Content note: This essay contains discussions of 13-year-olds being sexualized by other 13-year-olds, albeit in a way that was ostensibly consensual.
I was in the seventh grade the first time I saw a girl kiss another girl in real life – and she had been paid to do it.
Let me back up a bit. I went to a middle school that was located a couple blocks from Bessie’s Pizza, a convenience store that also had a giant pizza oven in the back and would sell slices of the most succulent, authentically Italian pizzas I’d ever tasted at that age. Bessie’s was the prime lunchtime destination for all the “cool kids,” and the kids who wanted to be cool. We’d trek over there in small groups to buy our slices of pie alongside chocolate treats, soda and Gatorade. Bessie herself presided over us, snapping furiously in Italian if we got too raucous in her store, which we often did.