My teaching career began with a parallel situation. While the greater Gay Community was finding itself and coming out of the shadows as it shed the image that had been traditionally promoted by non-Gay people to other non-Gay people which the Gay ones knew not to be true, I was in a position to start connecting the dots, and, in spite of having waded through the clues and chipped away at what was the me of others to find the me of self, and accept myself for who and what I was, not what others expected.

Gay people were to a growing degree no longer ashamed to be their truth, while they saw the need to spread that truth to the larger population letting them know that the only reason we were in the shadows was not because of who we are, but because the shadows is what Straight people pushed us into.

We began rejecting that assignment with both little and big steps. Rallies, parades, demonstrations were open and very obvious actions. For us, as opposed Straights, walking down the street holding hands was not just the show of affection it was, but, because enough was enough and it’s our world too, a quiet rebellion as no one was going to tell us not to do that anymore.

“Lover”, a sexually based term that fed into the stereotype of sex for sex at all times 24/7 , although its origin was more than that as it implied a committed relationship when living openly was denied us, something that “Trick” doesn’t, slowly gave way to “significant other” which, even as a compromise term not to cause the yet to be educated any discomfort, implied a fuller and more committed relationship in the days when we were denied marriage on the basis that as we did not marry, because we weren’t allowed,  we were incapable of it.

We were denied the legal and social recognition of our lives, and were often harassed when the true nature of the “roommate” was discovered and people disapproved when they realize the two old guys next door weren’t brothers who never married but lived together, but had actually been in a long term, committed, yet unrecognized, relationship on the same level of love and mutual support that makes a marriage, minus, of course, the legal, civil, taxpayer supporte4d benefits.

More and more Gay couples, in spite of knowing there could be reactions that included Gay bashing and death, began to show up with no fanfare at community events forearmed with defenses and explanations, knowing that each appearance and the reaction from people who saw the signs was an opportunity for educating the public of the truth, and experiencing all the usual reactions to coming out.

Even now, in the 21^st Century, each time a Gay person or a Gay couple go anywhere as themselves it often becomes a reliving of the first coming out moment as the reaction to “this is my husband” often involves those negative reactions and often insulting, sometimes innocently so, objections to our reality.

A man introducing a girl friend or a spouse, and vise a versa, gets happy comments and well wishes. Too often when a Gay man introduces his “boyfriend” or spouse, or a Lesbian her ”girlfriend” or spouse, people ask which is the husband, who plays the wife in bed, what kind of sex stuff do we do, and, my favorite, being asked if there is a fear the couple will split because of one being attracted to someone else in, what I assume to be a requirement to be Gay that I missed, an orgy.

I can recall, although it has become easier at my age to just not care how people will react, taking that deep breath or pausing in the “Before” while bracing for the “After” before casually coming out as Gay in a social situation either by a casual comment or by having to declare.

As true progress was made, major and earth shattering or, while not shaking the whole world, involving an individual in some small town that would ripple out for the greater good, there were certain signs of objection that were obvious, like denying rights, purging Gays from employment and housing, bashing, shooting, home and bar raids, and the “eeewwwww” you get when you tell your truth, but there were also more subtle forms of expressed disapproval and social rejection.

Now that we can marry under the law and are protected, somewhat, from discrimination, so-called religious people insist, in spite of law, that they be allowed to discriminate against Gay people by denying goods and services, and insist that it must be accepted that their use of derogatory terms is a righteous rebellion against un-American political correctness, and we are expected to accept why the use of the word “Faggot” is acceptable in particular cases.

I was once sitting with a group of teachers having drinks at the end of the school week when one in describing a new boutique that had just opened near her home, said she could tell the owners had to be Gay because the lettering on the shop window was all “faggotty”, then turned to me to point out with a knowing wink and a conspiratorial friendly nudge that she meant nothing derogatory by the term, but, “Well. You know”. Later in the conversation when someone mentioned a female friend who had opened a store she had wanted to since high school, I told the others that it was not too far from a bar I frequented, and that I knew the shop had to have been opened by a woman because when I drove by on the way home one day, the “Cunty” style of the letters painted on the widow had been finished.

The objections to my choice of words were vociferous and my attempt to cover with, “I mean nothing derogatory, but, you know,” did not, for some reason, cut it.

