Growing Up with Misconceptions

As I've talked about many times before, I was born and raised in a small community. This means that certain ideologies are not only misunderstood but even hated by the vast majority in this area.

This includes those of the LGBTQ ideology. How do we learn about these things? From our parents, of course.

My dad was a very hateful person. Any phobia you can imagine, he had it. This was especially the case for any one not white or straight. He would even point out every celebrity who was LGBTQ or those he thought belonged to the community just to openly mock and hate them.

The rhetoric got worse whenever I'd watch the Wimbledon tennis tournament and the talking heads would be Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova. I'd be watching and thinking about how smart and nice they both seemed. Then, my dad would walk in and call them every homophobic slur under the sun.

He'd try to explain to me why they were wrong or evil for what they did. I could never wrap my head around his thinking. If they were such terrible people then why were they on TV? Why were the other hosts laughing and joking with them? Why give them a platform? This was long before MAGA when I learned that money rules all but that's a different matter entirely.

He'd also constantly badmouth Melissa Etheridge whenever one of her songs would play either on TV or the radio. His biggest issue with her: she's gay. I was never really a fan of her music but her being gay wasn't really an issue with me.

As more members of the community would appear on TV, I listened to my dad less and less and just judged people by their actions than their identity. I was a registered Republican and yet I was socially very liberal. You can imagine how well that went over with people.

Another cause for massive misinformation was the schoolyard. In the 90s, being gay was still taboo. The idea of being gay lead to lots of misinformation between my classmates and I.

Growing up, we actually thought that people were turned gay after they were molested by an adult before eventually dying of AIDS. To say that our small community was naive would be an understatement.

That's why I've run to bigger cities and different cultures as much as possible: knowledge is true power. People who look down upon different cultures or bigger cities usually have no idea what they're talking about. Anytime you ask if they've ever been around someone of a different community or been to a big city to see how things are for themselves, their answer has usually been "no, and I never will either."

So they've basically admitted that they're willfully ignorant.

Things change. The world changes. People change. You can either embrace it or get left behind. People who talk about missing the "good old days" are usually referring to a time when women were expected to be barefoot and pregnant in a kitchen all day, the LGBTQ community were all considered mentally ill, and the Civil Rights Movement was considered "trouble ahead."

I'm so glad that things have progressed from those terrible times for lots of us.

Obviously though, we still have a long way to go.