"But Tomoyo can't be gay! That's sick! She's only 10!"

(Or 9, or 11, or whichever of the other elementary-school-age ranges fans arbitrarily set the characters at. It doesn't really matter for the purposes of this article.)

This is the line I've heard time and time again from fans on message boards, newsgroups, mailing lists and what-have-you as their primary opposition to the idea of a Tomoyo/Sakura relationship. And it's yet another example of the trap that people fall into when talking about sexuality and sexual orientation - that it's to do with sex in the physical sense. The primal act, the beast with two backs, etc. etc. (Discounting the fact that sex does not have to be a "primal act" at all but is often a natural and loving expression of one's feelings towards another, but that's a rant for another article. ^-~) This is, of course, contradicted by the fact that if knowing you "are" a certain sexual orientation means you're automatically thinking about sex, then knowing you're attracted to people of the opposite gender must mean you're thinking about sex too. So presumably, anyone who condemns Sakura and Tomoyo but not Sakura and Syaoran is of the opinion that homosexuality is somehow "different" - that it's learnt rather than innate, and that we're all born straight until something or someone comes along and corrupts us. It's "cute" for little boys and little girls to kiss each other at weddings or whatever. Nobody says "they can't do that, they're only 5!" When it's a boy and a girl, it's seen as natural, harmless, completely non-sexual - which it is. Only some kind of Freudian extremist would read anything of a sexual nature into such an innocent act. But when it's two girls or two boys, suddenly it becomes unnatural, and it's automatically a sexual thing. Why? Because heterosexuality is the "default". It's what we all are, it's what we're all born as, and it's perfectly normal to express that at whatever age. Only it isn't the "default setting" that we're all born with. Children are not made homosexual, they are born that way. I'm not going to cite any scientific studies or lengthy theses on this, because I don't have to; I have first-hand experience.

I've felt this way for as long as I can remember, though not having any role-models of behaviour to compare my feelings to, I didn't understand them, and when I did understand them my conscious mind wouldn't allow me to accept them. I always saw it as "a phase I was going through", something that would go away in its own time, or tried to dismiss it as something else. But now that I'm aware of it, I can look back on some of my earliest memories and realise that this was what I was feeling, long before I even knew that there was such a thing as sexuality, and certainly long before I was having thoughts of a sexual nature. I was just hardwired to find girls attractive. Pure and simple.

I had my first crush at the age of 7. If CLAMP, or some other company, portrayed a 7-year-old character as having a crush on someone of the same gender, would there be a public outcry? Or just more denial?