A Child’s Sexuality
“Besides, it’s not like there will be any girls around to make them fell embarrassed,” he told me, as if the presence of girls were the only possible reason they wouldn’t want to play a game aimed at younger children.
“What makes you assume their interest is in girls?” I asked.
He could’ve told me that his cousins had expressed interest in girls before and the conversation would’ve ended there, his answer directly addressing my question. He could’ve explained that he was making an assumption and he didn’t actually know or care about their sexuality. He could’ve explained that the event was just going to be family so it didn’t matter who they might be interested in, they wouldn’t be there regardless.
He did none of those.
“Are you calling my cousins gay? Cause if you are, that’s kind of low.”
“Are you calling them straight?”
—
It was the beginning of the end of our evening, my questions clearly eliciting what could have been a homophobic rage.
My second question was clearly argumentative and unnecessarily pointed, but the implications of my first question were honest. Each and every one of us makes assumptions about others. We must in order to function as a social entity. We assume that a uniform denotes a job, that the sex someone presents in their appearance is their sex (or at least the one they choose to present). I certainly don’t hold that against my friend as there’s not a person alive not guilty of it.











Michael Buchino of the