Dear parents,
It may have recently come to your attention that queer people like me are being portrayed as googly-eyed, predatory boogeymen who, when we aren't busy devising and unleashing devastating weather phenomena across America, are plotting how we can secure access to, and ultimately desecrate, your precious children.
This is nothing new.
You may remember (or at least have heard about) beauty queen turned orange-juice shiller Anita Bryant's crusade in the '70s to protect Dade County, Florida's children from queers like me, who, after years of lying in wait in the shadows, were supposedly slithering into the sunlight to openly push our nefarious agenda and pounce upon the innocent in order to inject our sickness into them (both figuratively and literally).
Pie-faced Anita wasn't the first to make this claim, and she certainly wasn't the last.
It seems that whenever the queer movement makes social and political gains (aka this totally radical thing called being treated equally) -- and it's happening more and more every week, I'm happy to report -- our opposition waves their hankies and rolls out their "oh, sweet Jesus, think about the children!" defense.
Russia's horrifying anti-gay "propaganda" law, which was passed last summer, is based on the idea that the country's children need to be protected from us. The case currently being mounted against legalizing gay marriage in Utah is centered around the lie that gay parents are dangerous to kids. Even in pop culture, perhaps now the truest American pastime, figures like the star of ABC's The Bachelor have no problem giving interviews in which we're labeled as perverts with lives unsuitable for children's impressionable eyes.
But is it true? No. Of course not.
I'm not even going to dignify claims that queer people are child molesters because it's so incredibly offensive and patently untrue that it's not worth my time or yours.
What's more, nearly every study that has examined the health and well-being of children with gay parents finds that they're no worse off (and in many cases they're actually better off) than kids with straight parents. Kids who have been raised by gay parents say the same thing themselves.
There was one ridiculous study by University of Texas professor Mark Regnerus that claimed that gay parenting has negative consequences, but that study has "been condemned by a host of experts including the American Psychological Association and over 200 professors and therapists." But that doesn't stop groups like the Family Research Council from continuing to use it in hopes of banning marriage equality, as it recently did in Indiana.
But an argument built on a lie is -- you guessed it -- a lie.
The truth is that we -- and the ways we live our queer lives -- are not dangerous or evil, and queerness is not something you can infect someone with, just like non-queerness isn't something that one catches like cooties. Think about it: How many queer people were and are raised by non-queer parents? You'd think that if sexual orientation or gender identity were so damn contagious, they would have rubbed off on some of us by now, right?
What's more, we're not secretly meeting up in Applebee's restaurants across America every Wednesday night and scheming over riblets-sauce-stained blueprints of your kids' preschools in hopes of recruiting them.
We're way too busy inventing the computer and reporting your news and running your cities, among other things.
But I don't want you to walk away from this letter thinking that I'm not targeting your children. I most certainly am. Because as much as I don't personally love kids (except the children of all my friends who might be reading this -- your kids are adorable! And geniuses! I promise!), there are things I want them to know about me and about my queer brothers and sisters (and themselves). And if you, dear parents, aren't going to tell them, then I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure they hear it anyway.
So, to get the ball rolling, here are just a few things (and by no means everything) I want your kids to know:
- I hope you know if you're queer, it's OK. It's better than OK. You're part of a really cool club with really cool people who've done some of the coolest stuff in history. You're not deranged. You're not unnatural. You're not a monster. And I hope you know if you're not queer, that's also OK. There have been a lot of non-queer people who've done some really cool stuff too.
And for all you parents reading this: I don't want your children, and I have no interest in defiling or dooming them -- or this great, messy nation, for that matter. But I'm not going away. Queers are not going away. And if you're not going to tell your kids the truth about us, and if you won't speak out against the lies that are being told about us, I'm going to do it myself.
Here is my promise. This is the true target. That, in the end, is my real agenda.
XOXO,
Noah