"dsi1" > wrote in message
...
> On 9/7/2014 4:21 PM, Julie Bove wrote:
>>
>>
>> When I was in Jr. High, we had a teacher who may well have been ***. In
>> those days, nobody would admit to it openly, especially not a teacher.
>> He also had one glass eye. For these two things alone, he was teased
>> very badly by a lot of the male students and in those days it was
>> tolerated.
>>
>> Worse still, he drove a Fiat. It was so lightweight that every day,
>> some of the boys would pick it up and move it somewhere else. Sometimes
>> into the middle of the street. Drove the teacher nuts. But the last
>> straw came when they turned it upside down. Damage was actually done
>> then and he did take action. Not long after, the poor man had a nervous
>> breakdown.
>
> I didn't know there was such a thing as *** people when I was going to
> high school. When I got to college, my eyes were opened and I finally got
> it. It suddenly hit me that a couple of my classmates were totally flaming
> and it made sense when I was told by an authority figure to stay away from
> "that piano player." As it goes, I was totally an innocent.

I had figured it out by high school but I didn't know in Jr. High. I had a
female friend who was Italian/American. She and her brother lived with
their dad. I don't know what became of the mom. She was never mentioned
and I never thought to ask. She wore boy's clothing. I just figured that
her dad probably didn't have a lot of money and he made her wear her
brother's outgrown clothes. My parents sometimes made me wear boy's
clothing as well if they found a good deal on it. I had a cardigan sweater,
some polo shirts and judging by some old pictures, baby clothes. They
always told me that nobody could tell the difference. They can! At least
for things with buttons because for some reason the buttons are on the
opposite side for male clothing.

Well one day I rode the bus home to my friend's house. We were sitting on
the seat together. I heard someone giggle that we were lezzies because my
friend had her arm around me. She didn't. She had just stretched her arm
across the back of the seat and wasn't even touching me. But whatever it
was, I figured that it must not be a good thing because people were
laughing.

I remember trying to look it up in the dictionary but of course it wasn't
there. I did ask around and someone (can't remember who) told me that it
was a female who liked other females. How's that for vague? Well, I was a
female and I did like other females but I also disliked some. So the waters
were still muddy there. No mention of sexuality there but even if there had
been, it likely would have confused me because although I knew the clinical
definition of sex, I didn't equate that to what sex really was.

My dad had told me that to make a baby, the dad plants a seed in the mom.
And our sex ed class wasn't much better. They did give technical details of
sperm meeting egg and so forth but never described the act. So while I had
seen sex in movies and such, I still didn't equate that to the making of
babies. And like our friend Bill Clinton, oral sex (although I called that
by another term) didn't equate to sex to me either!

Thankfully they cover this subject much better now in sex ed than they did
in those days. We were told that it was something that married people do,
so many of us were baffled when girls turned up pregnant. We also had some
girls who had been raped at school functions or after school and we didn't
equate to sex either. We somehow thought that they had just been beaten up
in a not so nice way but we weren't sure what way that was. I even knew one
girl who was raped. She was older than me and worked in the office with me.
But then she disappeared when they found out she was pregnant because in
those days pregnant girls weren't allowed in the regular schools. Not here
anyway.

I did manage to figure things out by tenth grade. Perhaps sooner. I
happened upon some books that my mom had. Recently published books. And
also my dad's Playboy collection.