Child Molester

     Scenario (With Notes and Script):  I have just walked into a McDonald's restaurant in New York City which is rather crowded. Shortly after entering the restaurant, a boy who looks no more than fourteen or fifteen locks eyes with me and looks at me with intensity.  He is blond, but with large brown eyes.  He is sure and confident and tall and boyish, but the kind of boyish in which one sees a manliness already in the visage. He has hairy legs.  He is holding a baby girl in his arms, and this is what throws me at first. This, and the fact that I am never ready when these children  make their move.  While still looking at me in a quite confident and serious way, but without smiling and with a touch of the mesmerized stare of one who wants to be sure to convey attraction  to another, he hands the baby over to a woman.  The array of persons he is with and their ages and interactions lead me to guess that the baby is his sister, and that one of the women is his mother.  He nods confidently toward the back of the restaurant while still staring at me, then walks in the direction toward which he nodded. 

       Family: [Exeunt]

       I am flabbergasted, caught off guard as always, and bewildered - bewildered  by his beauty, and by the suddenness and boldness of his salvo against the lie that is heterosexist society and its proprieties.  In this bewildered state, and intimidated by his boldness, I still somehow manage to walk toward the back of the restaurant, where the men's bathroom is.  I see him  entering  the bathroom while nodding from a distance for me to follow.  As I am walking back toward the back of the restaurant and the bathroom he has entered, many thoughts are running through my mind, thoughts like,  "Is this happening?"  "Do I want this?"  "How could he want me?"  "Why here?"  "Why can't we be alone to talk or slowly lead up to something silently and sensually, somewhere where the heterosexual police forces in the form of nosy and envious women or of angry old men or of church-trained  dolts wouldn't  ruin, as they always do, something beautiful?"; "Why can't we live in the ancient world, before heterosexuality and pedophilia were invented?"  "I don't like bathrooms - they're not sexy or comfortable"  "What does he want?" " Is he working for the enemy forces?" "Does he want to embarrass me or beat me or make love with me?"; "Should I be prudent even if he isn't?"; "God damn it, this poor child is trapped in the prison of family", and  "Don't lose this chance!" 

     I am scared to death as I enter the bathroom, but more because of his attractiveness and from thinking that I might have misjudged his intentions than from being attacked by the family values forces.  When I enter the bathroom he is right there in the middle of the room and looks at me with a little smile which is not at all salacious or devious. Despite the fact that there are other men in the bathroom his boldness knows no limit, and he motions for me to enter the largest of the bathroom stalls with him.  We are in the stall together before the last of the other men is out of the bathroom, and I am very aware of this.  I am standing a couple of feet away from him there in the largest stall of a busy McDonald's restaurant bathroom.  He pulls down his shorts, displaying his penis in an almost impatient manner, as if to tell me that I should know what to do and that no time would be too soon to do it. 

     These children who molest adults!  These child molesters.  These children take us by surprise with their confidence and boldness and, in the original sense of the word 'molest', take us out of our preoccupations by the outrageous honesty of their actions.  My sense of being molested, of being disturbed in these situations, really comes from this, from the sudden sense of a truth being boldly and beautifully spoken, a truth that it is ridiculous to deny.  I feel cheated and ashamed.  I suddenly feel again that I have been cheated out of reality by the lies of the heterosexist regime. I feel ashamed of myself for having allowed myself to, even as an out gay man, walk some of the walk and talk some of the talk of that lie life that consists, among other things, in the invalidation of the sexual desire of children, especially when they are LGBT children, and in the invalidation and incrimination of sex which crosses the line that delimits the false concept of adulthood.

     Soliloquy:  Oh, why did you have to molest me, blond, brown-eyed boy?  Why?  I was, if not happy, at least content and comfortable walking their walk and talking their talk.  You again exposed the lie, and did it boldly and beautifully.  You made them look like pitiful cowards and desperate frauds.  And now, I am disturbed in my comfort zone . Why did you have to molest me?  You.....child molester. 

Excerpted from the play "Let's Drive A Stake Into the Heart of Heterosexist Psychology" written by Hung N. Yung.

Dedicated to the memory of Shawn Devlin.