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Originally Posted by Beso
Just wanted to know if they are old enough to know they are gay.
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Well it’s unique to the individual when they form this knowledge about their sexuality, as with heterosexuality.
Speaking from experience I was about 8 when I knew there was SOMETHING about males that I felt differently about compared to females. I didn’t know about sex and sexuality or what gay was so couldn’t obviously understand.
Then at 11 when I went to Secondary school I learned what gay was from other kids, realised that was me and was terrified because the only context I heard it being spoken about was as an insult.
When I went though puberty at 12-13 it was obviously then my thoughts about guys became sexual.
There was still little to no mainstream representation, still negatively charged language surrounding it and so I spent the next 6-7 years hiding it and therefore when I did come out I had a decade of internalised homophobia to unpack.
Now representation is much improved, language is more more positive and I know if that 13 year old me went to a pride event today and saw the positivity and celebration and fun and joy that it shows then I would have felt safe to come out a lot earlier and wouldn’t have had a lot of self hate to deal with later in life.
It’s why representation matters so much, from a young age, so there is basicalevel of understanding of someone else existing alongside you. Kids seeing a film about two princes falling in love isn’t going to make them gay, in the same way watching almost every Disney movie ever about a Prince and Princess didn’t make me straight. But it WILL help a kid understand and reconcile their feelings when they finally do understand.
Thats why I grapple with whether pride should be family friendly or not - it absolutely has its merits of being so (and a lot of the small city ones actually are) but at the same time many gay people have spent many years filtering their authentic self down to fit with what a heterosexual society has deemed to be acceptable for fear of persecution or judgement for their homosexuality, and so it feels wrong to continue to do that during our own event.