I'm rather surprised how many people don't know any gays

[Joe Biden 2020]

I used to know (and work with) 2 gay people, one lesbian and one gay.  We never brought up the issue of sexual orientation for we were in the work place and it was not the appropriate venue.  They were both really nice and really hard workers, which I admired.  They helped me, unwittingly, become more accepting of homosexuals as people which later started brewing my slow warming to civil unions (which is now full-blown) and now gay marriage.  Even though we don't have gay marriage in Oklahoma and probably will never have it until a federal law is passed, it did get me more open to it, along with the people on this forum and my best friend on the forum, Jamespol, who is (or was) also gay.  Just talking to him, he really softened my fire-breathing hatred of gays that I had all the way up until about 4 or 5 years ago.  It started abating with those co-workers in 2005, and then James really helped alleviate the majority of the rest of it and then the rest of the forum helped pretty much squash it.