Part-Time
Mom
August.27.2002
Preparing a Gay Toddler for Public School
by Maureen
Jambor
Now that my homosexual son
Michael is five years old and will be heading off to kindergarten in
September, I find myself a little worried at what he will encounter
once he is in a classroom mostly full of heterosexual children. As much
as I'd like to think we live in a 21st century world free of prejudice,
hate, bigotry and intolerance, I know we are still far from that goal.
I look forward to the day when all children will be implanted with
microprocessors that moderate their speech and behavior and suppress
aggressive, anti-social impulses with a shot of seratonin to the
frontal cortex, but I know that kind of technology is more than a
decade away. Unfortunately, my child has to head off into the real
world next month. For the first time, he will be far away from the
people who have protected and cared for him over the first five years
of his life, far away from his nanny's loving arms, far away from his
therapist's gentle reassurance, far away from the webcam I use to keep
an eye on him while I'm at work or on my frequent business trips.
What worries me most isn't that he'll be away from his home for eight
hours a day, or that the public school he'll be attending was recently
profiled on 60 Minutes, or that he will have to walk eight blocks by
himself through the gunshot area of North Minneapolis to get there.
What worries me most is that the other children will bully and tease
him because he is gay. My husband and I realized that Michael was
homosexual before he was even one year old. If it was that obvious to
us, imagine how quickly the other children will pick up on it. Children
are often very cruel without intending to be, not realizing that the
words they say can seriously hurt someone else's feelings. When one
child is obviously different from the rest, it's human nature for the
other children to fear what they don't understand or is new to them. I
worry that this may make it hard for Michael to adjust and fit into his
new surroundings. He's not like a chameleon that can blend unnoticed
into the background, but more like a loud flaming sparkler that catches
everyone's attention in his red vinyl pants and glitter shirts. He's
easily noticed despite being quite soft-spoken.
Even though my husband and I are comfortably wealthy, I deliberately
chose to send Michael to a public elementary school in a strip mall,
sandwiched between an adult bookstore and a Korean massage parlor and
right across the street from a soup kitchen. I want Michael to go to
school in a multi-cultural environment where children come in all
shapes, colors and sizes, like the t-shirt collection at Kohl's. I
don't want him in an environment that is monochrome, pretentious and
overpriced, like the t-shirt collection at the Gap. It is my hope that
in all the multicultural noise and confusion of an urban elementary
school, Michael will fit in more easily than he would at some of the
private schools I visited, which were mostly Christian-run, all white,
and had strict anti-sodomy policies. You can't understand it until
you've been the parent of a gay toddler, but from my perspective it
doesn't matter so much that the woman who will be Michael's
kindergarten teacher has been in jail three times for drug possession
and once for assaulting a police officer, just so long as he comes home
every day happy and smiling with his self-esteem intact, and not crying
hysterically because someone called him a "fag" or a "queer" or
wouldn't let him engage in homosexual sex in the basement bathroom. A
child with hurt feelings is heartbreaking, and I would hate for his
nanny to have to deal with that day after day.
One very serious area of concern for me is that since Michael was known
to us to be gay shortly after he was born, his upbringing has been
specially tailored around his sexuality and thus he may find it hard to
engage in the games the other kids play. Most little boys his age love
to play wiffle ball, climb trees and throw the nerf football around.
Michael, on the other hand, likes baking brownies in his E-Z Bake Oven,
putting together outfits with his fashion plates, turning the basement
into a baby rave and dancing till dawn with his little gay friends. His
best friend Mario, another gay toddler in our neighborhood, will be
attending a special school this fall at a magnet kindergarten for
children gifted with computers. Michael has never shown any interest in
the Unix workstation my husband bought him for his third birthday
(other than to paint it pink and name it Melissa) so unfortunately he
and Mario will be apart for the first year at least. It will be hard
for Michael, especially since it's unlikely any of the children at his
new school will know how to play his favorite make-believe game, gay
house.
Every Saturday morning when his little companion Mario comes over, I
know the first words out of Michael's mouth are going to be "let's play
gay house!" It probably sounds cute to parents of heterosexual
toddlers, but let me tell you, gay house can can be hell on a parent's
nerves. I have learned that when children get together to play gay
house, one law will always hold true: Everyone will want to be the
daddy, but no one will want to be the lube. The kids will start to
argue over who has to play the lube, which can turn into an all-out
brawl if a parent or caregiver doesn't intervene quickly. It's a given
that someone will have to play the lube in order for gay house
to work; after all, what kind of gay house doesn't have any lube? If
anyone knows of a functioning gay household that has no lubrication of
any kind, please tell me who these people are because they are living
some kind of miracle. Here in reality, lubrication is the glue that
holds a gay house together, and the phrase "let's play gay house" is
one I've come to utterly dread. I'm glad I'm overseas 21 days out of
the month. If I had to spend as much time with them as our stern
British nanny does, one of these children would be dead now, I swear to
God.
I exaggerate, of course, but I am truly afraid that when Michael goes
to school and teaches the other children to play gay house, his teacher
won't be prepared for the difficulties and complexities that can arise
in a gay household and will be unprepared to handle the situation if
something goes wrong. Michael will be bringing to his classroom an
entirely different culture than the other children. How well he manages
to adjust will have a major impact on the rest of his years in school.
That is why in addition to paste, colored pencils and round-nosed
scissors, Michael's school supply box will contain at least one tube of
AstroGlide. The fact that you can't yet buy AstroGlide at Office Max or
the school supply section at Target speaks volumes about how gay
toddlers are still marginalized and ignored in American culture.
My fears aren't so much that Michael isn't ready for public school, but
that public school isn't ready for Michael. I know my son is a very
bright boy. Even though my husband and I were barely around for the
first few years of his life--you know how careers are--and his first
nanny didn't speak any English and worked for old clothing, Michael
quickly taught himself English from the television and even managed to
call 911 when he was just two-and-a-half years old after Consuela
passed out from sniffing gasoline in the garage. After that incident we
got our second nanny, a responsible woman who knew how to shake
discipline into a child like only a British nanny can, as well as an
early-life education specialist to teach him the basics of spelling,
writing and trigonometry so he'd have a head start when the time came
for him to go to school.
If I had known then that he'd be attending school in a strip mall on
Lake Street near the Spanish barrio and the Somalian homeless shelter,
I could have saved serious money on that education specialist. I sat in
on a class last May when I was doing school research, and if Michael
can count to ten in English and use both of his hands at the same time,
he'll be first in his class.
America has a long way to go before gay toddlers are accepted as a
normal, healthy and beneficial additive to the multicultural soup of
our country, but I know that if anyone can be a trailblazer for
equality and acceptance, Michael can. He has so far been a very vocal
activist for gay rights in our local chapter of PFLAG, has written
several op-ed pieces for the Star Tribune on tolerance and equality,
and even flew to Washington D.C. on his own last year to lobby Congress
to repeal DOMA. He's so independent that he didn't even tell us before
he left! If we had noticed he was gone we would have thought he'd been
kidnapped.
Raising a gay toddler in a heterosexual world isn't an easy task, but
my husband and I are very grateful that our nanny is up to the
challenge. I would love to hear from other parents with experience
raising gay toddlers. Please send me an email at maureen@divisiontwo.com. If
you have funny or interesting stories to share, I'll include them in my
next column.
Until next time, remember that true equality can only be achieved
through tolerance, acceptance, and most importantly, love.
Maureen Jambor is an executive management consultant, a business systems analyst, a published author, and a part-time mom.
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