The It Gets Better videos make me feel better even when they're not designed to.

Did I ever tell the internet how fucking grateful I am that I spent the last two years of high school at a school where 1) everyone thought I was dating a lady (I wasn't, we were close friends) and 2) I never heard anything about it except when a dude congratulated us on our courage for going to prom together?

Also, we were the only school district in North Carolina at the time that stated in writing that we didn't discriminate in hiring on the basis of sexual orientation. I am reminiscing on this because I am catching up on my Tiger Beatdown backlog and reflecting on how I never realized how hard institutionalized homophobia in the schools had to suck on the teacher's end, too. I honestly wonder if one of the reasons why our teachers were so kick-ass wasn't that a lot of them were red-state refugees, in one way or another.

(The It Gets Better project is always worth a watch and a listen, by the way.)