Did you hate, fear or dislike gay people at one time?

[Whiskeytide]

149. I never "hated, feared or disliked" ...

... "the gay", but my friends and I used homophobic slurs often. I don't recall ever directing it at someone I knew or suspected was actually gay, but I may have. We were teenaged assholes, and "fag" was probably our most commonly used put down.

When I started college, I worked in a campus bookstore. A co-worker had come out to his wife late - he was mid 30s I think - and had returned to school to get his Masters. He was a pretty cool guy, and we became friends. I didn't understand homosexuality since I was straight, so I asked him a lot of questions, and we talked about it quite a bit. I learned a lot about people in general from him. Eventually - in my eyes - he stopped being "this queer guy I work with", morphed into "this guy I work with who happens to be gay", and then into just "Bill".

I think it also helped me that another co-worker was a total asshole to the guy, and verbally berated him on a daily basis. I was able to watch the cruelty and ignorance of homophobia play out right in front of me, and decided I didn't want to be like that. It wasn't an overnight transformation, not a sudden epiphany kind of thing. It took a while. But I look back on it now - 35 years ago - as an incredibly influential experience.

I didn't get interested in politics until some years later, but I credit those couple of years - and Bill - with bending me toward the progressive on LGBT issues.

Great question. Thanks for the post.