I want my daughter to know that being gay is equally desirable to being straight. But I do worry about people expecting her to have a hard life - helping to perpetuate discrimination that might otherwise fade more quickly. If my daughter is gay, I don’t worry about her having a hard life.
#MOM DAD IM GAY MEME TV#
I wouldn’t be a politically engaged human being, let alone an activist, writer and TV personality, if I weren’t gay. Learning that not every gay person had it as good as I did helped me realize that a lot of people in general didn’t have it as good as I did. More than that, though, being gay opened my eyes to the world around me. By the time my daughter comes of age, she’ll have even more of a support network, including two moms, for crying out loud. My parents were ridiculously supportive from Day One, and I had a great community of friends and mentors who made me feel unconditionally accepted. Plus, I’ve never for a single second regretted being gay, nor saw it as anything other than an asset and a gift.
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But if my daughter wants to be an artist, I’ll encourage her all the way - and work to destroy any barriers along her path, not put them up myself. It’s also easier to succeed as a dentist than an artist. I’d do this even though his life would probably be easier if he didn’t. If I lived in, say, North Carolina, with an adopted son from Morocco, I’d like to think I would encourage him to be Muslim, if that’s what he chose. But no matter what, I’d want my child to be herself. And maybe if I weren’t an upper-middle-class white lesbian living in a liberal city, I’d have such worries. Here you might expect me to say something about how, if my daughter were gay, she would undoubtedly face challenges and hurdles she wouldn’t encounter if she were straight. It’s more widely acceptable to be gay in America today, but that’s not the same as being desirable. And while gay-positive culture has flourished since, our aspirations haven’t kept pace. Until 1973, the American Psychiatric Association considered homosexuality a form of mental illness. When the gay liberation activist Franklin Kameny launched a simple effort in 1968 to proclaim that “gay is good,” it was because, at the time, it very much wasn’t. Gay became an unfortunate, even pitiable status. Once upon a time, of course, “gay” meant “happy.” But eventually, the synonyms grew apart. “I wouldn’t even choose for myself to be gay,” a friend once told me. The idea that folks are “born gay” became not only the theme of a Lady Gaga song, but the implicit rationale for gay rights. Scientists even tried to prove that there’s a “gay gene.” These concepts about sexual orientation helped justify the case for legal protections. In the early ’90s, partly as a response to the destructive notion that gay people could be changed, activists pressed the idea of sexuality as a fixed, innate state. The idea that no one would choose to be gay is widely held - even in the gay rights movement. But it was impossible to know whether he meant to insulate me from the world’s bias or implicitly rationalize his own. “I’m just trying to protect you,” he said. When I was a teenager, my father cautioned me against marrying a black person. A less-charitable interpretation is that he thinks being straight is superior. But this attitude complies with, even reinforces, that culture in the first place. Perhaps he just meant that it’s easier to be straight in a homophobic culture.
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“Don’t you want her to be happy?” one friend asked. But wanting my daughter to be a lesbian? I might as well say I want her to grow up to be lactose intolerant.
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It’s one thing for them to admit that they would prefer their kids to be straight, something they’ll only begrudgingly confess. Many of my straight friends, even the most liberal, see this logic as warped. If we vote Democrat, of course we want our kids to vote Democrat. If we like sports, we want our kids to like sports. If we went to college, we want our kids to go to college. But more often than not, we define happiness as some variation on our own lives, or at least the lives of our expectations. I live in the liberal bubble of Park Slope, Brooklyn, where no yuppie would ever admit to wanting their kid to be anything in particular, other than happy.
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Sally Kohn is an essayist and a CNN political commentator.