How to Talk to Kids about Queer People

A while back, I got a phone call from an old pastor friend who was struggling with a difficult situation and wanted my insights on how he could approach it.

It turned out that his kid’s kindergarten was celebrating “Wear it Purple Day” and inviting all the kids to wear purple clothes to celebrate the inclusion and dignity of LGBTQIA+ people. This pastor wasn’t entirely against the concept per se, but he felt tension around the sense that his kids were too young to really understand the concepts of LGBTQIA+ experiences, let alone participate in this event. His children were too young to have even had conversations about sex generally, so how could they be ready for nuanced conversations about queer orientations and integrate those concepts with their religious worldview?

This represents a wider pattern I observe where Christian parents feel uncertain about how to speak to their kids about queer people, or even decide it’s not developmentally appropriate to have that conversation at all with children—at least not until they’re teenagers. This usually results in erasing queer people’s experiences from their family; even if the family does have valued friendships with queer people, if those queer people are not welcome to acknowledge their specifically queer experiences, this is still a form of erasure that demeans us and puts up barriers to meaningful relationship.

I’d love to speak into this, both to benefit families with kids, but also to benefit all the queer people who’ve ever been made to feel as though who we are as people isn’t ‘age appropriate’ for kids.

I want to acknowledge that having age-appropriate conversations with children is vitally important, and I fully understand a parent’s desire to care for their young ones this way. As someone who’s taught children in a professional capacity for 13 years and who works in schools, I’m very sensitive to the developmental needs of young people, and I will fight to protect them from developmentally inappropriate exposure. So when I say that kids can have meaningful and age-appropriate conversations about queerness and even benefit from it, please know this is coming from a place of prioritising children’s well-being and developmental needs.

Do you know how I know we can talk to kids about adult sexuality in developmentally appropriate ways? Because we do it so much for heterosexual people already that we don’t even realise it. Literally all we need to do is stop having a different standard for queer people that hypersexualises us, and we already have a functioning paradigm for speaking about orientation to kids.[1]

The good news is that you don’t need sophisticated understandings of LGBTQ+ experiences or terminology to have age-appropriate conversations about queerness. This isn’t a step-by-step ‘how-to’ guide, because I don’t think you even need that. What we need is just a paradigm shift. I say ‘just’ a paradigm shift because even if it demands a mental reconfiguring, if you can only take this one idea to heart, you’ll be positioned to approach any challenging conversation about same-gender love with kids from a place of confidence.

So here it is:

Speak about same-gender orientations in terms of love, not sex

Yep, that’s it. Kids aren’t ready to have the conversation about sex? Great, don’t make it about sex then.

Instead, speak about how people are oriented towards loving other people in different ways. Kids can understand love without having to understand sex, and like I said, this is how we already approach conversations about heterosexual experiences with them from the earliest age.

Presumably the kids understand that Mummy and Daddy love each other in particular ways they don’t indiscriminately love everyone else, and presumably kids can understand the love their parents have for each other without knowing the ins and outs of sexual intercourse. Imagine if we extended the same capacity for love to queer people!

So much of the ‘problem’ here disappears when we repent of hypersexualising queerness.

This should be especially easy for Christians, if we really believe what we claim to. If real love truly is not limited to sex, and if gay people are more than their sexual desires, it should theoretically be easy for us to have rich conversations about all the ways we’re oriented towards [non-sexualised] love.

Unfortunately, it’s not. For some reason, Christian subcultures tend to sexualise us even more than secular subcultures, and yes, that is even true for those of us who are publicly committed to pursuing chastity—even the celibate gay Christians are sexualised and treated as a threat to children.

So much of the ‘problem’ here disappears when we repent of hypersexualising queerness.

We also need to check our language for some of the Christian code-switching that sexualises queer experiences (such as “homosexual” instead of “gay,” or “sexually broken” instead of “queer”). Most of the preferred terminology conservative Christians use to refer to queer people intensifies our sexualisation far more than the common alternatives used by mainstream cultures.

