I was raised to see homosexuals as evil, sinful, deceitful people who molested children and had a secret agenda to infiltrate our homes and lives and degrade the quality of life itself and our nation's belief in God. "Fucking fags" were terrible people, possessed with demons and waiting to pervert whoever would crack first. There is one instance that stands out in my mind especially: a group of choir boys on tv, singing Christmas carols. My family took turns calling them catchy, derogatory names. I won with "Singing Sodomites." This was who I was. This was what I BELIEVED.

Then my parents got a divorce. A nasty one, where my father's hypocrisy was made painfully apparent as he was sent to jail for downloading so much child porn at work he clogged the servers, and my mom was revealed to be a judgmental, paranoid psychopath who sought to degrade and demean everyone around her except her son. She kicked me out of the house when I was 18 for sleeping with my then-fiance.

Just like any acceptance of any sub-culture, the rest was eventual. Slow, embarrassing, and awkward experiences as I gradually realized that these people didn't want to molest little kids or turn me into "one of them," they just wanted to be. Multiple encounters with multiple people helped me slowly branch the void. They were people, just like me. These "possessed, compulsively-lying pedophiles" were really just people that liked to take it up the ass, or sometimes dress a little different, or adopt an abnormally large amount of cats. But hell, who doesn't do those things?

I'm still pretty ashamed of how I was and how I thought in the past. I was so intentionally hurtful to so many people, and I didn't need to be. Growing up in a repressive, conservative household will contribute to that, but really, so much of it was just my own small-mindedness and lack of exposure to reality. It's not something I'm proud of, but it is something I've overcome and learned from, and it's no hyperbole to say that it's made me question the way I see things ever since.