How I Was Recruited.........

Heteronormative: A pervasive and institutionalized ideological system that naturalizes heterosexuality as universal; it must continually reproduce itself to maintain hegemony over other non-normative sexualities and ways of identity construction.

My Mother didn't warn me, but maybe because she was in on it. My father didn't either, I would hate to think it may have been a conspiracy. I just wish they had warned me, I wish anybody or somebody had warned me. I wish I had known I was being recruited into a heterosexual lifestyle.

Because I was a young child in the 60's, my recruitment first began while watching television. The propaganda they used was appealing. The agenda was hidden deep in our entertainment with names like Leave It To Beaver, Father Knows Best and I Love Lucy and even the Munsters. At 6, you don't know that watching these shows led you into believing that the only choice was to marry a man and have children.

The agenda was also layered deep within the books we read, from Dick and Jane, The Borrowers, Stuart Little and Little House on the Prairie. Always filled with happy Moms and Dads and children. Nothing wrong with that at all, but there was nothing in them about a girl like me. They told me that was the only way it was.

The nice thing with books as I got older, was that nobody cared what I read, just as long as I read, so sometimes I could pick up something like The Children's Hour, by Lillian Helman, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde or Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin. I was moved by these books, something would stir in me, questions would form, almost asking if there wasn't maybe another way it was. Then my mom would take me to a movie like Goodbye Mr. Chips or we would stay in and watch Love American Style together and I would forget the thoughts and feelings I had while reading those books. I could see for myself that was the only way it was.

In church, any sermon on the family only included a husband, a wife and children. In those days, that was really the only way it was discussed. Never even a sermon about adopted children, or single mothers or fathers. Always, a husband, a wife and children. I knew that was the only way it was.

In my later teenage years, my dad, always rather astute, would ask me often about possible boyfriends. It always worried him when I would say I didn't have one. He would say, don't worry someday you will find a nice boy and settle down. It didn't seem to matter that I didn't want to find a nice boy and settle down, but by then even I repeated this lie.

When I moved out of my father's home and went to college, I started to experiment with the heterosexual lifestyle. I found out that if a boy took me out to dinner, I was expected to have sex with him. If I didn't he would pout all the way home and wouldn't call back for a second date. No one had informed me that in the heterosexual community, sex was worth was a 5.00 meal. Some of the boys even expected you to sleep with them without dinner first. They would drive to a secluded spot in the country and just expect to charm your panties off with one kiss. They told me that was the way it was.

While at first none of the boys proposed anything like marriage, a number of them requested anal sex, and all of them wished to engage in oral sex, or rather have me preform it on them. In college I finally got a couple of proposals of marriage. I had learned to play the game and put out, I wanted a second date damn it! I got some second and third dates. I never could bring myself to say yes. I guess I needed a romantic story to go with it first.

Well, as you know, I finally said yes. But it wasn't at all like the way it was supposed to be. It never could be, I found out that as programmed as I was, you can't really recruit somebody into something they don't already belong to........