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Key points
- The "Don't Say Gay" bill is about hiding how normal LGBT people are.
- Florida lawmakers may think that hiding us from their children is somehow protecting them.
- Kids accept as normal whatever we tell them is normal — and that's exactly the point of the bill.
I recently overheard a conversation in a hair salon about what a customer referred to as Florida’s “don’t say gay” bill. The stylist objected vigorously, insisting that those three words don’t appear anywhere in the law and that the name was just a liberal ploy to make the “parental rights in education” bill sound bad. The two went at it for a little while, then let it drop as they moved on to other topics. I decided, just this once, to sit it out and not speak up, preferring instead to simply enjoy having someone wash my hair for me as I sat back in silence.
Of course I stewed about it the whole time that stylist worked on my own head. She knows I’m gay, knows my wife, and has met my trans kid. To her we are just friendly regular customers, not especially demanding, and pretty good tippers. You know, normal. Did she even make the connection between what she’d just been saying and who I was? If I hadn’t felt so very, very sick and tired of having this discussion, here’s what I might have said to her:
First of all, you’re right — plenty of political battles are won or lost over the language used. “Don’t say gay” is brilliant, but it’s not what Florida’s new law says. The law does, ominously, refer to prohibiting “classroom discussions” in a way that could certainly be construed to mean “don’t say that word!”
But It’s Worse Than That
Because second, did I ever tell you about the time my wife and I were the “mystery readers” at our younger child’s kindergarten class? That weekly treat involved having a special guest show up to read the class a story, and one Friday both of us went in to read The Interrupting Chicken to a bunch of five-year-olds. We had worked out a whole routine in which Marg would be the frustrated fowl parent trying to tell a bedtime story, while I’d be the interrupting little chicken making the job impossible. I was sure we’d slay — but the kids had other ideas.
“Wait, who’s that other lady?” we heard right away as we took our tiny seats. I realized immediately that the kids all knew Marg as the pick-up and drop-off mom, but I was the working mom. They didn’t all know me, and we were going to take a quick detour before the story started. “That’s my other mom,” Maria explained patiently, as the questions ramped up. “But which one is your real mom? Which one did you come out of?”
Cue the Classroom Discussion
It was not a crisis (although it was a little uncomfortable). They asked, we answered. Thinking back on it, I wonder if parents like us would ever be invited to be mystery readers in Florida now. Our very presence invited “classroom discussion,” and although we never said gay we did say we were both moms, our kids were both adopted, and we were both very much real. From that day forth, Maria was the kid with two moms — and that became normal for her class because we presented it that way. Normal.
And that is exactly the issue. It’s not about saying gay — it’s about making LGBT normal in a kindergarten classroom. If Maria’s classmates mentioned us to their parents that evening, they would not have said that they had been introduced to predators, or that we had come recruiting the next generation of kids for the LGBT ranks. They had met normal moms — maybe a little weird that there were two of us, but otherwise normal. And that’s just what Florida doesn’t want.
Normal Lesbian Moms
Normal is exactly what we were determined to be when we became parents 18 years ago. We pushed our babies in strollers, then later we took them to gymnastics and dancing school and soccer practice. We volunteered for the PTA, raised money for the sports teams, and drove a minivan full of kids everywhere we went. (For a while the neighborhood kids referred to me as Miss Frizzle, and our van as the Magic School Bus.) We were, and still are, exhausted, hardworking, normal parents.
But for some folks, we will never be normal. We’ll be deviants, perverts, something to be hidden away from children. The last thing they want is for their kids to think LGBT identities are normal. If they hide us from their children, maybe we’ll all just go away. I’m pretty sure that’s what lies behind all the laws that have ever tried to prohibit same-sex relationships — as if you could legislate away the gay. People have tried to ban gay bars, gay sex, gay marriage, gay adoptions, and gay teachers and coaches, all out of fear. How terrible for them that we keep coming, generation after generation, never going away. We keep finding each other, and now even marrying one another and taking our kids to kindergarten. Why can’t they make us disappear?
We're Still Here
I’m sad and angry and frustrated about those who feel that way — but at my age, I don’t really care what anyone thinks about me. What breaks my heart is the thought of those kindergarteners and middle schoolers and teenagers who hear that message all their lives, that drumbeat that says LGBT = abnormal. What would my child have thought if her moms were not allowed to read to her class, if she were forbidden to talk about her parents at school? What about the kids in classrooms today who already — at 5, or 10, or 15 — wonder about themselves? What message are we sending them to say that to be LGBT is something to be ashamed of, an embarrassment to hide away from small children?
I know the answer all too well, because in the 1960s and 1970s I was one of those kids. In my Irish Catholic world, there were no LGBT people — I literally did not have a clue there even was such a thing until I was… well, too old to be that ignorant. In my world, nobody said gay — and I carried that little seed of torment with me every day of my young life. It doesn't stop anyone from being LGBT to be told it's abnormal. Why would we want to keep doing that to our children?
Centuries of banning and stoning and imprisoning, and here it is 2022 and LGBT people still exist. The fearful ones will try again and again to hide us from their children, to make sure no kid ever gets the idea that to be gay is to be perfectly normal. But they’re wrong. To be LGBT is to be normal, and you simply can’t make that go away.
I guess I could have used that day in the salon as a teaching moment — to be an interrupting chicken, if you will. But you know, all moms get tired of teaching moments sometimes. Sometimes we just want to lie back, close our eyes, and have our hair shampooed. Just like normal people.
