I need to make this point first: I had it good. I had it very good. Compared to other kids I had it golden. Mom loved me, I never doubted that. But there were others on her side of my family tree who would have been happy if I’d never been born. Not all of them…I need to emphasize that too…but enough of them that I felt the static over being my father’s son all the time I was growing up. Here’s the thing: you grow up in these situations others might consider strange and it doesn’t seem strange to you at all. It seems normal. Because for you it is normal. I didn’t get to meet my dad until I was 15 and that had to be on the down low because otherwise mom’s family would go nuclear. Which…they eventually did anyway. But that was normal for me. Your mileage may vary.

Part of the reason I was able to handle my emerging sexual orientation as well as I did was I’d already accepted by then that there would be people in my life who would hate my guts for something I couldn’t help being, and which all by itself wasn’t anything for me to be ashamed of. But it left its mark all the same, and at age 72 I’m still picking out pieces of the scabs.

So if it seems strange for a guy my age to be completely taken by a series of books aimed mostly at teenagers and young adults, it’s because that background premise in those books of “Forbidden Children” and “Children Who Should Not Have Been Born” and its main character telling the gods at the end of the first series to recognize all their children from now on so no one ever feels unwanted again, really hits me in a very deep place where I didn’t expect the books to take me.

I started reading the Percy Jackson books when I saw the cover art pop up in one of my feeds for The Sun And The Star and realized looking at it that it was a story about a young same sex couple in some sort of fantasy/adventure story.

I have been devouring those kinds of stories ever since Mercedes Lackey wrote her Last Herald Mage books, as a way of vicariously having/reliving an adolescence reading boy meets boy, have adventures, win their battles, defeat the bad guys and fall in love stories I never had a chance to have growing up in the late 60s/early 70s. So I bought a copy and started reading, and then fell into Rick Riordan’s universe of forbidden demigod children, unknowingly born into world where they are misunderstood weird kid outcasts at best, targets for monsters at worst, and half their family tree is dysfunctional, and they have to fight for acceptance and find and defend their chosen family.

I was only able to get halfway through the first Harry Potter book before I got bored with it and put it down. It was at the quidditch match part and I put it down to my reliable allergy to watching sports. This was well before I saw her dark side online. At the time I thought I should at least try to finish it because it seemed like everyone was thoroughly enjoying the books and the story of an outsider kid growing up in a family that raised him in a little closet away from the world of his birthright should have appealed to me. But once I put it down I moved onto other things, and then later I saw her dark side. It was probably less traumatic for me than others since I’d already become bored with her world. In retrospect Rowling had all the tropes and the skill to use them better than most, but not enough to make them rise above themselves. It’s like the difference I found reading Zane Grey versus Louis L’Amour, or Tom Clancy versus Alistair MacLean.

Looking forward to watching the second season of Percy Jackson And The Olympians, and then season three where we finally get to meet a young Nico di Angelo. Alas at the rate they’re going it won’t be for another six years after than before we get to Nico’s fight with Cupid and it comes out he’s gay and he had a crush on Percy. Maybe in seven years Disney Corp will have enough backbone to actually tell its audience that no kid should ever feel unwanted again.

Even if they’re gay and their father is Hades.