Most parents of adolescent girls have the goal of keeping their daughters safe while they grow up and explore the world. The parents' job is to protect, the daughter's job is to explore.
I’ve had many, you know, happy ending sleepovers’in my early youth — my period of exploration. I think that’s essential. Anyone who hasn’t had a gay moment is probably trying to avoid some confrontation with a reality in their life.
By the time I was a teenager, my desire to be daring and taste everything got me in trouble. Too often, I was in the company of kids my parents would call 'wild.'
Even at an early age, I rebelled against my strict upbringing. When I was 9, I built myself a 'make-out fort' in our backyard from wood, filled it with candy, and invited my blond, blue-eyed neighbor over to kiss.
Back in high school, there was something fun and dangerous about inhabiting a different personality.
I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.
Teenagers are always sneaking around in drawers where they shouldn't go and reading things they shouldn't be reading. And that's an attempt to try, I think, to penetrate, that's how I found out as a teenager what was going on, was by sneaking into drawers and reading letters that I had no business reading.
I pretty much got busted for everything, but I definitely stretched out my boundaries as a kid, as well.
If God wanted a world filled with saints, He never would have created adolescence.
