My Gay Valentine

Lately I've been thinking about my heterosexuality. Specifically, I've been wondering if nature hardwired me to want to have sex with women, or if it was societal influences that persuaded me to lead a straight lifestyle.

Looking through a box of old things my mother saved for me from my childhood, I found a stack of all the Valentines I received in the first grade. Some of them were a little surprising.

Back then, every first-grade student had to give all the other students in the class a Valentine so no one would feel less popular than anyone else. That meant the boys had to give Valentines not just to all the girls, but to all the boys, too.

That, of course, was really, really gay. "Be mine," is not a message my friend Dave would write to me these days, but he did in 1980, and I blame it on my school's homosexual agenda.

Other cards I got from boys include one that reads "You score big with me, Valentine," featuring an illustration of a little boy holding a football. Another one with a fish on it reads "I'd sing a tuna if you'd be my Valentine." Even giving these cards to someone of the opposite sex would be gay.

Of course, I don't really believe my first-grade teacher was trying to turn me queer by forcing me to give Valentines to boys, but it got me to thinking about nature vs. nurture and my own sexual development.

By the ninth grade, my school was pushing a heterosexual agenda. A computer program called Data Match was using information from questionnaires to provide students with a list of their most compatible classmates. It only matched boys with girls and girls with boys.

Whatever society was encouraging me to be, I ended up straight, and I'm quite happy that way. But I still have to admit that I'm a strong proponent of the gay agenda. The way I see it, any time two men get together, they leave more women for me to hook up with, and I certainly approve of that.

And when two women get together, well, that's just hot. What red-blooded heterosexual man wouldn't want two women to get together? So, I can't help but see homosexuality as a win-win situation.

Paul Lundgren is a newspaper columnist and a very nice man. His e-mail address is paul [at] geekprom.com.