Sexual Orientation: Lost and Found—Storytelling, Mentorship, and Ethical Responsibility

Abstract

I have this memory from early childhood. I am about four or five and wearing only my underwear. I am running. My arms are spread out, and I am pretending to fly. Darting and whirling around the living room, I shout, “I am Peter Pan; I am Peter Pan!” My mother is standing nearby. It is time for us to go out, and she is holding up a pair of soft, light grey trousers. “Ja, you are Peter. Now, Peter, put on your pants!” Framing this memory for me are the voices of my mother, my aunt, and grandmother; their chorus in an Austrian dialect I heard throughout my youth and well into adulthood: “An Dir is weu a Bua verloren g’anga!” (In High German: “An Dir ist wohl ein Bub verloren gegangen”; in English, roughly: “With you, a boy was certainly lost.”)