[tymejumper]

Originally Posted by Ningmom

Hi again. Sorry if I end up quoting things wrong; I'm still trying to figure out the inner workings of forums (fora??) here.

Don't worry about quotes and stuff, every once in awhile I have to have one of the Moderators fix my messes! Or, I have to ask my teen to help, I don't really know wich is worst!

Originally Posted by Ningmom

To be honest, when I was in college, I was really confused about all of this. I was not an ally, at least not in the way I am now. I'd characterize my 20-year-old self at the time as "fascinated." I didn't have the repulsion that my fellow students had toward LGBT people, so maybe I was seen as "safe" by some students who did come out to me, or very nearly so. I finally decided that homosexuality wasn't a sin, but it was just a manifestation of some innate inability to fit in, an outward expression of some "differentness" that had no name, and the people who had it chose homosexuality as the vehicle to express that differentness. Yes, you can throw tomatoes at me -- go ahead.

You are about my age, I am 39 this year. We grew up in a time that homosexaul persons were considered sick and deviant and also had our own DSM code in mental health. Case in point, that is one of the main reasons that I didn't come out sooner than say, mid30s even though I knew for sure in my early 20s what the heck was going on, it was just a matter of lables, BI or Lesbian?. My father certainly did not have anything pleasant to say about gays and my mother knew jack squat, so she could not support me even if I had come out earlier than the one statement I made to her about 16 of "Maybe I'm having trouble with guys because I'm gay, Mom". No heroes or positive roll models, how were we to know that were really normal? You can hardly expect someone who is straight to know much, and see us as not deviant if us gay people were all lost also. So, no tomatoes for you!