Instead, if we’re going to code-switch to Christian alternatives, we should go the opposite direction and choose terms that decentre sexualised language when speaking to children. I’m gradually moving away from terms like “sexual orientation” and prefer instead to speak of having an “orientation to love.” I do this for other reasons, but it also makes age-appropriate conversations remarkably easy. I can speak to youth about how some people have an orientation towards loving people of a different gender, while some have an orientation towards loving people of the same gender; others have an orientation towards loving people of all genders while still others have an orientation for loving no one ‘like that’ but instead love everyone as friends without being ‘in love’ with anyone (remember asexual inclusion matters! Especially in conversations like this).

Sidebar: Notice how easily we can speak about people having different orientations to love without speculating about the 'cause' of those orientations. Frankly, it's not relevant, and while our best science suggests orientations are a complex combination of nature and nurture, the bottom line is that, like anyone else, a queer person didn't choose and cannot change their orientation. 

Presumably kids can understand the love their parents have for each other without knowing the ins and outs of sexual intercourse. Imagine if we extended the same capacity for love to queer people!

Raising questions

Will this approach raise a bunch of follow-up questions for your kids? More than likely! That’s great! Good learning, especially for kids, involves fostering deeper curiosity, not eliminating questions. Learn to encourage those curveball questions and remember you are teaching your kid not just by what you say but by the response you model when faced with tough questions.

You don’t need to be afraid of your children having questions, even ones you don’t know the answers to. Here are a few possible responses to have handy, depending on the situation:

• If you’re able to and it’s appropriate, answer the question plainly!
• If you’re not able to but it’s an appropriate question, model a humble investigative posture for your child by acknowledging the limits of your current understanding and educating yourself—possibly together. (“That’s actually a really great question that I haven’t even thought about much yet. Let me do a bit more thinking and reading and get back to you/let’s do some more thinking together—do you have any ideas of things we could read about this?”)
• If you know the answer but it’s not an appropriate conversation for your child yet, it’s okay to be up-front about that! (“That’s a good question, and I promise we’ll make time to talk about that when you’re older, but remember how we talked about how some conversations are for older kids only? This is one of those conversations. Do you have any other questions?”)
• Invite other valued voices and mentors into the conversation to help (especially queer role models: see below).(“That’s such a good question that I’m not sure Mum or I can answer it on our own, but you know Emily who used to teach you in Sunday school? She’s someone who loves girls as well as boys and she’s really good at explaining this stuff. Would you like us to ask her this question together some time?”)

Again, you don’t need to be afraid of children asking big questions. Most kids themselves aren’t afraid of having big questions (including unanswered ones), so if this is a source of anxiety for you, it’s worth reflecting on what that uneasiness communicates to you about your own position.

Remember kids have a far higher ambiguity tolerance than we usually given them credit for! They are good at holding things in tension, especially because so much of the world still seems mysterious or paradoxical to them. Sometimes all we need to do is name that there is a tension to hold, and they can accept that. They may still have curiosity, and that’s okay! Our goal in interacting with children is never to extinguish any remaining curiosity by proffering a false sense of black-and-white clarity.

A common objection

A common objection goes along these lines:

“What about talking about the sinfulness of homosexuality? How do we do that if we frame everything in terms of love?”

First of all, why are we so quick to pivot any conversation about queer people to their sinfulness? Do we feel the need to talk about heterosexual depravity every time we go to a wedding or our kids come across a straight couple? Just as there is a time and place for conversations about adultery, divorce, domestic violence, pornography, or any of the other sins often correlated with heterosexual expression, and just as we use discernment about when to have these conversations with children, I’m suggesting we should exercise the same judgement about sharing your views on sexual ethics with children and that this conversation need not happen every time your kids interact with or speak about queer people.

