I totally know how you feel. I thought I had escaped my small town bigotry when I moved to St. Louis but I still call my friend from my small city and she just doesn't get that the word gay doesn't mean stupid. And even in the place I'm at people still do stuff like that. There is no escape for this.

Ah! small town south, that's a fun place to live. I was living in Arkansas of all places when I came out to myself. I pissed a lot of people off because I had this horrible habit of asking people not to use the word gay in a derogatory way around me (I was already the freak from CA) and I even managed to piss off a couple of teachers.

I know what you mean about internalizing the comments, I get that way too, but I think that it has only gotten worse since I've actually started to come out at school on a wide scale (not in the sense that I run around declaring my sexuality--not often anyway, but that I don't make an effort to hide it). When someone makes a comment in class and I mention that I don't like it and they brush me off or get snotty it's somewhat more irritating now than it was before, especially when I've made it clear why I don't appreciate the comments.

Direct is definitely worse than indirect.

I was going upstairs at break the other day and it was hailing out and these two underclassmen were on their way downstairs and one of them said "Hail is so gay!" and the other replied with "But it's the closest we'll get to snow."

My question is whether or not precipitation can even have a sexual orientation, and if so does that make snow heterosexual?

California--the land of coffee and bagels.