By Lisa Brown

My husband, our six-year-old son, and I were walking around the Castro District in San Francisco one early Sunday morning. Early morning because that's when the six year old wakes us up, and on our way to an all-nite diner, because that's the only thing open in the Castro that early in the morning.

The Castro has the best movie theater in the city, a cookie store, a diner where our son can sit at the counter and chat up the servers because that's what he's good at, and is walking distance from our house. It's also, of course, San Francisco's gay hub. The locals tend to be tolerant folk, open to seeing heterosexual couples and the results of their breeder inclinations strolling freely down their streets.

My husband was attempting to have the "don't talk to strangers" conversation with our son. Whenever we come across something that we don't want our kid to do, like sticking his finger in a socket or playing in traffic, we say: "looks dangerous," in a non-alarming way. After all, we wouldn't want to frighten our darling boy into submission, right? When it's either something we want to encourage or something fairly innocuous, we say: "Looks like fun." This morning, we were hoping to lend a nonchalant, "looks dangerous," tone to child abduction.

Husband: "Suppose someone who you don't know asks you to get in his car. What would you do?"

Kid (pausing only a brief moment): "What kind of car?"

So, we were walking. My son had his eyes to the ground, trolling for words. Now that he is in full I-can-read mode, he tends to look for any textual materials he can find, and since he himself is fairly near the ground, that's where he tends to focus. Usually it's club flyers. "Hot," "Free," "Boy," and Toy" are all good words to sound out. That day, however, he found a photograph of one man giving another man head.

It wasn't as explicit as one might have thought, but there was no denying what was going on. When attempting to tell this story, my husband holds two fingers up as if they were little legs, sitting, and then places the index finger of his other hand between them and says, "like this. Naked."

Our son picked up the photo and gazed at it for a long time, while my husband and I exchanged a look. The look said this: "So... how do we present this particular lesson? Up until now, our kid has exhibited no curiosity of any kind about straight sex, let alone gay sex. He makes, as far as we can tell, no distinction between our friends in hetero or in queer relationships. He's miles away from figuring out how babies are made. He thinks it's merely cruel that my husband and I get to share a queen bed and he is stranded in his little twin all by his lonely self. After all, there's nothing that we do in bed that he feels that he shouldn't participate in as well. Do we really want to open this can of worms? We're not ready."

In my head, I was girding my loins for a Talk. Which would go something like the following:

"When two people LOVE each other..." (No... bad. What if he goes after a little love interest on the kindergarten playground?)

"When two GROWNUPs love each other..." (OK, better, but now what?)

"When you are a GROWNUP, and in LOVE, you might take off your CLOTHES and..." (No one wants to hear their mother say anything anywhere close to that. I don't care how progressive you all are.)

Time passed. Our son sighed, threw the photograph back on the ground and said, "Looks like fun."

Seems as though we need to teach him a little lesson about littering.

–Lisa Brown is the bestselling illustrator and/or author of a growing number of books, including How to Be, The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming, and Baby Mix Me a Drink, the first in her popular "Baby Be of Use" series. She had two new books in 2010: Picture the Dead, an illustrated YA Civil War ghost story written with author Adele Griffin, was released in May by Sourcebooks, and her children's book, Vampire Boy's Good Night, was released by HarperCollins in July. She draws the Three Panel Book Review cartoon for the book section of the San Francisco Chronicle. Lisa lives in San Francisco with her son and her husband, who is rumored to be Lemony Snicket.

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