Second, when the child is developmentally ready, it’s easy enough to speak about how we have differing orientations to love, and how regardless of those orientations, each of us have a capacity to misdirect that love in a twisted, even sinful direction. In fact, that’s partly what makes sexual sin so high-impact—the fact that it was meant to be a deeply intimate expression of love in the right context means that when sex is misused (whether by rape, infidelity, or self-gratification outside of the marriage covenant), it harms us and others deeply (this seems to be a key part of the Apostle Paul’s argument for sexual integrity in 1 Corinthians 6). The paradigm of understanding human sexuality as an orientation to love gives us a richer context for understanding the severity of sin.

But more than that, it counters our fixation with defining people by their sinfulness and gives us a framework for looking beyond that to their Spirit-empowered capacity for flourishing by living in alignment with the created purpose of their orientation. This dignifying way of exploring a positive calling for queer Christians is what we call a “vocation of ‘yes’” in my community (credit to Eve Tushnet for coining that now-household term!).

If queer people are capable of genuine love and not just lust, and if we can steward our orientation towards faithfully loving people of the same gender (and not necessarily in sexual ways!), then there must be good and Godly expression of our orientations. More than that, not only is such Godly expression possible, but we are morally compelled to explore that positive calling as we steward our capacity for love towards God’s glory and our flourishing.

Valuing queer mentors

One simple thing parents can do that massively takes the pressure off these conversations with their kids is to welcome the input of queer role models in their family’s lives. You don’t need to be an expert in these topics to have meaningful conversations with your kids, especially when you have people in your life who are already experts in their own experience. We can be valuable mentor figures who are especially skilled at holding the tension of faith and queerness together with integrity and resilience.

I sometimes think the opposite of queerphobia is integrating us into the rhythms of family life. Valuing our voices and our presence in your family not only teaches your kids informationally, it also models vital lessons for them relationally. Perhaps the most important lesson your kids may ever learn about queer people is the inherent dignity we deserve, a lesson internalised as they observe your own loving posture towards us in the family home.

I sometimes think the opposite of queerphobia is integrating us into the rhythms of family life.

As someone who’s been warmly welcomed to ‘be family’ with a few different families in my church, I can testify how mutually enriching this has been, not only for my own flourishing but also for the development of kids who benefit from the big brother/uncle Matt figure who’s now a fixture in their lives.

Does this mean I’m always talking about queerness to these kids? Hardly ever! There are way more important things to talk about in that stage of life–like what our favourite kind of dinosaur is, or who would live longest in a zombie apocalypse. But it does mean that when the time comes for big questions, they have a rich context for tackling those conversations and their parents have a trusted ally to draw into the conversation who’s already part of the village raising their child.

I actually believe that part of the queer ‘vocation of yes’ in my Christian worldview is that queer people (especially single and childless queer Christians) have a distinctive calling to channel our nurturing instincts towards investing in the lives of our baby brothers/sisters/siblings and spiritual children. In my anecdotal experience, queer Christians have a special heart for little people and what Jesus might call ‘the least of these,’ and we have a lot of maternal affection left to give! In my church community, same-sex attracted and queer people have consistently been massively over-represented in creche/kids church rosters, and we are typically the go-to babysitters for families in our community. Both by circumstance and by temperament, God has crafted us to beautifully complement the capacity of busy heterosexual parents. Putting a child’s best interests first looks like allowing them to flourish with all of the care, nurture, and friendship that their diverse village has to offer.

So. Let us love you by loving your children, and let your children learn to love us. Maybe they’ll even learn more from us about how to love.

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[1] I want to acknowledge that this post focuses primarily on conversations about orientation rather than gender identity or other important queer experiences. Much of this will be more relevant to gay, bi, lesbian, and SSA people than it is to, for example, trans and non-binary folk. This is not because I see those experiences as less important, but because I think they are distinct enough to warrant a separate, follow-up post which I plan to co-write with a trans Christian friend who will bring deeper insights to a very worthy topic.