First Conversation
"Mama, what's "QUEER" mean?"
"Queer? uhh, it means different ... sometimes funny."
"Like how?"
"Hmm. Well, kind of like this: See these three big potatoes Mama's cooking up for dinner?" The child nodded his wide-eyed understanding. Reaching up to the basket hanging about the kitchen's island, the mother added a smaller new potato to the countertop. "If you look at all four of these potatoes together, you might describe the little red potato as queer. 'My! What a queer little potato!'"
The little boy looked thoughtfully at the four potatoes sitting on the gray-slate countertop. Worried that the concepts might be beyond her only child, the mother added encouragingly, "Queer is a very big word. Where did you hear that today?"
Visisbly proud, the little boy exclaimed, "I didn' hear it Mama, I read it!"
"Oh what a big boy you're becoming! You only just started reading a few months ago. Mama's so proud of her little man. Where did you read it? Tell me."
"On this sign that the man on the street was holding it said 'God Hates Queers' but I already knew 'God' and 'Hate' 'cause those words is easy but I've never ever seen 'Queer' before but it looked like 'Queen' and I've seen that one. Mama, does God hate the little potato?" By the time that her son had completed his explination, the mother's moment of pride and joy at her son's new accomplishment had diminished in its entirety, and a memory that should have been held dear was tarnished forever by the enthusiastic of man. How does a mother even begin to explain?
"No, little Boo-boo," she said, using the family's nickname for the boy more for her own comfort than for his, "God doesn't hate the little potato." Kneeling, she gathered her son into her arms, hoping and praying with every scrap of her soul that she could physically shield him from the evil of the world. She knew the futility of her gesture, and with a deep breath decided to face this issue head-on, with the warm sunny block of light from the kitchen window giving her as much strength as ever she was going to get. "God doesn't hate, sweetheart, no matter what that sign said."
She knew the sign. She had seen the signs and the men holding them often enough. Nicely-dressed, clean-cut, average-looking men holding signs along the main road of the town. Slandering homosexuals, Jews, Catholics, and she was sure they would have added signs against Blacks too, if they thought they could get away with it. Always on the busiest days -- Fridays and Saturdays and Sundays ... after church, of course -- and in all kinds of weather they stood, as though holding hate-signs in the rain made them martyrs. The overwhelming hipocracy of it made her ill every time she saw them.
But how does one explain the complexities of ignorance, prejudice, and the difference between real Christians and the false Christians on the street to a seven year old boy?
"Listen Boo-boo. Mama's gonna tell you something important, okay?" A solemn nod was her only response. "Those men holding the signs on the street were told a long long time ago that people who are different from them are bad. You remember Mama told you that 'queer' means different? Well, they've grown up not knowing anyone different, and being afraid of people who are different. Because they're afraid of them, they don't like them, and they want to make other people not like them. They think that if more people don't like them, then they will be more right to not like the different people. Do you understand all this?"
"Ummm, what makes people different?" Her heart warmed at the intelligence and precociousness of the question.
"Sometimes it's the way a person looks, like the color of their skin. Sometimes it's what a person believes in or which church they go to. Sometimes it's the language that they speak. What these men on the street don't understand is that everyone is different from everyone else, and it's being different that makes us special."
"So, it's good to be queer?"
"It's good to be queer. It's better to be yourself. It's best to let others be themselves."
"So we have to let the bad men stay bad?"
"As long as they don't hurt anybody, we have to let them have their say, even if we know that it's wrong. But, we can live our lives being good people and teaching our friends and families to be good also, and eventually the bad men will learn better." She knew the idealistic view she painted of the world would be shattered one day, but a mother's instinct to protect her child is very strong.
"So God doesn't hate the little potato?" he asked again.
"Didn't God make the little potato?"
"Yeah."
"Didn't God make everything?"
"Yeah."
"Do you think God would make something that he hated?"
"No."
"Then God loves all the queer little potatoes."
His reassured smile warmed her to the soul, chasing away this chill the previous conversation ... her first true conversation with her son ... had left upon her. She knew that as years went by she would have to let go and allow the corruption and malice of the world to touch his unblemished soul. But until then, she could stand in the safety of a sun-warmed kitchen, with countertops full of potatoes, and do her best to teach him that it's okay to be a little queer.