Things were unbelievably homophobic when I was a kid, and I guess I just didn't notice

Playing supposedly innocent playground games like Smear The Queer, giggling at old books that used the word gay in its original sense. And there was the pledge of allegiance parody that we somehow all picked up:

I pledge allegiance to the flag,
Michael Jackson is a ***.
Pepsi-Cola burned him up,
Now he's drinking 7up.

And the weirdest part is, looking at it now, it was a whole lot of little things that individually might not have been terrible, but added up to a very negative view of anybody who wasn't strictly heterosexual.

Weird how you only see some things in retrospect.

bijouxbroussard · F

I have a low voice, always have. It makes sense as an adult to have a woman’s alto voice, in my family. But as a child I had a "boy’s" voice, "unfeminine". I heard that in school often and felt bad