How To Talk To Your Kid About Gay Sex

(Or anything else, really, but let's stick to gay sex.)

• First, wait until she asks.  The kid knows when the kid is ready to talk about the issue.  So don't cleverly bring up the point -- "Sweetie, see those two guys over there?  Guess what they do when they're alone?"  No, no, no.  A time will come, probably when you're watching Dr. Who or Will & Grace together, when she will say, "What?  What did he just say? What did that mean?"  Right then.  Now she wants to know.
  
• Tell her only as much as she actually asks about.  No, really, don't get into issues of position and tools and I will not go on.  My kid was, I think, five, when she first asked. I believe her first question was something on the order of, "What is a lesbian, exactly?"  (This had to do with the fact that at her charming public school kindergarten the five year old girls were calling each other lesbians at the drop of a hat -- like if one little girl held hands with another, ooo, LESBIAN!) I said, very easily, that, well, you know how mama loves daddy?  Well, some women love men and some women love women, and that some men love men.  Lesbians love women, and gay men love men.  That was all I told her then.
• When she asks for more, tell her more.  Tell her where she can get more information if she needs it.  Provide links and books and warnings.  (I tell the kid not to open any link that says over 18; I tell her why, too -- here's what might be beyond those links, here's what could happen if you do.  Don't be mysterious.  Give them the facts.  Bear in mind they'll be on their own a lot, and linked up a lot, too, when you aren't there.)
• Tell her what her friends get taught, and why.  This is where I haul out my patriarchy lectures.  Why are her friends using gay as a bad word?  Why aren't her Pentecostal friends being taught anything about sex at all?  (They can't even use the word!) Why doesn't anyone in her class know anything about birth control yet?  (Most of them aren't even really certain where babies come from, or how it happens -- or at least they weren't, until my kid led a seminar behind the oak trees one recess.)
• Wait until more questions come up, and answer those too.  Act calm, even if you're panicked inside.  The way you treat sex is the way she'll treat sex.  Everything you say she takes to heart.  

Update: Oh, wait, I forgot one really important bit: actual examples.  As when my kid said to me, how come we don't know any gay people?  And I said, well, yes, sweetie, we do. (Here I gave examples.) It's only that gay people are not really very different from straight people, so you haven't thought of them any differently. 

Then I'm afraid I taught her the term gaydar (because she asked, how, if straight people and gay people weren't very different, one could tell them apart), which cracked her up.