A Language of Love

A Language of Love

I was nine years old when my family purchased its first television set. The year was 1968 and the popular series “Lost In Space” was in its final season on prime time T.V. I loved “Lost In Space” and avidly followed the adventures of the Robinson family through years of afternoon reruns. My sisters teased me about having a crush on Billy Mumy, the young actor who played Will Robinson. This charge infuriated and puzzled me. It infuriated me because I knew it wasn’t true, but it puzzled me because I recognized a seed of truth in their teasing. It was many years before I was able to articulate what that truth was: I didn’t have a crush on Billy Mumy. I had a crush on Angela Cartwright, the actress who played Penny.

I liked boys growing up. But I liked girls, too, and nowhere did I see that kind of liking reflected back to me in the models held out by my family, the media, and peers. Indeed, I didn’t have a name for what I was feeling for many, many years. How could I? The culture I lived in was silent. There was no vocabulary for the complex array of emotions that crowded my adolescent awareness. I decided that what I was feeling must not exist.

I don’t think things have changed a lot in the twenty-five years since I was coming of age alone and undefined. Sure, we’ve had Ellen. Gay men and women appear somewhat routinely in the supporting roles of movies and sitcoms. Lesbian sex is hinted at in music videos. It has become popular for young people to accept sexual diversity with a shrug and an “It doesn’t bother me.” But I suggest that underneath their nonchalent demeanor it does bother them, especially if they are the ones who don’t fit the prescribed ideal. One has only to look at the staggering ...

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...would grow up more willing to embrace a different sexual identification than if they had been raised in a climate of tight-lipped shame. Is this a bad thing? Would we rather have them lock a vital component of their authentic selves away? Granted, being anything other than heterosexual in our homophobic society is not easy: few parents would wish such a challenge upon their children. But if we begin--all of us, now--to transform our own silence into an open dialogue, the societal norm will eventually catch up.

For the vast majority of our children, growing up with an awareness of other forms of coupling will not change their own identification as heterosexuals. Yet that awareness may give them an important thing--permission to be all of who they are, in all the myriad ways that don’t quite fit the societal idea of “normal.” Isn't that, ultimately, what we want?