Challenging Perceptions

My parents were raised very strictly Christian, and for a large part of my upbringing thought rather less of homosexual people, simply based on what they had been taught in church.

This all changed when I entered my second year of high school. Up until my senior year of high school, I hadn’t had a girlfriend (I am male), minus of course the so called “girlfriends” that little kids have when they aren’t old enough to understand what the words and concepts actually mean. This was not because I was interested in people of my own gender, but rather because I had crippling social anxiety, and always spent as much time as I could playing video games or using the computer, rather than talking to anyone, male or female.

My parents, being loving but slightly misguided people, mistook this behavior for me being gay, and had some heart to hearts, consulted their bibles, and decided that, no, homosexuality is not wrong, and by proxy there was nothing wrong with potentially-homosexual me.

Without knowing until a few years later when I met the woman who I would go on to marry, I had changed my parents’ view of homosexuality by having a then-poorly understood mental disorder.