In my youth a kiss was an innocent claim of affection for another. It was as unimposing as a hug or a pat on the back between friends. Of course we young men were not going around kissing each other. We would beat each other up as a display of endorsement for one another.

The young women mind you, received, tussled hair, while at the same time never imposing terms or conditions upon our kisses.

That was all they were, kisses.

Just because her wet lips devoured yours, you were not to believe that meant you’d marry, go steady, or were to have any thoughts of children and if she saw you kissing another, that was fine because you did not belong to her anyway.

She could kiss her girl friends full on the lips and suck on their necks, leave hickies and red marks where shadows grew during the day. This did not make them ‘lesbians,’ mind you. Those kiss did not deaden her desire for the touch of a man and neither did it rule out the possibility of sharing that man with her closet friends. They were innocent and as unimposing as a hug.

The habit of labeling and categorizing and joining groups or tribes, did not occur, until high school and where not so ‘all encompassing,’ until the death of adolescents and the choice was determined by traditions, few had a chance to investigate on their own, were encouraged never to question or alter, and probed and precluded thought, but the time spent under the grip of higher-scholastic-obligations.

$40,000.00-$100,000.00 was spent on four to eight years deciding if what we have come to accept as social realities was to remain in the realm of theory, fantasy, and projection, or if it was true because relationships are much to difficult to hold onto outside of the traditions laid out for us.

I was nine years old when I learned Christians had no love or understanding for Sodomy or Lesbianism. The innocent kiss of young girls among each other that grew into the recourse of holding off, marriages of convenience, pregnancies of loveless marriages, and the ambitions of vain men who only loved the idea of a woman and not the woman was the definition of everything against the teaching of the traditions of the Church, verses everyone else.

Now it is taught by Catholics that we are to accept it as always was and normal. It is the ideal form of expression and men were expected to love their fellow man with his probing rob, strictly in the anus of another. The innocent kisses of the playground have turned into the insecurities of our elders who faint under the weight of holding to the declarations of truth, long prodded over and paid in full through years of financial and scholastic endorsement.

Oh, how I yearn for the days of my youth when their was no tribe, no obligation and a kiss was an innocent as a hug.