= new reply since forum marked as read
Please read the whole Twitter thread. 
If you don’t have gay friends or neighbors here, you are living under the rock instead of on top of it. (Our island is coral rock). One of my friends owns a construction company, another is a well known Florida artist, another is a dock master in a large marina, another bakes and delivers her Key Lime pies (featured in Southern living magazine) to our local restaurants. I know real estate agents, doctors, shop owners and several high school students in my own neighborhood who are openly gay. Two of the couples are very close friends and we’ve helped to raise each other’s children, attended each other’s family funerals, and shared more than one cocktail together over both sad and happy events in the past 40 years since I made these islands my home. And strangely, I’ve never turned gay. 
So it is perfectly possible to have a normal community with all sorts of people in it.
Maybe it’s in our water?? 
Both of my kids struggled in elementary and middle school. Especially my oldest, two years older than his younger sibling. In high school they joined in with a crowd who all were into anime. I was the "con" mom. I would accompany the group to all of the anime cons (conventions) and got to know them all pretty well. Turns out all of them embraced their gender and sexual diversity. The oldest of them was a trans guy, a couple were bisexual, and a couple were asexual. My son was finally happy in school. It was amazing.
What was interesting was how much I learned from them. Not all of them consider themselves "queer" but they all seem to accept that gender and sexual identity are spectra, and they tend not to put labels on them (even if I sometimes do 
).
I think of these kids as "my" kids, even though they all have (mostly) supportive parents. I'm so glad they found each other, and I'm so glad my kids found them. One is now a teacher, one got a full scholarship from the DoD, one is a writer about to publish his first book. They're all beautiful humans.
