Reply #22: You seem to think that having a gay couple over is more "adult" than having a straight couple. [View All]

[yardwork]

Why is having a gay couple to visit a more "adult" situation than having a straight couple to visit? Is it because you automatically equate "gay" with "sex?"

Your daughter is eight years old. You don't mention whether or not she knows about sex - the birds and the bees conversation. I'll assume that she does know about sex but as a mother myself, I know that most eight year olds don't think about sex very often. When they meet people they don't think about whether or not they are going to have sex soon. When an eight year old goes to bed she's going to bed, not to have sex (unless there is sexual abuse in the home, which I assume is not the case here, right?) When the eight year old sees a straight couple go to bed is she thinking/speculating about their sex lives? I very much doubt it.

So why do you fear that your daughter will speculate about the sex lives of your gay guests? It seems very unlikely to me.

When my kids were little I told them that some people liked people who were the same sex. They were familiar with the idea of husbands and wives, girlfriends and boyfriends. I simply stated - very calmly and without going into any detail - that some men were boyfriends or husbands of other men, and some women were girlfriends or wives of other women. And even that some people liked both. And that was that.

As they got older I mentioned that there were people who were mean to some other people, including being mean to people who liked the same sex. This resonated because my little kids had already learned about Martin Luther King, Jr. being assassinated because of the color of his skin (typically this is taught in kindergarten) and had already encountered extremist Christianists at school who had informed the other kids that they were all going to hell for not going to the right church. So by the time my kids were eight they certainly understood that there were bigots in the world.

Don't mix up sex with orientation. You don't know that your gay guests are going to engage in hot sex in your guest room and you would probably agree that it is not very polite to speculate about it. I can practically guarantee that your eight year old daughter won't be speculating about their sex lives.