Growing up in West Bend, one of the more conservative zones in southeast Wisconsin, I didn't really have any encounters with homosexuality as a concept until I entered high school. It wasn't that there was some institutionalized effort to portray it as something bad; we just didn't talk about it in school. Ever. Well, there was one way we talked about it - as an insult, among ourselves. If you were one of the dorky unpopular kids in the class (like me, naturally,) "fag" was one of the names you'd get called - usually by people who didn't know, or care, what it actually meant. Although people like the school guidance councilors were willing to discuss the subject if you approached them (so said a couple of my friends), we were never informed of that fact as a class - if we didn't go in and ask about it, we would have been none the wiser.

The situation didn't really change all that much in high school, at least officially. Teachers still didn't talk about it much; if gay students wanted to find help, they would have to do it on their own. What did change was the status of the students themselves. In high school there was a surprisingly large community of homosexual students - people who had never officially come out, but may as well have because everyone knew about them. Several of my friends were in this group (I still remember my initial reaction: "what? is gay? That can't be; he's too normal!") and thus, I had an inside look at their status. They suffered the same kind of backlash you might expect - the name-calling, the anonymous death threats, the parents calling them up to shout at them to stay clear of their kids - but this student-formed group made it all so much more bearable than it would have been otherwise.

What they all agreed on, of course, was that things would have been better still if they had done it sooner - in middle school, when they were still afraid even to talk about it, and didn't know about each other. Perhaps some more openness at school would have changed that.