When people talked about protecting their privacy when I was growing up, they were talking about protecting it from the government. They talked about unreasonable searches and seizures, about keeping the government out of their bedrooms.

Mariah and Whitney Houston were my goddesses growing up.

We definitely weren't poor growing up, but we weren't rich.

We're so preoccupied with protecting children from disappointment and discomfort that we're inadvertently excusing them from growing up.

I felt like the luckiest kid in the world. And I was. I was growing up middle-class in a time when growing up middle-class in America meant there would be jobs for my parents, good schools for me to prepare myself for a career, and, if I worked hard and played by the rules, a chance for me to do anything I wanted.

Growing up, one of my cousins was an out gay man.