THB #254: Consuming

My 12-year-old is pretty much free to watch what he wishes.

He is not into violent movies or sex-laden films, though he gets more than enough of both in the anime he watches daily on Crunchyroll. But basically, he is still young enough to come to me or his mom with things that make him uncomfortable. (Sadly, I suspect that this will end soon and we will only hear grunts for a few years.)

One of my constant efforts is to offer him context to phrases, ideas, images, and other kinds of content that he runs into and comes from a past he has no context for… mine. The 60-minute conversation about the song YMCA, real YMCAs and YWCAs, Village People, why the group is called that, gay culture of the 70s, 80s, and forward, Allan Carr, Can’t Stop The Music, and the meaning of each of the characters in Village People is now available in syllabus form at 143 colleges and universities. (Not really, no.)

I am writing this piece without any answers. I don’t know that we really have answers yet.

But w…