason why a person is smart, but groups of people are absolute morons.
I’m not sure when I knew it existed, but I had a related conversation with my mother recently. When I was in high school (mid-1970s) there were one or two guys I knew who had quite flamboyant mannerisms. At that time, I never really thought of them as being gay, though. They were just showy and dramatic and a little bit irritating. Looking back now with the knowledge that they were gay, I wonder how it was I did not think that back then.
When I was younger, kids in the school yard teased others about being “sissies” or “queers,” but that was though of as boys who acted somewhat girlish. I doubt most of us knew much about sex then. I first heard the word “gay” in ninth grade (early '70s) and did not know at first that the term referred to homosexuals.
So recently I asked my mother (born 1937): in the '60s when I was growing up and Liberace was all over television and Paul Lynde was in the center square on Hollywood Squares did the adults around me know or suspect these men were gay? She said that in a vague way most people were aware, but Liberace was hugely popular among women and it wasn’t until Rock Hudson died of AIDS in the mid '80s that homosexuality was more generally acknowledged.
I’m in New England, so we were generally a little slow on the uptake.
When I was nine, an older girl saw me and my friend holding hands and called us lesbians. My friend must have known what it meant, because she immediately let go and never let me hold her hand again, but I had no idea. I asked “What are lesbians?” and got the answer “Girls who love each other.” I didn’t get it. I stared at the other girl in puzzlement and said “We do love each other”, just meaning that of course we did, we were best friends forever. (It turns out I actually am queer, maybe that had something to do with why the two of us reacted so differently. I dunno, even today I’m not sure if I had a crush on her or not.)
I think I actually learned what being gay meant when I was around ten or eleven, when there was a gay male couple on a reality TV show my family watched.
I think it must have been around the middle of elementary school, so 8 or 9? I’m not really sure. It was definitely in the context of it not being right or natural due to the conservative Christian nature of the school I was going to. I think it came from the part of the Bible where Abraham and Lot are in Sodom and Gomorrah. I remember we did learn that it was just as vile that the daughter of Lot had sex with their father as it was that homosexuality was going on in Sodom and Gomorrah.
When I was in 4th grade (age 8-9, '81-'82 school year), the boys in my class started calling everyone and everything “gay.” When the teacher banned that word, they started saying “happy” instead until she made them stop. I had to ask my mom what that was all about, and I got a neutral explanation. Around the same time, I saw an episode of “Donahue” where Phil Donahue was interviewing a woman who had two mothers. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how two women had a baby.
I didn’t develop any uncomfortable feelings about anyone’s sexuality until later. At 8-9. though, sex was still one of those inexplicable things that grown-ups did and it was all weird.
I understand where you’re coming from, but I think you might be overstating the case. Of course no one molests children because of their sexual orientation, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable - or in the least homophobic - to think that in many/most cases the child a pedophile chooses to abuse is informed by their orientation. E.g., a heterosexual who also happens to be a pedophile will probably abuse a child of the opposite sex; a homosexual who also happens to be a pedophile will probably abuse children of the same sex. (Are there exceptions? Of course. There are always exceptions in matters of sexuality.)
I’m also wondering if it’s true as you say that pedophiles aren’t interested in adult relationships and prey on children specifically because they’re helpless. My understanding is that pedophiles are specifically attracted to children, their helplessness being an incidental matter. Otherwise, wouldn’t they be equally satisfied by attacking quadriplegics or the very elderly?
All I know for sure is that it had to be before age 12, and it had to be after age 6. I was 12 when some kids tried to convince me that this guy was hitting on me, and that was not some concept I’d never heard of. But at 6 I know I barely understood men and women getting together.
I do know it was a lot later than that when I figured out my uncle was gay.
I’m somewhat surprised that a Christian school would be teaching 9-year-olds about Lot’s incest. But I suppose it should be commended for its unabashed view of Scripture.
somewhere between 7 and 9 when the neighbor kid wanted to play games that exposed the other boys’ wang doodles. O… K… we’re going to be playing over here with our clothes on if you’re interested.
and everyone knew he liked boys rather than girls.