Gray Posted July 25, 2016 Posted July 25, 2016 (edited) About 12 years ago, when I was a recent college graduate still looking for a real job, I landed a night job working at a warehouse. It was grueling work and the pay sucked, but it was the best I could do under the circumstances. I remember my trainer, trying to be my buddy, showed me a NSFW image on his phone. Not wanting to get involved in that sort of thing, I said, "I'm not really into that." I thought the matter was over. Little did I know he had interpreted that to mean I was gay. It soon spread around the warehouse that the new guy was gay. Everyone gave me the cold shoulder, and I mean everyone. I sat alone at lunch (lunch was sometime in the wee hours of the morning), I had no friends. One of the managers even found me and not so subtly grilled me about my personal life. He seemed relieved when I told him about my wife. By this time I had caught on that people had been thinking I was gay. In retrospect it was a great teaching moment for me. Having grown up in the church and having gone to a rural high school, I was probably carrying typical levels of homophobia. Nothing nasty, but an almost unconscious prejudice. Certainly I had never grown up hearing even one positive thing about gay people. The experience at the warehouse shook me up and made me reevaluate my assumptions. By the time Prop 8 put the issue front and center for me, my reaction was driven by empathy rather than prejudice. ETA: the situation was stressful and upsetting. I was an instant social pariah based on what people thought my sexual orientation was. I might even have been fired if my manager hadn't discovered that I was actually straight. I got just a very small taste of what actually gay people go through all the time, and it wasn't fun. Edited July 25, 2016 by Gray 1
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