In a week where headlines announcing two more gay bashings glided across my computer screen, along with the murder-by-bullying suicide of an 11 Year Old Boy who couldn’t take the fag baiting he was getting at school anymore, this headline somehow managed to grab my attention…

Young and Gay in the Bible Belt: ‘My Mom Came at Me With a Butcher Knife!’

After asking the conversation-opener of the group — "So, would you like to all share your coming out stories with me?" — a young woman on my right named Angie* immediately burst out, "My mother came at me with a butcher knife!"

Stunned, I was trying to process this when a young woman to my left whispered, "You don’t want to hear my story, it’s too violent." More violent than your mother attacking you with a butcher knife? How is that possible? What does that mean?

Maybe you don’t want to know.  The author of this AlterNet post, Bernadette C. Barton, has done these Gay/Straight alliance visits previously, as she says, "…during my campus visits".  Apparently this was the first time she’d done that in the God fearing Jesus loving South.  Never mind the stories you heard that day Ms Barton…all the stories you didn’t hear are staring you in the face right here:

Meanwhile, the alliance students, although attentive and respectful to Angie and one another, did not act disturbed or even very surprised by the butcher-knife story or the ones that followed. Their general demeanor suggested that these kinds of horror stories were simply business as usual in their lives.

I am 55 years old and ever since I came out to myself in the early 70s, and began to wander my way through the gay community and this never ending scorched earth war on our hearts and souls, I have heard stories from gay teens and grown adults alike, bearing wounds from their childhood days that would make a stone cry, if not a fundamentalist.  That time in our lives, when we are just discovering desire, and what it is to love another, and be loved by them in return, ought to be one of the most magical times in our lives.  Instead, it gets turned into this:

"My father called me an abomination and quoted Scripture."

Remember this the next time you hear some drooling numbskull yap, yap, yapping about how they’re not anti-gay, just pro-family, and that same-sex marriage will irrepairably harm children.  Presumably in some sort of way that a butcher knife, or their own parents calling them an abomination won’t.