frye@bbncca.ARPA (Roger E. Frye) (09/17/84)
As a bisexual man and a divorced parent of three children, I have had to deal with the problem of educating my children about the question of sexual orientation. I came out to my children, with their mother's permission, when their ages were 17, 15, and 13 and I had been divorced for five years. I chose that time because I was becoming politically active, so I wanted any information about me to come from me rather than from the television or their friends. I was pleasantly surprised at how easily it went. I felt that my children were even closer to me than before. I don't remember having consciously prepared them for accepting homosexuality. I had been much more worried about conveying my ideas about pre-marital intercourse and contraception. Perhaps they just picked up on my own acceptance of the variety of life. Over the years, I had heard my kids call each other fag and queer and brown nose along with all the other swear words they picked up at school. But I realized that the words didn't mean anything to them except insult, so I worried more about how they were feeling towards each other than about the societal implications of the words they were using. Even so, I must say again that I was pleasantly surprised at their acceptance. I would suggest this as a great topic to bring up on net.motss. Who better to ask about attitudes toward homosexuality than gays themselves? You might find some quibbling resistance to the word "preference" instead of "orientation", and to the idea that "homosexuality is really tough", but on the whole, I think it would be welcome. By the way, I strongly object to smoking too, yet my middle child, now 17, smokes up to three packs a day. Drug preference is really tough. -Roger Frye, 617-497-3155 decvax!bbncca!frye frye@bbn-unix.ARPA