How old were you when you learned learned that homosexuality existed?

In My Humble Opinion
61

For me it was around age 9, circa 1981 or so. Like some of the other posters above, my school had “Green and Yellow Thursdays”, meaning if one wore that colour combination on that day, they were gay. I had to be careful, because I had a yellow ball cap that was green on the underside of the bill. I was gay a few times because of that darn hat. In hindsight, this cracks me up, because although nobody wanted to be “gay”, but none of us knew what it was.

Around that same time, the schoolyard insult of choice was to call someone “gay” or “fag” or “homo”. We didn’t even have enough knowledge to know that the latter half of the word was “sexual”. My dad must’ve heard my brother and I exchanging jabs, because he pulled us aside and asked if we knew what “gay” etc. meant.

I didn’t really understand. It was confusing, as I was still young enough to be, let’s say, “asexual”. Although I had the interests that one would typically see in a 9 year old boy coming up, there was nothing sexual about them. I didn’t start to like girls for a few more years, and prefered the company of my friends. So, I suspected I might be gay. Like I said, “confusing”.

It was a homophobic time, and I recall my earlier youth with a bit of shame. I was young and immature enough that at the high school age, I would repeat any nasty gay joke I heard. I don’t think I had true hate in my heart, but I lacked the wisdom to see that I shouldn’t say these things.

There were a couple of kids in my school days that either came out later, or were in hindsight, definitely gay. I feel bad to remember that I no doubt said bad things in front of them. We even called them gay at the time, but it was because they were effeminate, not because we actually thought they were genuinely homosexual. Lame, I know.

I couldn’t have been all bad. I remember in University when I was 20, there was this one gay kid I recognized from when he was manning the “GAYLOC” - Gays and Lesbians on Campus - booth on the first day of school. You can picture all the different clubs and groups on campus, and all of them having a booth on the indoor track on registration day. This guy caught my eye, and whenever I saw him around, I recognized him as “Mr. Gayloc”.

Anyway, I was swimming regularly for exercise, and one day I saw him in the locker room, naked. I was mature enough by then to know that he wasn’t going to try to have sex with me, and secure enough to not care if a gay guy saw me naked. This was an improvement from Jr. High.

Anyway, I went for my swim, and came back around 45 minutes later. He was still in the locker room, wandering around, naked. In my mind, I invented the scenario that some homophobic people had stolen his clothes and hidden them, article by article in seperate lockers. This was because this had been the prank of choice on unlocked friends’ posessions when I was younger. Then I got to thinking that maybe some homophobe had just stolen his clothes outright.

I started to feel really bad for him, and realized that I had shorts/t-shirt also on hand for when I lifted weights. Not pretty, but it would get him home. So, I worked up my nerve and asked if his clothes had been stolen, with the intent of offering him some backups. He got embarassed, said “no” and then quickly hustled away and got dressed and left. Apparently a pasttime he had was hanging out naked in the locker room.

I can’t say I blame him - if I could hang out in the women’s locker room at a university all day long, I’d be all over that.

Anyway, long story and digression from the original post. My point was to illustrate that even 20+ years ago as a callow, ignorant youth, I was still a good enough person to be willing to help out a gay stranger.

62

My mother still cannot believe that Rock Hudson was gay. Liberace? He was glaringly obvious, and his audience didn’t care. I saw the movie about him, “Behind The Candelabra” (starring, of all people, Michael Douglas, who did a great job of portraying him) and if that’s what he was really like, wow, he really had a terrific PR agent. p.s. She also had (she died a few years ago) a friend who lived with her “best friend” for over 50 years, and in the 1970s when they found out they could do this, bought a house together. Hello, they were a lesbian couple! Didn’t matter to her, though.

I had a friend in high school whose father was in the Navy in WWII, and he said there were gay men in his platoon, and everyone knew who they were and nobody cared as long as they did their work. I told someone about that when DADT was being proposed, and he said, “Yeah, everyone thought they were gay because they were skinny and had high pitched voices” and I replied, “No, everyone KNEW they were gay because they were going out with each other.”

63

That sounds to me like age-inappropriate sexual behavior. You sure this boy wasn’t being abused?

64

Same here. I’ve gotten a few surprises on Facebook, that’s for sure! The biggest one was a woman I knew from band; she is single but has a son who’s a young adult, and her profile says she’s bisexual, leaning more towards women (looking back, I can see that) AND polyamorous. That part was a bit surprising to me.

And there was a boy I also knew from band who I “liked” for a long time, and he knew it. Heck, I’d call him up to ask him for a date (ETA this at a time when girls rarely did that), and we’d talk for an hour or more, but he always had some excuse why he couldn’t go out with me (no, we didn’t socialize otherwise) and I finally had to admit to myself that he wasn’t interested in me. One day, about 15 years after we graduated/15 years ago, I was pulling weeds in my garden and thinking about him, and it was like, “PLANET EARTH, CALLING NEAR WILD HEAVEN: HE’S GAY!” I have no idea if I’m right or wrong, but yeah, I suspect that’s the case.

