*sniff*

You may have seen this already, but it was new to me. It's a video in which which a high school student comes out to her entire school at an assembly.

I went to high school more than 20 years ago now, and I can't imagine something like this happening at my school when I was a teenager. I had a couple of gay friends, but they were only out to their friends and we all knew it was important to keep their secret.

I've since learned that quite a few more people I knew in school were gay, and I've even become friends via Facebook with one classmate who is a transwoman, who hid her identity very well in school. Most of these people were closeted in high school because they didn't have much of a choice. It would have been unthinkable for one of them to do what this young woman did, in the late 1980s in the Bible belt.

I know we have a long way to go, but wow -- we've really come a long way. :-)