I don’t think I was ever homophobic, although with sports teams growing up, and then the Marines later on, there was a lot of homophobia in those groups. When I got to know some gay people that’s when I more overtly accepted that, hey, they are people just like me and we’re all trying to make our way in the world, trying to establish careers, find a mate to settle down with, just like most folks are. Someone upthread said it was the process of growing up, and I think that fits. I’m grateful to live where different types of peoples live nearby. We’re not all the same. That way I get exposed to different peoples and their values, and I believe we’re all the better for it.
When we were kids, I can remember my cousins and I calling each other queer when we played/fought. I know we had no idea what it meant. It was just a word we heard and parroted.
I think I was 14 when my mom became good friends with a couple of men who lived as a married couple and I liked them both, so this sat in my head and jostled around with all the other stuff. Around this same time, I experienced a little bit of sex play with a girl and I didn’t hate it, but still knew I liked boys better.
So, while I don’t think I ever felt any animosity towards gay people, I know I felt some confusion about it all. Much to my embarrassment, I can remember wondering if AIDS was a message from god. Growing up with the Bible being read to us every night, made life a little hard to figure out sometimes.
In my sophomore year of high school we had to do presentations on Euthanasia, AIDS and a few other topics worthy of discussion. This was before December 1st was designated as World Aids Day in 1988.
I wasn’t aware of knowing anybody who was gay, so it seemed like something which was only relevant for New York City and San Francisco.
The following year my friend’s younger sister came out to her family, and I found out when her sister was at my house and wanted to watch the news to see if she could pick out her sister in the demonstration earlier that day.
Didn’t have much of an opinion, and basically never made much of a fuss.
My friend now has a younger brother. Because of him, and because I’ve known him since he was in kindergarten, I’ve probably been a lot more accepting of transgender people and become more outspoken about supporting the rights of the LGBTQ community.
I don’t think there was a single incident for me.
Growing up, there was a friend of the family who was very obviously gay so I always knew it was just something that some people are, and they do not mean harm to anyone and they don’t try to convert straight men or any other such nonsense.
OTOH, back then it was normal for boys to call each other gay as an insult, and describe bad things as “gay” etc.
And, as I’ve admitted to on the Dope before, I was very immature as a teen even by the standards of normal teenagers. So I would have said such jokes, ironically believing it made me seem more adult.
As I grew up, I gradually realized the immaturity of this and other behaviours. By the time I graduated Uni I had several gay friends and wouldn’t dream of using it as an insult. However, I remained weird at talking to girls and probably didn’t have any lesbian friends until maybe a decade later.
My mom was a “Free to Be You and Me”-style hippie. I think she’s still a little bit homophobic, but she also recognized that she shouldn’t be, and made a conscious effort not to pass that down to my sister and I. My father, meanwhile, was absolutely 100% homophobic, as a result of his own repressed homo- or bisexuality, but so far as I can tell, I’m completely straight, so that didn’t have any traction with me (plus, my parents separated when I was very young, and it was Mom who raised us). So I don’t think I ever thought being gay was wrong.
I think it was when Jon Stewart said “Why not let them get married? Let them go through the same marital anxiety and heartbreak heterosexual couples experience.” Maybe up until then I had envisioned them as lawbreakers who wanted to shock the system, but then somehow they became regular people with regular problems.
This sentence pretty much encapsulates my exact feelings on the matter. When I was a kid I had this innate sense that homosexuality was “wrong” somehow. I remember when Prop 8 was floating around here in CA, and my mom said a line that stuck out to me at the time - “why can’t they just leave them alone?” - and yet until that moment I was vaguely pro 8 without actually thinking about it (not that I was really pro or anti anything, I was a dumb kid who wasn’t actually paying attention to politics yet, and I certainly couldn’t vote yet - thank God).
Two things changed my mind. First, posting here. I never posted about my bigoted views here (I think I was self aware enough to realize they were offensive, at least) but watching others have their anti-gay arguments demolished again and again, I first realized I needed to spend some time thinking about it rather than defaulting to my brain’s baseline “eww, they’re doing something I don’t do, icky” response.
Second, I went to college and actually interacted with some gay people in person.
So I guess it was a one-two punch of having my ideas challenged here, then going into the world and seeing that the side I thought was overly sanctimonious and self-righteous was actually completely right, while the side that was comfortable and familiar was completely full of shit.
When my best friend came out to me when we were thirteen. I sometimes acted as his girlfriend at high school events.
