Hugh is a queer.
That was the word that circulated through the school playground and among the kids at our church, which Hugh also attended.
This would have been sometime in the mid-to-late 1960s, when “queer” was the most common reference to LGBTQ people. I’m not sure exactly how old I was when I first heard this, but it must have been before I reached the age of 10. All I really knew then was that queer was an awful thing to be and it was OK to mock or bully them.
Most kids avoided people like Hugh because being queer was thought to be something you might catch, like a contagious disease.
You might think that idea is something so silly that only a child would believe it. But today, more than a half century since I learned about Hugh, there are grown people – educated, prominent, otherwise reasonable people – who believe that LBGTQ is contagious, at least in the sense that there is an agenda to coerce, convince and persuade children to become LGBTQ.
The term used now is “grooming” and recently state legislatures and school boards and other groups have taken measures to remove reading materials from school and public libraries that reference LGBTQ on the grounds that any discussion of LGBTQ is inappropriate for young children. The argument is that a parent has the exclusive right to determine if, how and when their children learn about certain subjects. A parent does not have the right to determine that for other parents, however, which is why these efforts must be rejected
In Leon County, Florida, a parent of a second-grader is challenging the school district to remove the book, “I am Billie Jean King” from the local elementary school library under the state’s new law, often referred to as the “Don’t Say Gay Law.”
The book is one of a series of children’s books on famous people written by Brad Meltzer, a prolific author whose thrillers, comic books and children’s books have been New York Times best-sellers. Dispatch readers may recall that Meltzer was the keynote speaker at the W’s 2018 Welty Gala. The theme of his speech was “ordinary people change the world,” which became the thesis of his “I Am” series, which includes people such as Rosa Parks, Abraham Lincoln, Anne Frank, Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson, Jim Henson, Dolly Parton and others. Meltzer points out that each of these people didn’t start out being famous, but were ordinary people who achieved great things, an inspiring message for children to hear.
But in Florida, the parent took exception to a single passage from “I Am Billie Jean King” that explained in simple terms the tennis player’s sexuality. The passage: “Around this time, I realized I was gay. Being gay means that if you’re a girl, you love and have romantic feelings for other girls — and if you’re a boy, you love and have romantic feelings for other boys.”
The two sentences are the only reference to sexuality in the 40-page book.
In her complaint, the parent wrote that her daughter saw the passage and came home “with questions.”
“I object to material that discusses being gay and what it means to be gay.” the parent said.
Look, parenting isn’t always easy and being a parent means grappling with all sorts of difficult questions. As much as we would like to determine when our children are exposed to certain things and be the first to explain them, we are often not afforded that opportunity. Unless you keep your child under lock and key and that child is never around other kids, a parent is going to be blind-sided from time to time. Our children are seldom as naive or innocent as we imagine them to be and they are often far more curious than we would like them to be sometimes.
I wish all those years ago I would have had someone explain to me what being gay meant in a way a child could understand. I think it would have made me a better and kinder kid. I think it would have spared Hugh some of the cruelty he had to endure all those years ago.
At the very least, I might have learned then what some people still don’t understand now: A child cannot be groomed into being gay, but a child can certainly be groomed to hate those who are.
That’s what is going on in Florida now, and, I fear, what we will soon see in our own community if we are not vigilant.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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