VillageVoice.com – by Julia Reischel
Gay adults like to say they were born that way. So where are the gay children? Everywhere? Fabulous, baby.
On a recent spring Saturday afternoon at the American Museum of Natural History, the carpeted atrium beneath the giant blue whale in the Milstein Hall Ocean of Life teems with children. Preschoolers and kindergartners lounge on the carpeted floor and race from diorama to diorama while their beleaguered parents try to catch their breath. I’m here to meet the family of a three-and-a-half-year-old boy who’s not like other boys. His father, whom I’ll call Arnold, has watched for the past six months as his son clung to dolls and tried on dresses. Arnold joined a national Listserv that connects parents of children who express this kind of gender-atypical behavior. Today, his son, the unusual Joseph, is somewhere in the throng below me.
If you think a boy who’s acting girly would stick out in a crowd, you haven’t been around five-year-olds lately. At the museum, boys who seemed feminine were everywhere I looked. Was Joseph the little blond one clinging fearfully to a stair rail? The boy in purple with the Farrah Fawcett hair? It turned out Joseph wasn’t any of them. He turned up wearing boyish jeans and a T-shirt, and sneakers with tiny red lights blinking in the soles. Up close, his curly brown hair is shaggy and long, tufting delicately out over his ears, but he’s hardly shy or clingy. Instead, he’s bold and gregarious: He immediately jumps out of his stroller to meet me. Nothing about Joseph seems notably feminine, until he holds up a doll dressed in a bright pink dress. “See my Barbie?” he says, proudly.