He moved to the Castro when we were 19 (that would have been 1975), and used to take me barhopping there, back when it was a nexus of extreme and flamboyant behavior. So I kind of got an immersion experience.
It wasn’t so much “okay to be gay” since I didn’t have two thoughts about it previously (being female, it wasn’t an identity issue the way it is for boys in this country), as it was “wow, here’s something completely different!”
This thread isn’t a debate, it’s pretty clearly a thread about people’s opinions on the subject matter (and it’s a really good thread so far, actually) so it would be better suited to IMHO. I’ll move it now.
RickJay
Moderator
Homosexuality wasn’t discussed in my family much, but the message I got was that it was wrong. Gay men “turned” straight men. Gay men preyed on boys.
I was 10 years old when California’s Proposition 6 tried to prohibit gays and lesbians from working in the public schools. Knowing next to nothing about gay people, I supported this, thinking “better safe than sorry.”
By the first years of high school, it became clear to me that homophobia had no logical response to the doctrine of “consenting adults.” My school had a lot to do with changing my mind. One year, they even invited an out gay man and an out lesbian to speak to a class (not mine) and answer students’ questions. This was in the early '80s. I didn’t even see the presentation, and it left an impression on me.
Now just speaking as a poster,
I think one’s answer to this will often be proportional to one’s age. I’m 49, and there was never really a moment when I was like “oh, I guess that’s okay.” I’m not going to lie and say I was a perfect social justice warrior when I was a teenager; we were casually tossing around homophobic slurs as teenaged boys do, but the idea that gay people were bad wasn’t really a thing in my mind. That sort of thing was already going away and considered backwards and rednecky. TV shows and movies were showing homophobia as being a bad thing.
Of course I wasn’t from a religious family, so that might help.
Anita Bryant’s anti gay campaign was well underway when I came of age and her rhetoric was a huge turn off we all hated her. No one was openly gay that I knew in HS, later on working at Ma Bell in Miami I became fast friends with some co-workers who were gay.
I was from a religious family - well, sort of. My mother and her whole side of the family were devout Lutherans (my maternal grandfather was a pastor). My father was a sort of “soft” atheist - he didn’t have any religious beliefs, but also didn’t really discuss the matter, and just basically got out of the way as my mother tried to raise my sister and I as Lutherans. (It didn’t take, but that’s a bit beside the point).
The point I’m trying to get around to making is that the religious elements of my upbringing and the religious half of my family weren’t at all homophobic. When I got to be old enough to maybe start dating, my mother made it very clear I was expected to introduce whoever I dated to my parents, but was equally clear that she didn’t care whether that was a boy or a girl (or white or black or Jew or gentile or…). To the extent that homophobia even came up, it was pretty clear that my mother and her side of the family considered it un-Christian. There was some “that’s the way God made them” and some “a good Christian tries to live a Christ-like life, they don’t try to tell others how to live theirs.”
On the other hand, I’ve known a couple fairly militant atheists who were also among the most homophobic people I’ve ever known. I think those actually went together. Not the atheism per se, but the militancy, where they insisted everyone else had to have the same beliefs, or lack thereof, as they did, and likewise, they were straight, so everyone else should be as well.
That was my background, too, I was just simplifying. My family was officially Catholic, and I was sent to Catholic schools (which in Ontario are public schools; we literally have two totally separate, government run schools systems, one Catholic and one secular.) But we didn’t go to church, didn’t really care about that stuff. My parents just sent me to Catholic school basically out of habit. Catholic schools at the time taught a very vanilla version of Christianity. At no point were were ever told gay people - or any outgroup - were bad. Indeed, we took tours of other denomination’s churches and synagogues to learn about them. It was basically just an hour’s instruction a week I was bored by.
I agree that age matters. I’m 49, and gay (and completely out, and married to another gay guy, etc.). I’d say I think it’s 90–95% okay to be gay: internalized homophobia is a thing. I never called anyone or anything “queer” or “gay,” and I was never around any anti-gay bigotry, but the culture’s passive anti-gay bigotry is enormous. Representation matters, and there were almost no gay characters in mainstream media (books or film or TV) until the 1990s. Some exceptions, yes, especially if you count the coded ones, but I was a dumb suburban kid and couldn’t break those codes.
For myself, I remember being in college (so aged 20 or 21) and a friend came out. I had other gay friends, but all flamboyant or a bit camp. This one was “normal,” and I hadn’t really considered the possibility that you could be “normal” as well as gay. How sad is that? But it was the kick I needed to accept that I was gay, and I came out myself soon after.
