Stranger Things (Netflix Original)

[Leo656]

Guy a grade ahead of me who we all knew from Kindergarten was a Mormon. Who wore a skirt sometimes. Don't think he was actually gay so much as just had a strong "F*ck 'em if they don't like it" kinda vibe. Huge TMNT fanatic, incidentally.

Sadly he got hit by a truck and died like a month after he graduated. Whole school was devastated. If he HAD been gay, nobody would've given a sh*t. He was super well-liked and popular. Hardly anybody even questioned the occasional skirt.

Half the Drama kids in my high school were at the very least bi. The "parties" (read: orgies) they'd have at the richest kids' houses when the parents were out of town were legendary. Even the football kids were jealous; they got laid a lot too, but the Drama kids got better drugs (and as a result, hotter chicks). But man, you'd hear some stories come Monday morning. "Someone saw _____ in the bathroom with _____ at the cast party; I didn't even know they were gay!"

Kinda funny, kinda sad story came out of that group. The head cheerleader (who was also one of the higher-ups in Drama) was going out with this really popular guy everybody liked, I *think* he was another Drama kid. Everybody was jealous of him for being the one who got to f*ck the head cheerleader, all that stuff. Her family would take him with them on exotic vacations and all that, they were together for the first three-ish years of High School, everybody swore they were gonna get married. So either Junior or Senior year, I forget, but she has the guy come with her and her family to Cancun over Spring Break. When we all got back to school the next week, everybody noticed how the girl was all gorgeously tanned but looked completely miserable, and how she and the guy weren't even talking to each other anymore.

Come to find out, while they were on the trip she was apparently gonna ask him to marry her... and he thought that would be the best time to come out and admit to her that he was gay. That was a situation, for sure. But again, nobody gave him a hard time about it. I mean sh*t, gay or not he still got to f*ck the girl everybody in school wanted to f*ck but couldn't, for three whole years or so, so f*ck it, he still came out way ahead of anybody who would've hypothetically picked on him.

Couple'a guys on the soccer team were f*cking each other, too, that I'm aware of. And one of the soccer coaches got fired for f*cking one of the guys on the team.

I also knew plenty of guys and girls both who were looking forward to going to college in another state specifically so they could expand their sexual horizons. Plenty of them WANTED to experiment with being bi/gay... just not with people they'd known since Kindergarten. Which I guess makes sense; where I lived a large number of the kids you graduated high school with were the same kids you knew when you were 5, and the others still lived only 5 minutes away so you still knew them even if you had a different elementary school. I can definitely understand some guys not wanting to give their first blowjob to the kid they saw poop their pants at the zoo in First Grade. Lots of my friends were like "I wanna figure some stuff out, but I prefer to do it where not so many people 'know' me." Honestly makes sense.

Granted, this is NJ, and NJ most certainly IS the best place to be (if you can afford the godforsaken property taxes, which I guess is the price one pays for being in such a great place). But I find it hard to believe that things were THAT much different or more sheltered elsewhere. You guys make it sound like as late as 2000-whatever kids were getting stuffed in trash cans for being gay. Texas, maybe. I am quite sure they still do that there NOW, actually, but most places are and have been a lot more enlightened for a very long time.

No, over here you don't get sh*t on in school for being gay, you get sh*t on for being poor. Being gay is Just Fine but if your Dad loses his job and your family now has to downsize from a house to an apartment, you need to learn how to throw a punch because kids will NEVER let that "crime" go unpunished. I once stuffed a rich kid in a trash can my Senior year after he went on a rant about how all the kids from my town were "trash"; I disagreed, and chose to make my point using him as a visual aid. That high school was all kids from two adjacent towns, one Rich and one Poor; and while yeah, the kids from the "poor" town were a bit rougher around the edges, a ton of the kids from the "rich" town were snorting coke and shooting heroin on the daily by age 15 - including the kid I stuffed in the bin - so it's like, okay, you got money, you're still garbage. Worse garbage, even. Like yeah, the kids from the "poor" town were a bunch of potheads who got into fights, but Jesus, at least they weren't sticking f*cking needles in themselves every day when they got home from football practice like the rich kids were. Jesus.

Anyways yeah, nobody where I live gives or gave a sh*t about gay people, sounds like y'all just had sh*tty schools OR are just making sh*t up for lulz, I can buy either one. There's also the fact that many people here tend to come off like people who either didn't have a ton of friends, OR kept a small circle, whereas I was friends with "everyone" and so would have been exposed to much larger "sample size".