[eyerolling]

[palominocorn]

I grew up in the sort of family where "we should round up all the queer people and kill them", followed by a very lengthy and detailed description of how, exactly, this should be done, was totally noncontroversial dinner conversation. So, you know. I grew up more than a little bigoted. And growing up in 90's Eastern Europe and then 00's Upper Class America... I knew zero openly queer people.

My first exposure to queerness was when some of my friends made a queer couple for our big tangled roleplay web. I couldn't very well just ignore these characters, so I had mine interact with them, and I put their sims into the little RP neighborhood and dutifully played them, and eventually I was like "okay, they're cute and nice and stuff, they're nothing like what my parents say queer people are like"... and I slowly started unlearning all the crap my parents and society in general taught me.

But I guess the fact that I wasn't morally pure from birth and didn't have access to actual queer people makes me horrendously problematic or whatnot.

Comments

[stardust_rifle]

This reminds me of my cousin.

Like, I'm the lucky one. I got to grow up with liberal parents who had gay friends and wasn't marinated in the toxic Christian stew of homophobia that she was from a very young age.

Her figuring out that I was bi was probably the battering ram that broke down the walls of her homophobia, but it wouldn'tve happened without the slashfic that she'd read dutifully chipping away at the wall, yaknow?

[palominocorn]

Yeah. It seems like this is extremely common with those of us who didn't grow up in Super Progressive Queer Friendly Utopias with Tons of Access to Real Life Queers. (I did later find out that a couple of my teachers were queer, but being openly so, in 2003, in front your class of middle school kids of rich parents? You'd get fired and never get another teaching job again.)