65

I knew I likes guys when I was 5. Not sexually at that age of course. But I didn’t have a word for it or know there were other out there until i was 10-12 or so.

66

I remember being small, like maybe 6 or 7, and there was an episode of some TV show where a guy introduces his husband. I was very surprised because I didn’t know men could have husbands. I was too little to understand anything about the sexual aspect at that time.

67

I remember not knowing about homosexuality as a primary school aged child, but I don’t remember when or how I found out about it.

68

Me, about 7-8ish: “Mom, why is that place called Stallions? Are they cowboys?”

Mom: "Ummm…"then an explanation suited for my ears.

69

I learned about it when I was 12, from the generally execrable Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex… But Were Afraid to Ask. Upon reading that paragraph, I thought, “Oh. That’s what’s going on with me.” I just passed my 39th anniversary of coming out.

70

I would say 1985 (age 10), about the time AIDS became a huge story in the media. You couldn’t really cover AIDS without mentioning homosexuality, and my ten year old self finally understood it was men having sex with other men. I probably heard about “gay people” before then, but I couldn’t really grasp what made them different. And in the small town I grew up in there was no way anybody could be openly gay. I have a gay uncle but I didn’t find out about that until adulthood.

71

I can’t remember a time that I didn’t know. A lesbian couple were dear family friends from before I could remember. Going to Aunties Carol and Patricia’s house was just as routine as going to by best friend’s house across the street. I knew Carol and Pat were in love and saw them kiss just like mom would kiss dad when he got home from work.

And though I know it is a stereotype, my parents were involved in community theater and we knew several gay couples.

Early childhood was late 70s in upper east Tennessee.

72

I’d say maybe 13 or 14. There was a scandal in our town where gay men were picking up teen boys and paying them for sex. The scandal was that the police were using some boys under threat of arrest to entrap the men, and waited until after they’d had sex to make the arrest. A worldly friend (there’s always that one kid well-versed in life’s more sordid aspects) explained what went on. What struck me (and made me a bit suspicious) was his claim that while the customers were gay, the boys were straight and just in it for the money, which was “pretty good. You could get a whole game system for what those guys were paying.”

73

I’m pretty surprised at all these tolerant stories. I’m in my mid-twenties, and I grew up in an extremely liberal area, and I found out what gay meant when I heard kids using it as a derogatory term.

74

Embarrassingly late, all things considered (7th grade) and I suspect I knew/understood pieces or segments of what it meant but was squirmy about a lot of sexual subjects before that and deliberately ignored them. For instance, I didn’t know there was a sexual appetite component to human sexuality (as opposed to it being something you did deliberately only for reproductive purposes a couple times in your life) until the summer after 5th grade.

Anyway, it was brought up in the form of a rather friendly and uncreepy inquiry from a classmate wondering if I wanted to with him. I stared at him rather blankly and bounced the tips of my index fingers off each other and said “how the heck would THAT work?” He laughed and explained, I kind of said “Ewww!” and that was that. He wasn’t offended and we stayed friends anyway.

By the following year I was finally getting clear on the notion that lots of the nasty mean-spirited things being yelled at me by other guys weren’t just random hostile insults, but that most of them were crude epithets meaning “you’re gay (and disgusting)”.

75

I was young, exact age I don’t know. I grew up in the late 80’s/early 90’s. I remember Ellen coming out on TV, that was a big deal at the time.

76

I would say I was about 11ish (early 1970s, rural community) when I finally understood that it was about homosexuality, as opposed to just people being mocked or bullied for being effeminate or butch (depending on gender). Found out the usage of the term “gay” in this sense through English-class readings in High School.

77

Not sure. As far back as I can remember, a “Poof” was an effeminate man who liked other men, the term was used as an insult. That was in small country town Australia in the early 70’s when I started school. I guess kids would repeat terms they heard their parents and older siblings use and you learned them via osmosis.

The first comprehension that it wasn’t just an insult and that there were actually people like that, was watching an Aussie TV program called No 96. Mum would let me sit up and watch it with her. One of the first TV programs in Australia to contain full frontal nudity and have a gay character.

78

Somewhere around 9 or 10. There was a city park a block away from my house and I spent all my spare time there. I remember a guy starting to haunt the men’s room around that time. He would sit at the picnic tables “reading”, but if one of the kids went into the john, he would make a beeline for it and follow them in. Occasionally, another guy would show up and talk to him, then the two of them would head into the john together.

It got to the point where none of the kids would go into the bathroom any more. We’d go home to take a leak. I happened to mention all this to my brother one day, and he explained to me what “queers” were. He also called a couple of his friends and had a talk with the guy, who never showed up again.

79

If a kid showing off his dick around that age is a sign of being molested, then half the guys in my neighborhood and several in my church were.

80

By the same measure, if showing off your dick at that age is a sign of homosexuality, there were a huge number of future queers in my peer group.