Maddie Matters: A Six-Year-Old Solves The Gay Acceptance Riddle

by JEAN ANN ESSELINK onFEBRUARY 11, 2014

in ASIDES,JEAN ANN ESSELINK,NEWS

My six-year-old granddaughter Madison – Maddie to her friends – is a regular one-kid think tank. She knows “gay” means girls loving girls and boys loving boys, and while she really has no concept of the “why”, she knows there are places in the world where gay people are not accepted, and people in the world who do them violence. That’s why Nana – me – writes for The New Civil Rights Movement.

Last Saturday, I was working on Sunday’sOn Our Radar column about the “Olymbians” who are competing in Sochi, and to keep her occupied, I had Maddie help me choose their photos. Before long, she began wondering aloud how anyone could be less than awestruck by these amazing women – and for the first time she began thinking about the concept of being gay.

The conversation went like this:

Maddie: (Talking about David Badash, founder of The New Civil Rights Movement.) Does your boss know I’m not gay?
Me: It really hasn’t come up.
Maddie: Am I gay?
Me: No one can answer that for someone else. It’s like asking me if you’re hungry or sleepy.
Maddie: Is there anything else you can be? Besides regular or gay?
Me: It’s called straight, not regular. And if you are thinking about Mario and Luigi or the Monster High kids, there is no “attracted to cartoon people” category at this time.
Maddie: So just the two?
Me: Well, there’s bisexual. That’s people who are attracted to both men and women, they just fall in love with a person because of who they are on the inside.
Maddie: (Thinks about this with a scrunched up face.) Do people know about bisexual? Because if we all just say we’re bisexual no one will care who you love.
Me: An excellent plan, Maddie. I think that could work.
Maddie: You should tell your boss. He could put it on his website so Russia will know what we’re doing.

So I did. And here it is, Maddie’s childlike solution to homophobia on our grownup gay website. If only I could make her dream come true….

Jean Ann Esselink is a straight friend to the gay community. Proud and loud Liberal. Closet writer of political fiction. Black sheep agnostic Democrat from a conservative Catholic family. Living in Northern Oakland County Michigan with Puck the Wonder Beagle.