You may have seen the "It Gets Better" campaign. It's an initiative by sex advice columnist and gay rights activist Dan Savage. The idea is to tell gay (and bi, trans, etc.) youths that their school experiences are not necessarily an indication of how the rest of their lives will go. That's especially true for gay kids in small towns, red states, or conservative families. Certainly, when I look back at the on-average one student in every class who wasn't straight, I can't imagine what they went through. The shift from that experience to a modern gay neighborhood in a big city would have to be a huge positive change in one's life.
When I think about that, I find myself thinking, I wish I was gay. Can you imagine what that would be like: you become an adult and don't just move out of your parents' place, you move to a place where suddenly everyone understands you and accepts you?
We should all have our own gay community. You suffer through high school, but then you get to move to the jock neighborhood, or the goth neighborhood, or geek town. There, you're surrounded by people who accept you and appreciate you for who you really are, even more than your closest friends and family did. Of course, for those of us who grew up in the pre-internet era, modern life is kind of like that. Online, you can find that personal community. So if you're over forty, you have something in common with the homosexual community.
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