You know, thinking back to my callow youth, I don't remember anyone ever asking me to fill out a questionnaire.

I remember being attracted to a girl or two in my neighborhood when I was around twelve or thirteen. Then when I got to high school, the number of freshly nubile young women I found in my proximity had me chewing the edge of my desk a lot and contemplating future delights with a great deal of impatience. I was standard horny teenaged boy.

It was in high school that I first heard someone call another boy "queer." The boy in question was a bit on the effeminate side and aspired to be an actor. I didn't know what that epithet referred to and had to have it explained to me. The whole idea—that men might want to have sexual-type relations with other men, or women with women—struck me as "simply weird" and didn't appeal to me at all. I liked girls. Still do. I've been happily married for thirty-five years. To a lovely woman of infinite resource and sagacity. We share many interests: various kinds of music, we both write (I write prose, Barbara writes both poetry and prose), we enjoy the same kind of entertainment, and of course, the usual marital delights.

About twenty-five years ago, I had a long, frank conversation with a fellow I knew who was openly gay. Not effeminate or obviously "gay," but he made no secret of it, and he and another fellow had been "roommates" for years. I asked him about the "choice" matter. He put it this way:   

"Considering the kind of prejudice, both job-wise and social, that a gay man frequently encounters, and the attitudes that many people have about homosexuality, INCLUDING the fact that it can get you repeatedly beat up—or killed!—who in the hell in his right mind would CHOOSE to be gay?"

Think about it!

Don Firth