It’s true.  Some years ago, after Maryland started allowing us to view our grade school records, I took a trip to my old High School and asked to see mine.  Reading all the comments in my file from all the teachers I’d had over the years was a real eye opener.  Two of them stood out in particular: one from a fifth grade teacher who wrote Bruce "Takes excessive interest in personal art projects".  The other was a write-up by one of my first grade teachers for a discipline infraction.  I’d been caught kissing other boys.

It wasn’t until I read her words that I even remembered the incident.  Perhaps I’d just shut it out of my mind all those years because the embarrassment was too much for my little first grade sensibilities.  Or perhaps I just let the incident slide on by because I hadn’t thought it was any big deal at the time.  All I remember of it, was getting scolded for kissing a boy.  But that particular teacher was always scolding me and then dragging me into the coat closet, where she dragged all the kids at one time or another to make them pray for forgiveness because of something they did, or that she though they’d done.  I still remember how livid she was when the Supreme Court ruled that public schools can’t force the kids in them to pray.  Picture a first grade teacher standing stone faced in front of her classroom of small children, and telling them that the Supreme Court had just taken God away from them.

Which is all to say that my sexuality, even at that age, was probably already beginning to surface in various little telling ways, and that some of the adults in my life were already starting to brand me for it.  There’s a really interesting article in this weeks’ Village Voice about parents and teachers struggling to cope with developing gender and sexuality in grade school children and younger in a culture that simply doesn’t want to aknowledge that children have any such things.  But if there is a bioligical basis to sexual orientation, then its a no-brainer that they do.

But why not? We know almost nothing about gender and sexuality in young children, but what we do know is that they both emerge in children quite early.

"It varies, and development varies from child to child, but awareness of sexuality begins in elementary school," says Caitlin Ryan, a researcher studying LGBT families with the Family Acceptance Project in California. "Even though adults who work with children or adolescents are typically not aware of this as part of their professional training, regardless, it’s happening. It’s very common for young people to have attractions to same-sex peers if they’re young."

I remember my grade school crushes to this day.  I often drove my friends back then crazy with my heated emotional attachments.  In those days though, strange as it may sound today, a young boy was almost expected to dislike girls and find more emotional gratification in his male pals until he got to a certain age.  There was a saying for it "Going through a phase…"  As time went on and my male pals began their first tentative efforts at courtship, I would reach for that saying to describe myself and my own emotional responses to the same and the opposite sex, over and over again like a mantra.  "I’m just going through a phase…just going through a phase…just going through a phase…"   I had no idea what it meant, but it sounded like a good enough excuse to avoid dating girls…something I was really really not interested in.

If only someone had told me that I could date boys instead.  Oh…I’d have jumped right on that… 

Just ask the parents. "In their kindergarten class, I’ve definitely observed three or four of the boys being flirtatious, with both girls and other boys," says the mother of the little boy who wants to marry his "god brother."

Ryan says that elementary school health teachers have told her that they hear children talking about crushes beginning as early as kindergarten. "Children can describe thinking of Valentine’s day and of having that little special feeling of having butterflies in their stomach," she says. "Why would we think that this is only something that takes place in their twenties?"

And why would we think that only straight kids are getting twitterpated? Is it because we still think gayness is such an undesirable outcome?

Twitterpated.  I love it.  Describes my schoolboy crushes perfectly.  Twitterpated.  Except I had no idea what it was all about, because I wasn’t allowed to know that boys could fall in love with other boys.  Those years could have been a lot happier for me then they were.  Every kid should be allowed to get twitterpated without getting dragged into the closet to pray for forgiveness.