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I had my first “sexual” experiences as a child, somewhere around the fifth or sixth grade. These experiences involved my closest childhood friend. We would play “kidnap” at her house. I’m not entirely sure what the actual plot of the game involved; what I recollect was that one of us would play the man, the hero, and the other the woman in distress. The “man” would rescue the woman, and then we’d kiss each other, and move up and down against each other, feeling for the first time the thrill of sexual arousal. I have come to realize that this kind of childhood sexual play isn’t uncommon. Many of my friends, both men and women, engaged in similar play as a child with a friend of the same sex. There were games one never spoke of. As children, we knew there was supposed to be something secretive about this play, even something shameful. No adult had to tell us this. We just knew.

And yet there was a kind of innocence about our kissing and touching, too. Or, if not precisely innocence, at least a certain kind of naivety and unsophistication. It was simply a part of the natural landscape of childhood: an imaginative space of role playing, of pretending to be grown-up, and of discovering ourselves through play. Playing “kidnap” did not leave a lasting impression on me. It was an exercise of mutual self-discovery, of dipping our toes into new urges and secret pleasures, all explored safely with a childhood friend. We certainly didn’t take it any more seriously than our other imaginative games. If it informed my identity at all, I suppose it did so in a way that underscored the importance of play, of dramatizing different experiences not so that I could gain an insight into myself, but so that I might have a template to help me understand others and the world around me. But to see it in this light is to moralize something that isn’t in fact moral. Mostly I played these secret games with my friend purely to experience pleasure. Nothing more, and certainly nothing less.

I often wonder if cultural forces existed then as now, I would have walked away from these encounters with my playmate wondering if I was a lesbian, or at least a bisexual. It’s difficult to imagine how I might have avoided wondering these things. The language and moral codes of well-meaning adults would have certainly caused me to at least consider my identity as non-binary. (I was also incredibly tomboyish and, until puberty, entirely uninterested in girly things like combing my hair or wearing a skirt.) As it was, notions of my personal identity were left unadministered by the educational and health institutions that have come to hover around children and youth today. I developed an understanding of my sexual identity the old fashioned way, through painful social interactions, giggling self-embarrassments, plenty of missteps, and occasional moments of delight. Ah, youth.