The Beginning of Pride

I’ve been a gay rights activist/straight ally since I was five years old.

by Riem Higazi

My very first experience of falling quite seriously in love happened in kindergarten in Canada and the object of my affection was a blond little boy called Perry.
Perry was EVERYTHING. He was totally into all the things I was into.
Storytime, music hour, dance class, playing ‘TV’ (where we would pretend to be characters from Sesame Street), building houses out of sand, the see-saw, the dress-up box with costumes featuring feather boas and sparkly shiny things.

Perry was a beautiful little boy and always dressed immaculately and he was sensitive too—he would immediately rush to my side if I took a tumble in the playground or give me a tickle if he thought I needed cheering up.

Two weeks after we met on that first day of kindergarten, I declared my undying love to Perry and told him he was now my boyfriend and he did not agree but did also not disagree so to me we were an official couple.
One week after that, other boys in our kindergarten class started to taunt Perry. They called him ‘sissy’ and a word which I had no idea what it was but I got the gist that it was something bad—the boys called Perry “gay”. The boys chanted, “Perry the fairy!!! Perry the fairy!!” when we were outside during recess.

I’m pretty sure the boys teasing Perry were as oblivious to what they were exactly saying as I was but they had already somehow been taught that a boy who plays pretty much exclusively with girls and doesn’t participate in the activities considered ‘boy stuff’ back in 1975, was something called ‘gay’ and gay was something that was bad.

I wasn’t exactly an extrovert but I really loved Perry and I could see that the way the boys taunted him really hurt him so I came to his defense with the only way I knew how.
I yelled at the boys, “YOU’RE gay!”
They just laughed and continued to make not just Perry’s life miserable but mine too because now I was a ‘gay-lover’ so I put Plan B into action and started to hit the boys.

This got me into a brawl that two teachers had to break up and my parents were called in to discuss my violent tendencies. My parents were perplexed because a) I had been pretty much a major softie up until that point and b) I didn’t tell them about the ‘Perry is a fairy’-business because I somehow felt it was all too horrible for me to even have ever heard as bad a word as ‘gay’.

Flash-forward to the last year of high-school and a speech arts competition in Ottawa where I was representing my Toronto suburban school. Guess who was representing another Toronto suburban school?
My ex-boyfriend Perry.

His family had moved him to another school because the teasing could not be stopped and we lost touch as we both then continued to move on to other schools.
We both went through our teens during the 80’s where two issues hung over our young heads: the threat of a nuclear war between Russia and the US and the still hardly understood but incredibly frightening AIDS. We were also bombarded with a music era of androgyny and an increasing visibility of non-straight communities. Being a total New Waver not to mention someone who was always pulling for the underdog, , I was all about gay rights as a teenager.

Perry was instantly recognisable to me as he was still gorgeous from the inside-out and after we had an initial catch-up, I made an attempt to flirt with him.
He took both my hands in his as we sat across from each other in some café and he said, “Riem. I’m gay.”
It was the first time someone had come out to me.
I looked at him and smiled and said, “So, you really were a fairy?”
We both laughed at the ridiculousness of what I just said not to mention the incredibly politically incorrect and insulting term ‘fairy’.

Perry then said, “Yeah. And you’ve been a gay rights activist since you were five years old.”