I’m 56, so I was growing up in the 1970s and early 1980s. As others have already noted, in that era, the idea that homosexuality was wrong/immoral/deviant was very common, and looking back, I’m sure that I felt that way, simply because that was the the overwhelming opinion of society, and those around me.
What changed my mind?
First, when I was an adolescent, there were several points in time where I felt attracted to males. At that time, the fact that I had those feelings alarmed and frightened me, and I tried very hard to tamp them down, and not dwell on them. Once I reached my 20s and 30s, I was finally able to start to come to terms with the fact that I did have those feelings.
But, probably more importantly, I discovered that there were people whom I knew and cared about, who were gay. The guy who was my college roommate during our sophomore year – and with whom I’m still close friends – came out when we were seniors. A few years later, when I started working, I got to know a Lutheran pastor (the pastor at the church which sponsored the day school where my then-girlfriend taught) who was a gay man (though, due to the rules that the church had, he had to be closeted, at least in public).
And, a few years after that, my college girlfriend came out to me. When she had broken off our relationship, after two years, the ostensible reason was that she was planning to go to medical school, and wouldn’t be able to focus on a relationship for many years; the underlying reason, which she was just starting to realize at that time, was that she was bisexual, but more attracted to women.
Through all of that, I started to get it through my thick skull that sexual orientation wasn’t a “choice,” and that being gay or lesbian doesn’t make you weird or deviant.
Over the past few years, the children of several friends of mine have come out as gay and transgender while they were in high school or college. I know that, though society has changed a lot since I was that age, and is more accepting of non-straight, non-cis kids, it’s still an enormous struggle for them. But, I also think about the notion that, if I were a teenager today, with the feelings that I was dealing with, I might have been willing to acknowledge that, yeah, I’m bisexual (and, likely, not strictly cisgender, too).
My mother was more than “officially” Lutheran. She, and most of my relatives on that side of the family, were devout, observant Lutherans. Church every Sunday, church socials*, inviting the pastor over for dinner, bible study as a casual pastime, etc. She really tried her best to raise me and my sister as observant Lutherans. She was upset when I stopped going to church, and it was mildly traumatic for both of us when I finally told her I wasn’t a Christian and didn’t believe in any sort of god (she told me she thought that meant she had failed as a mother). Lutheranism was a lot more than just going through the motions for her and most of my relatives on that side of the family.
Even with all of that, though, I didn’t get any homophobia from that side of the family. My atheist father wasn’t exactly homophobic, he didn’t make crude jokes, and in the abstract he had no problems with homosexuals or homosexuality. But on a personal level, he was clearly uncomfortable interacting with gay men, while the men on my mother’s side of the family, the devout Lutherans, didn’t seem to care.
Point being, I don’t think coming from a religious family or not necessarily makes any sort of difference.
*If you remember Dana Carvey’s “Church Lady” character from Saturday Night Live, my mom’s side of the family swore that character was supposed to be Lutheran, that every church had at least one “Church Lady”, and it was only a very mild exaggeration of reality.
Homophobia was deeply ingrained in me as a child, and I’m not even sure where it came from. I don’t remember anything much, except one time when my father called the single woman who lived in a house across the street and who “walked like a man” a “Lizzie” which I thought was wrong because her name was Helen. I think I must have absorbed most of it from the prevailing culture (1950’s), even though as far as I remember it was never talked about.
When at the age of 7 I realized I was one of those people, my diffuse and unconscious homophobia became intense and internalized, along with a deep sense of shame. It was a very long and uncertain process to get over it to the extent that I have. I am nearly 72 and I still am uncomfortable coming out to each new acquaintance – that’s pretty much what it is, coming out over and over again, correcting people on the phone when they refer to my “wife” and so on. Well, that’s the world I’m in so I deal with it, but I’m not over it.
The question of what turned me around was just meeting lots of LGBTQ people over the years and realizing that they are just people like everyone else, with exactly the same range of personalities and problems and happiness.
Well said, and better expressed than my attempt above. 
Thanks.
I forgot to mention high school. There were a couple of guys in my class year who were a little suspect due to perhaps a slight flamboyance or some aura or something. In senior year one of them, I think, tried to make an opportunity to explore something with me, but I made the choice to not let that go forward, and he dropped it. I was worried that someone even thought I might be interested. I was obsessively careful about not doing anything suspicious, to the extent of having a girl friend in senior year (poor girl, I never so much as kissed her). Internalized homophobia is a harsh master.