Your child absolutely WON'T be fine.

San Fransisco is by percentage yhe gayest city in America. The 2nd gayest is Lakewood Ohio, and has been for decades.

Lakewood has always had a very good police response time. It's a very small city. About 6 miles long, and 2 miles wide. If you call the police, even for something minor like littering, the police are there in 2 minutes or less.

Recently I would say gay acceptance had reached an all time high, where gay people no longer should feel the need to be closeted.

I feel the pendulum is about to swing back HARD.

There was a time when a gay man in Lakewood got beaten by 4 men with baseball bats. It happened just after 2:30am. Bars aren't legally allowed to serve alcohol in a bar after 2:30. So they all close at that time.

This man walked out of the bar. He was clearly gay. Lakewood has always been a safe space for the gay community. These 4 men, driving through in a van, saw him walking on the street. They jump out of the van, each with those metalic baseball bats. They beat him until he fell down. Then they took out a pair of handcuffs and handcufffed both wrists to a chainlink fence so he was 100% helpless. They then proceeded to beat him completely to death. Leaving his head completely split open in a pool of his own blood.

But this wasn't recent. In a city where you're only 2 minutes away from cops showing up, this beating went on for 45 minutes. The cops didn't arrive until after sunrise at 7:30am because a parent walking her kid to school screamed. THAT scream got the cops called. Not the 45 minute beatdown screaming in literal murder. Not someone else discovering the body in the 2 hours 45 minutes a corpse sat in its own blood during bar closing rush.

I'm 100% convinced the police had to have been called, multiple times, over this. There is NO WAY a dead body, in a small city as densely populated as lakewood, went totally unnoticed the entire time it sat there, much less the entire struggle and beatdown.

This was at a time when being gay was seen as a cause for physical violence. Where people agreed that gay people were evil and deserved to die.

I'M not saying that. I'm saying what I remember society was when I grew up.

Now it sounds like I'm describing the 1960s or some shit. This was 1994. This was objectively not that long ago.

Where police and public alike ignored a man being beaten to death because he deserved it for being gay.

Where the only reason EMS was called was because a traumatized kid didn't know the body was long dead, and thought there was a chance to save him.

And that mother who screamed, and tried to shield her son from seeing what she saw? That was my mom. I will never forget that sight. Most people never see a real human brain. I have. I saw it in chunks on the sidewalk, and in his head still split in half.

They sent a message that day. Not to him, but to the area around them. Not even Lakewood is safe to be gay.

And I fear we're headed back to that. I'm not even gay, but I'm also not a monster. I feel everyone should have a right to exist, and not be targeted for their identity.

Unfortunitely, it's not a 100% shared belief.