Already in our culture, men who work with young children are looked at with suspicion. Gay men perhaps doubly so. Anita Bryant’s 1978 campaign to ban LGBT people from teaching is not yet ancient history.

So I played the little girl’s question off with a joke, something like, “Why? Are you proposing to me? I’m a little old for you!”

The other kids laughed; the girl blushed and laughed, and I moved on to the next question about my favorite video game. That became my go-to deflection every time, and as the laughter subsided, I’d always be on to answering how I got the idea for one character or another, or how I handle “writer’s block,” and I’d hear no more about my marital status and the kids would quickly forget that I hadn’t actually answered that question at all.

My dodge always worked, but I dreaded being asked every time and I always regretted dodging the question afterward. My boyfriend and I might as well have been married. We’d lived together for years, shared furniture and a dog — I even showed kids pictures of the dog in my PowerPoint! — and we had big plans for our future. We would get married once the law allowed us to.

It wasn’t that complicated and a 10-year-old could certainly have understood it, but still I made it a joke and I moved on. Did I really want to "come out" in front of hundreds of fifth-graders? I did not. At every elementary and every middle school, in every presentation, for three to four presentations a day, I deflected — in a way I hadn’t since I was in high school — and stayed in the closet.

I told myself this wasn’t really a return to the closet. I was just keeping my gay identity and my work completely separate, as if being a novelist were like being an electrician. Who cares if your electrician brings his full and honest self to the rewiring of a breaker box?

But being a novelist isn’t the same.

In my books I carry my young readers through huge ranges of experience and emotion, adventure and danger, hope and loss, fear and bravery, giggles and tears. When I talk in schools about my process, I share the real-life inspiration behind the ideas in my books and I talk about honesty and clarity in storytelling. Yet I always kept this one thing walled off. It was my right to do so — writers do not owe their readers personal revelations — but still, it felt dishonest.

And then, shortly after same-sex marriage became legal around the country and my boyfriend became my husband, I was at an elementary school in New Jersey. The question came up:

“Are you married?”

I was wearing my wedding ring. I’d been married for a month. I was really excited about it. So I said, “Yes, I am.”

“What does your wife do for a job?” the girl asked.

“Well, I have a husband, not a wife, and he’s a teacher.”

One or two of the boys looked at each other puzzled and then not puzzled. A girl giggled and another girl elbowed her in the side.

And that was it. I’d just come out to a room full of kids and they didn’t really care. The next question was about whether I would ever write another military action book (I’d written six by then; they came with dog tags). I said I would and the boy who'd asked high-fived the boy next to him because they really liked my military action books.

After the talk, I signed books. Everyone was really excited to get a book signed by a “real author.” Kids wanted to know what breed my dog was and which football team I liked. Some of the boys told me I should be ashamed of myself...for liking the New York Jets. They weren't wrong.

From that day on, I always answered The Question when it was asked. Once in a while, a teacher would look up from grading papers in the back of the room with a quizzical expression, but that was the extent of it. In middle schools, there would be a louder gasp or two from the students, or a whispered “What’d he say?” from neighbor to neighbor. Sometimes, in those audiences, eyes would light up, tiny smiles creeping at the edges of a 13-year-old’s mouth. A nearly invisible nod. Sometimes my solutions to writer's block got bigger reactions.

Month after month, year after year, I kept telling them about my husband. I didn’t have an agenda. I was just answering their questions honestly as they came up, the same way I answered their other questions about plot ideas or thinking of book titles or how to get published.

In many cases, I was the first “out” adult these kids had ever met. In Norman, Oklahoma, a little boy waited until after the presentation to talk to me. With nervous glances at the other kids still standing around us, he told me that he was gay and that he was happy to see how confident I was, how it made him feel like he could be confident. “Like I could have a good future too,” he said.

After a school talk in Connecticut, I got a note from a seventh-grade girl who told me she’d come out a few weeks before my visit, and kids who hadn’t spoken to her since then were talking to her again. “It wasn’t that you inspired me,” she explained. “It was that you inspired my straight friends to see me as more than just a queer kid.”

In Charleston, South Carolina, a sixth-grade boy got two books signed, one for himself and one for his friend who’d just told him he was gay. He thought his friend would think it was cool that he’d gotten his book signed by a famous author, who was just like him.

“Except for being a Jets fan," he added.

Every one of these kids was braver than I had been when I was their age and their revelations did not come without risk within their communities, within their own families. While I was never chased from a school after "coming out" during a Q&A, I have gotten letters from parents and seen book reviews online, enraged that I would foist "my agenda" into children's books, angered that I would presume to introduce children to such a “controversial” subject.