[Daryn]

I am going to tackle this from a slightly different perspective. It comes from my views of how personal change is the first step to all kinds of other change. Most people and especially teens hold a lot of unexamined beliefs. I did.

While I did not grow up in the South, I did grow up in rural, red neck, stupid f**k Amerika and many decades ago. So all I ever heard was that queers were bad, immoral, etc. And mostly the concern was with gay males. Everyone I knew thought that way, pretty much. And if you wanted to insult someone a lot than throw in a homophobic pejorative.

While I did not believe in a lot of the standard local b.s. (I was against the war in Viet Nam and had my black arm band torn off the day of the Moratorium - my frosh year), I still bought into homophobia. So it's not like I needed my high school peer's approval or even my parents'. That belief was just unexamined and deep seated.

In June of 1969, Time mag ran a cover story about Homosexuality in America after the Stonewall uprising. I was finishing 9th grade. I read it. I had to look up a lot of words (sexual terms). My reaction was - those people should have rights but I don't want them around me. At that time I was had dreams of joining the SDS and blowing up banks and taking LSD. Well, I never did any of those three things. But......... here I am.

And what changed my thinking was my senior year I started hanging out with college students and grad students who were not from my home town (most of them were from very large cities). Some of them were involved in the theater. And I heard a lot of discussion where the narrowness of the locals (and that includes the next town over where this college was) was the butt of jokes. So essentially, I realized there was a different point of view than the only one I had ever been exposed to.

So the first part of any change is to change the way you think about things.

One of my mother's friends read me as queer before I was even 13. At the time, I had no concept of queer. But my behavior got a lot of attention and I did learn what was concerning them. And that's where I started learning gay was not OK.

And more years went by (and that many) I found the freedom (some people have told me courage but I've never seen it that way) to be with women. Coming to my masculine identity was a much longer and trickier journey.

There are openly queer kids in my hometown now and their parents don't disown them or kick them out.

So for the most part, I guess I'd blame the parents here. Not that teenagers cannot be cruel and mean. They can. And what is tolerated and what goes on is apparently a lot worse than what it was years ago. As a geek I got excluded from a lot of things but no one was ever too overt or in my face or anyone else's. Probably just as well as just about every teenager in the county had easy access to guns. While I don't condone kids who go ballistic, I think I can understand it as a response to bullying.