Comix/The Birds & the Bees

[desayunoencama]

Heard back from the editor, Jennifer Camper, accepting "The Anniversary," the 6-page b&w comic Sara and I did for her follow-up queer comics anthology JUICY MOTHER 2: HOW THEY MET. Yay!

The book will be out from Soft Skull Press next Spring.

I'd like to do some more shorts with the same characters, maybe eventually have enough to pull together as a collection.

The protags are two kids: one (Thom) adopted from Asia by two gay men, the other (Jason) who lives with his biological mother and her girlfriend (with the biological father remarried and still in the picture, although not in the abovemtnioned 6-pager). Lots of potential for all sorts of comparisons of different alternative family environments. And the kids are very self-aware and irreverant... to make it more fun.

One of the other pieces I'd like to do would be "The Birds and the Bees," broken down into four 2-page segments (to maybe be able to run them in a magazine somewhere, since a 6-pager is much too long) comparing how the two dykes (one of whom was formerly married) explain sex to their son with how the gay dads explain sex to their son with how Jason's father explains sex to his son, and, of course, how the kids talk about sex amongst themselves.

So, I'm curious (and also looking for background material which might be incoprorated into a future comic):

How old were you when your parents had "the talk" with you?
(If you prefer, or in addition: how old were your kids when you had "the talk" with them?)

Which parent was it (same-sex parent or not)?

What euphemisms, if any, were used?

Any other anecdotes or memorable situations/lines from these sorts of parent-child discussions about sex you want to share?

Comments

[misia.livejournal.com]

My father's niches as an anthropologist were pre-Columbian Ohio River Valley cultures and C19th epidemiology in working-class immigrant populations in a few Midwestern cities. He never did sexology as a discipline, just taught an intro class as part of the anthropology department offerings because someone had to -- stuff like menarche/ejacularche rite of passage, menstrual taboo, marriage customs, that sort of thing. But the books, particularly the textbooks, were around, and 70s intro-level human sexuality textbooks were pretty decent all things considered.

It's funny, it didn't occur to me until much later in life that I might've taken my mom's comment as meaning that having children (me!) had ruined *her* life. At the time I knew exactly what she meant when she said it, which was essentially "have children before you're at a point in your life where that makes sense and you'll regret it because there are things (like college, establishing a career, etc) that you will want to do and if you have a child it may be impossible for you to do them the way you'd like to."