Last Independence Day (and other than the date I don’t know what brings this story to mind), a friend of ours brought her two kids (I don’t know their exact ages but I think the younger one is like 9ish and the older about 11 or 12) over our place to watch the fireworks because you can see the fireworks from the city stadium from our backyard. During the course of the evening, Harry Potter came up (probably a commercial for one of the movies came on our something, but I don’t really recall), and I casually asked if she’d heard the (at that time) news that J.K. Rowlings had announced that the character Dumbledore was gay. She mouthed “They [her children] don’t know what gay is” to me before loudly stating for her children’s benefit, “Yep, Dumbledore is happy as a lark.” To her credit, she wasn’t upset with me for using the “g word” in front of her kids or anything like that, she just didn’t want to explain to them what it meant.
I would never give unsolicited parenting advice or otherwise interfere with a parent raising their child the way they see fit (outside of an abusive situation), but I’d sure love to have sat down and had a talk with her about it. Even if gay marriage, adoption, DADT, etc weren’t such major news items, I’d still find it incredibly naive to assume that an 11 year old doesn’t know what “gay” is. I’m not suggesting that a child knows the ins and outs of gay relationships (or frankly straight romantic relationships) or is all that aware of the political issues surrounding them, but when “that’s so gay” is a common way of responding to something undesirable, you can be sure that by age 11, they are familiar with the word.
It’s actually what they don’t know that strikes me as the reason to talk to them about it. Whether you (as a parent) choose to acknowledge it or not, your kids are going to receive messages about homosexuality; from their peers, the news, and other adults. I don’t think it’s inaccurate to suggest that alot of those messages are going to be very vague and negative. If “gay” is the worse thing a person (or thing or incident) can be called, then how is that going to effect the child’s perception of gay people when they learn what “gay” actually is, or even scarier, if they hit puberty and start realizing that the label may well apply to them!
So here’s my advice to parents out there: your children ARE being taught about homosexuality; if you’d like to have any input into what they’re learning and the attitudes they are exposed to, you’d better make sure one of the voices they are hearing from is yours. I’m not saying you need to go into the details of gay sex or anything, but what’s wrong with noting that those two guys whose house we went to to watch the fireworks love each other the same way mommy and daddy do?