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“Why’d it take you so long?” or “I knew before you did.” Don’t be offended—this friend of yours is just trying to get over the offense of not being trusted with this information sooner. The human urge to respond to news by pretending to have known all along is as old as the hills and has nothing to do with you.
    For a lot of people, especially if you were raised in a conservative environment, coming out is the process of admitting to earlier dishonesty—admitting you were dishonest with your friends in high school, possibly even admitting you were dishonest with yourself. Many people are taught in sex-ed that same-sex attraction is a phase that will pass, and they assume they’re still just in that phase and it hasn’t passed yet, and for them coming out is the self-realization that it isn’t a phase and isn’t going to pass. Other people are legitimately attracted to people of both sexes, and coming out means admitting to being bisexual.
    Here’s what you don’t realize: No one worth your time actually gives a flying fuck. It seems like they do, but they don’t. They don’t care if you’re gay, they don’t care if you’re bisexual, they don’t care if you’re straight. They care if you’re being dishonest with yourself and the people around you. Telling the truth will make you feel so much better, and you’ll gain surprising insight into who your real friends and family are. There is no way of knowing how people will respond. But the good people, the morally superior people, the ones whose opinion you should care about—they’re gonna be fine with it.
    Where to Go to College If You’re Gay
    You’re going to want to avoid Brigham Young University, that university that Jerry Falwell started, and anything with “Christ” in the name. You’re going to want to avoid the South and a lot of the Midwest. You’ll be fine in Chicago, Illinois, or Madison, Wisconsin, but in general you want to head for the coasts. Whatever you do, avoid those schools with beautiful architecture and nothing but fields for hundreds of miles; if you’re already at one of those schools and the atmosphere is ridiculous and suffocating, transfer somewhere better as soon as possible. The bigger the city, the happier you’ll be. You need to be introduced to the full spectrum of what the world has to offer, and you need to be around other gay people so that you can figure out this side of yourself and so that you can find someone to kiss.
    The History of Gay People in a Few Paragraphs
    There have been gays as long as there have been people. There have also been gay bees as long as there have been bees, gay penguins as long as there have been penguins, gay dolphins, gay seagulls, gay killer whales, gay bison, gay raccoons, gay elephants, gay moths, gay lions, gay caribou, gay turtles, gay cheetahs, gay lizards, gay fruit flies (rim shot!), gay dogs, and gay cats. A disproportionate number of People Who Changed the World are believed to have been gay. (Back before being gay was okay, the gays had lots of time on their hands for changing the world.) The guy who broke the Nazi code to lead the U.S. to victory in World War II was a homo, and so was the guy who came up with Keynesian economics, and so were Plato and Socrates and Sappho and Alexander the Great, to say nothing of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo and Gertrude Stein and Eleanor Roosevelt and the Indigo Girls.
    The gay civil rights movement started in 1969 in New York City, shortly after Judy Garland died, when a bunch of homos harassed by the cops at a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn decided they weren’t going to take shit from the cops anymore. They chanted funny slogans and did chorus-line kicks. “I remember thinking this was going to be the first funny revolution,” says Edmund White, who was there. Sometimes it wasn’t that funny. The first openly gay politician elected to public office in the United States was San Francisco’s Harvey Milk; he was shot