Restoration

I'm one of the advisors for the GLBT-A student/community group on campus. It's easily one of the most rewarding things I've ever done in my life but there are occasionally moments that stand out more than others. Growing up gay you miss out on a few things, most notably a sense of "normality." Most queer kids think they are the only one. We all had moments where we felt incredibly isolated and weird and just wrong. We had no role models, we had nobody to tell our story, we had nothing to make us feel like there is more than one way to be. That's why I love things like pink proms. (Proms for grown up queer kids that didn't get to have a real prom before because they couldn't go with who they wanted.) Tonight we did something kind of similar in a way and kind of weird. We read children's books with gay themes. I had a few reservations about it to begin with. It seemed sort of cheesy and silly but one of the board members seemed really excited about it and we had nothing else planned so I let him run with it. He went to the public library and got all 5 books they had. At first the rest of the group seemed hesitant. They are good sports though and they all went to a big room in the union and sat on the floor in a circle and took turns reading out loud. They sort of made fun of the books to begin with and the idea and the the entire kindergarten atmosphere but then they got into it. The books were so simple and so beautiful because of it. Just simple messages that it's ok to be who you are, it's ok if you aren't like everyone else, there are a lot of different types of love and they are all good, there are a lot of different types of families and they are all good. Sometimes it takes something as simple as a children's book to restore a little part of yourself you didn't know was damaged or missing. We didn't have these books when we were little. We all grew up thinking that boys fall in love with girls and that was that. If you were a boy and you didn't like girls then there was something wrong with you. Tonight we all got a little piece of our childhoods restored to us. We all get to feel a little bit better about ourselves. We all got to feel just a little bit more "normal." But above all that we all got to bond over something as silly as children's books and feel like we belonged.