As time went on, and Gay couples began to become part of their community often arriving as couples and at times with a child in tow who was from a previous straight marriage of one of the women or men, adoption, or surrogate birth. Family days at school, father daughter days, bring your kid to work days, church, festivals, library book readings in the children’s room, Gay families began to become a fabric of the community of families.

With this, however, came the phrase that, although seemingly innocent and positive, has its roots, once deliberate and pointed, the exclusion of families with same-sex parents.

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These events began being advertised as “Family Friendly”.

Behind the innocent veneer, those around when the term came into use know its origin and its purpose. It meant that Gay families were not welcome. An event “for the whole family”, “bring the family”, “Family rates”, are not as loaded as “Family Friendly” which implies now, but had been direct then, a potential attack in some form on the Straight family.

Initially, Gay committed relationships were too “informal” to be considered serious, not by those in them but those who felt it was their place to pass judgment, and up until and even after the recognition of marriage equality by states then the Supreme Court, there are locations, whole states, that still leave the acceptance of a legal marriage up to the opinion of individuals who act according to their opinion.

Sadly, as with the Stockholm Syndrome or, being young and the beneficiaries of what was won for them, there are those in the Gay Community who, having children now, fear that we old men and women who fought, gave of our youth, and, in some situations, their lives so that their families could have a legally married set of parents who could adopt, win the custody of a biological child in a divorce, or one in the marriage being, or both using, a surrogate, might celebrate our victories and in the process make it necessary for the parents to come up with some long, convoluted reason that someone at a Pride Festival might get a little tipsy, going into a long dissertation on the Kinsey Report, when all they have to do is simply tell the kid that that guy probably went through a lot in his youth and is allowed once a year to celebrate any victory won and the fact that they had lived long enough to see the changes the kid will grow up with as just part of the picture.

Those who fought the majority Straight population to obtain the basic rights we should have always had, should not now, having overcome the oppression of a Hetero-normative society, replace that oppressor with toddlers.

Once a year in a former state, on Pride weekend men and women would come to the capitol city to let their hair down and, admittedly, go a little overboard with their annual celebration of self, and then return to Klan infested small towns to work their ranches, alone, as bachelor ranchers, like the Norwegian Bachelor Farmers of Lake Wobegon.

This person deserves that weekend and should not have to deal with toddlers as if being as answerable to them as they had had to be with straight society.

I was invited to a Labor Day event. There was plenty of room for social distancing, and, being a political event to celebrate Labor, I intended to go. That was until I saw that the event was “Family Friendly”.

What would the event be if it wasn’t family friendly? At what point would it become obvious if the event began to become less “Family Friendly”? Who were they telling to stay away?

A  G rated movie was going to be shown, and that implied family friendliness. Since the adults going would not need to be told to behave during the movie, the speeches, and the barbeque, why designate it as “Famiy Friendly?”

“Bring the family” would have sufficed.

Not being their experience, some will say I am making something of nothing, but having never been asked to leave an event because, well, ”You know, it’s family friendly” so I, a family of one, treated as less than friendly, but more of a threat, I suppose, may not have had the experience to know the back story.

Those who use the phrase may be innocent of its original intent, but common phrases now that were originally based on derogatory terms only lose their true meaning when those to whom they were applied are gone and people remain unaware of how it was used to exclude.

Paddy Wagon, Aunt Jemima, licorice babies whose original name included the “N” word, monkey-looking Leprechauns, a serape wearing, sombrero shaded Mexican sleeping against a cactus, adding “um” or “ee” to the ends of words to sound Native American or Chinese, remained common in our speech and “cultural images” until someone made the original objectionable meaning known to those of us not in the group being disparaged.

Because it did not affect us we assumed it affected no one, with our cardinal sin being ignoring those who spoke of it to us, dismissing their own experiences, which, because we did not gave them, as works of fiction.

This is not correct.

But those who know the underlying meaning in this case are still here.

People have that blind spot where if something whose true meaning is known by the group to which it applies in name or action, but not by those outside that group, it can be easily dismissed.

The accepted belief is that if something does not affect someone directly, it causes no offense to anyone.

The reality is, it does.