Furthering the slightly nostalgic theme of yesterday:

I was really lucky when I came out, save the ongoing parent issues. Six months after I came out, my best friend came out as a lesbian. A year after that, our best friend came out as gay. One more year, and another close friend was out, too. By the time we started college in the fall of 1999, 3 of my 4 closest friends had come out of the closet. I had all the support I’d ever need, and the best thing is that we’re all still as close as we ever were.

A couple years before I came out, Salt Lake City dealt with the infamous gay club issue at East High. (The story’s told quite well in the 1998 documentary Out of the Past.)

We went to a public high school in suburban Salt Lake City that, for whatever rare reason, was pretty accommodating to us gay kids.

I expected problems when I came out, but I never had a single negative thing happen. It wasn’t necessarily acceptance as much as it was apathy. Nobody cared about our sexuality, that’s all. I wish the real world were more like that. I had friends who were jocks, nerds, stoners, and every generalization in between, and it just wasn’t a big issue.

While in 1995 East High had been torn apart by the gay club controversy, my school started its own gay-straight alliance in 1998 with barely a raised eyebrow. Soon, the word got out and gay kids from across the area started transferring to the “gay high school.”

A year after I got out of high school, a friend who was still there told me the following:

During the first week of my senior year I was sitting in history when a skinny, pale sophomore boy who’d been very quite so far that year walked into class wearing a nice polo shirt… and a skirt. The pre-bell chatter stopped immediately. Dead silence. Even for this ultra-liberal school it was something of a shock.

He sat down at his desk as if nothing were different.

The usually-bitchy cheerleader-stereotype sitting next to him turned and looked him up and down rather curiously.

I held my breath, wondering how ugly this was going to get before the teacher showed up.

She started to open her mouth, and I’ll never forget the look on his face when she said, “So, did you get that at Express? I saw it there this weekend and it’s totally cute!”

And with that, pre-bell conversation geared right back up like nothing ever happened.

I have to admit, hearing about that incident totally changed the way I thought about cheerleaders.

It surprised no one that later in the year a group of 16-year-old drag queens were regularly performing during lunch hour. And they were a hell of a lot better than any “professional” queen I’ve seen since.

How can you not love a school like that?

Sometimes I really do miss my high school years.