Kids Say the Darndest Things

Editor's Note: The video referenced in this story was removed from the web on Thursday, March 11.

Micah Schraft was combing through his computer files earlier this week when he stumbled upon a video he and boyfriend John Hill shot over Thanksgiving of Calen, the young son of his cousin's close friend, wrapping his brain around the idea of two men in love. "I usually see husbands and wives, but this is the very first time I saw husbands and husbands," he says excitedly, before declaring, "So that means you love each other."

They do indeed. Together for almost a year, Micah had brought John home for the holidays to meet his family. They had been playing around with their new flip cam to capture some candid family moments at a day after Thanksgiving dinner with extended family.

In the video Calen engages them in conversation for about a minute before running off to play Ping-Pong, not giving the idea of two men in love any more thought. But the video, which the Los Angeles-based couple decided to upload on Facebook Monday, has already been seen by nearly 17,000 people and counting. FreedomToMarry.org posted the video, as have a number of other gay rights groups, seeing what Micah and John both saw -- that kids get the concept of gay relationships far better than many adults.

Micah sat down with The Advocate to talk about the "husbands and husbands" discovery that blew young Calen's mind.

The Advocate: So this was literally caught just spur-of-the-moment? You were playing with your Flip cam and he started talking about this?
Micah Schraft: I had brought John home to meet my family for the first time, so we were just filming to get reactions and stuff. I was walking by and John was in the bathroom, and I went, "What are you doing?" The door was open and he was standing there with this kid. He said, "Well, he asked me to help him wash his hands, and then he asked me who my wife was." I think kids think that adults are married [laughs]. That's just what they think. And so he sort of pulled me in to that conversation and said, "Well, I don't have a wife." And that's where the conversation started. The camera was already on.

Did you show the video to the other people who were there?
I showed it to his mom, and then we sort of just left it on the computer until a couple days ago. I needed to clear some room off my hard drive and I was looking through these old videos. We always thought it was cute, so we just sort of cut out the parts where it was just us talking ... we were just sort of laughing and thinking, Oh, my God, I can't believe this kid is talking to us like this. Then I sent it to his parents and said, "Isn't this cute?" They thought it was adorable, and we told them we were going to put it on Facebook. This was 36 hours ago, and we woke up this morning and it was like, "17,000 people have viewed this video."

When you showed it to his parents, what did they think?
They were really, really cool about it ... they just thought he was so sweet. They're very progressive, liberal people. When I first showed it to his mom, she said, "Yeah, it's really cute," and then we sort of forgot about it in the hustle and bustle of Thanksgiving. So I think she just thought it was really cute. I don't think we were the first gay people he'd ever seen by any stretch of the imagination -- I just think it was the moment he put it together.

I know you just put the video online to share a cute moment, but with 17,000 views, it's clearly reaching people. What do you hope people take away from watching the video?
I mean, honestly, we had no agenda. We thought it was cute and we thought, Wow. If a 5-year-old can figure it out, it's actually not that complicated. The whole gay marriage thing isn't really that complicated. And then, of course, he's like, "You wanna go play Ping-Pong?" It's like, he figured it out, it blew his mind, and he was over it. It didn't trip him up at all, and I can promise you he hasn't thought about it since.

We were filming a lot of Thanksgiving because we wanted to film our family. He's not really in our family, he's sort of an extension of our family, but still ... it was just something we caught by accident, and in a weird way, with the power of movies ... with documentary sort of stuff, you can capture a real moment. It's obviously not faked or planted. We're not feeding him any lines. It's authentic.