On her Fox News show, Laura Ingraham asked: “When did our public schools, any schools, become what are essentially grooming centers for gender-identity radicals? As a mom, I think it’s appalling, it’s frightening, it’s disgusting, it’s despicable.” Somebody, please take away her thesaurus. And while its backers often referred to the legislation in terms of “parental rights,” some of them also spoke of it as an “anti-grooming” measure. people as malevolent opportunists with children in our sights. The debate over a recently enacted Florida law that prohibits discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity among young schoolchildren was both an emblem and an engine of the demonization of L.G.B.T.Q. “Grooming,” as Monica Hesse wrote recently in The Washington Post, “has lately become a buzzword in anti-gay politics.” She went on to note that it “preys on every parent’s worst fear - someone harming their children - by insinuating that all gay or gender nonconforming people see their children as prey.” And I pretty much forgot about it, choosing to relish progress rather than rehash the indignities of the past.īut everything old is new again, including slurs. I stopped seeing, hearing or at least noticing it. Its meaning was both specific and sinister.Īs the decades passed, its currency seemed to fade as the prejudice it gave expression to ebbed. To leave us alone with children was to give us an opportunity to groom them into sexual activity, so we had to be watched. It was a facet of our perversion, a function of our deviance.
And perhaps the cruelest of the lies about us, reflected in recurring debates about who should and shouldn’t be allowed to teach in schools, was that many gay men were child molesters.
There was no playful tousling of hair, so there would be no wrongful stirring of suspicion.īorn in 1964, I grew up when stereotypes about gay people like me were largely negative and deeply ingrained. I made certain not to congratulate one of them with a pat on the back, lest run-of-the-mill tenderness be misinterpreted as something else.
For much of my life, I was extra careful around young children, especially young boys.