My Response to a Letter in "The Vancouver Sun"

Below is my response, submitted today, to a letter that appeared in The Vancouver Sun last week: 

In a recent letter to The Vancouver Sun, Johannes B. Kelder asked the question, “Does anyone really need the right to promote their sexual lifestyle to children?”  I’d like to answer that.       

The term “sexual lifestyle” is inaccurate.  Being gay isn’t just about sex.  It also includes an emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and, yes, physical connection between two human beings, who just happen to be the same gender.  And lifestyle, at least to me, implies one making the conscious choice to be gay, which is no more likely than one making the conscious choice to be straight.   

With regard to promoting anything, one person’s propaganda is another person’s information.  Growing up “different” in the 1960s and ‘70s, I needed, above all, age-appropriate information, so I knew I wasn’t the only kid like me.  But our culture wasn’t there yet, which, in my case, resulted in many wasted years of self-loathing.  As the Russian culture apparently isn’t there yet, either.  

Making gay-related information illegal only isolates all those kids who are just like I was.  It doesn’t prevent them from being gay, and it sends the general message that homosexuality is wrong, which, of course, it isn’t.