What's a Lesbian?

            When I was younger I watched an episode of Degrassi and thought I was a lesbian.  I think that was more a testament to my mother not knowing how to adequately explain what a lesbian was to her pre-pubescent daughter.  

“Umm...  Girls who like girls” she said. 

“I like girls” I replied.  I was not fully aware of the sexual and/or romantic implications hidden in this ambiguous definition.

            In fact, I had known since the age of six that I was most definitely not a lesbian because, while all my playmates were convinced boys had cooties, I was getting ostracized for knowing that Ian Phillips was totally cute.  I didn’t know what to do with that information when I was six, and it didn’t really matter anyway because he was convinced that, since I was a girl, there was absolutely no doubt that I had cooties too.  Cooties is a real romantic deal breaker when you’re six.  But still, I had been tricked by Degrassi into false lesbianism because I didn’t grasp the difference between ‘liking’ and ‘like liking’. 

            What I gathered from the show was that it was pretty damn complicated being a lesbian, and I was a little confused about why girls liking girls even mattered that much.  Who better to resolve that confusion than Canada’s finest selection of after school television writers and child actors?   

            Several years later I was teaching Highland dancing at a community centre downtown.  One of my young mischievous students around the same age I was for the Degrassi incident was busily checking out some of the posters in the studio instead of doing what she was supposed to.  As I was about to tell her to go do some dancing, she turned to me and said “What’s gay lesbian and bee-sexual?”

            I should probably mention the fact that at that time I was studying Criminology with a concentration in Law, and one of my Law electives was a seminar on GLBTQ Charter of Rights issues.  So literally a few weeks prior to this event we had spent our entire three hour opening lecture defining these exact terms.  If ever there was a Highland dance teacher equipped to tell an eight year old what a “bee-sexual” was, that Highland dance teacher was me!  Instead, my response was “DO YOUR SWORD DANCE!!!”

Moral of the story: No matter how many Law classes you take or episodes of Degrassi you watch, explaining sexuality to children really fucking sucks.  But the explanations we get when we’re young stay with us through life, so I’m sure glad the definition I got was as simple as girls liking girls, rather than something along the lines of “it’s an abomination of God and they’ll burn in hell for an eternity”.  One thing that is certain is that kids are really curious.  Possibly even bee-curious.  But if they’re in a Highland Dance class they probably should just do their Sword.