I am not lesbian. I’m not transgender, I’m not bisexual. I do, however know people who are. I have friends who are, I even have family members who are. Honestly, I haven’t really thought about it that much. I guess I just grew up in a house where whatever you were was okay.

However, I am definitely starting to realize that not everyone was brought up that way. A lot of people I know, people I’m friends with, were raised to think that being gay is a sin or a crime. Until it started to be brought up in conversation I never really thought that people could be NOT okay with other people being happy. And yeah, writing it down, it does seem completely stupid and naive. But that’s just what I thought. I was perfectly happy living in my fairytale world where everyone supported each other and honestly just worried about themselves. But that’s not what it’s like.

People everywhere, not just in our school- actually everywhere-, have fundamental problems with people being happy – I just can’t understand that. Why would anybody ever have a problem with someone being happy,or doing what makes them happy? Being gay, or lesbian or transgender or asexual or pansexual or whatever you are shouldn’t mean that you deserve less happiness as other people.

I definitely sound naive. Definitely a little free-love-everyone’s-brother-and-sister. But really, is anything i’m saying that naive? It’s the pursuit of happiness, right? It’s literally declared for all of us to be able to do that in the constitution, it’s written down.

I think that if we had more representation for this kind of stuff, or more people talked about it, there would be less of a veil over it. It wouldn’t be a foreign thing people’s parents warned them about, but it would be something you knew about and understood. If this school openly supported LGBT students, I think everything would get a lot better with a lot less hate.

Being happy, having rights, being able to walk around hallways without being afraid of people verbally attacking me: I get to do all those things, I don’t think it’ll ever be okay until everyone can.