Annie on My Mind on my Mind

Twitter is nice, but every now and then I really need to write something longer than a status update. So I think I'll keep writing here from time to time even if it's just me.
I just finished reading a book for my Children as Readers class called "Annie on My Mind" by Nancy Garden and it was excellent. It's been a long time since I've been so moved my a book - it almost made me cry at the end.
It's a love story about two young women in the 70s and of course it becomes more than a love story because they have to deal with all the shit they take for being gay and it was just very very sad, but also sort of inspiring. It was almost sadder for having a happy ending because it drove the point home that being gay is like a battle you fight your whole life. And no matter what you do or how good you are or how kind you are or how hard you try, there will always be people who will hate you just for who you are.
And I guess being black is the same way. Or being in any minority that people are bigoted about. And I think I never really got that, or I've never had it driven home so succinctly. I hate having people dislike me or hate me. But I'm a white straight male, and so I know that people will mostly hate me for what I do, for things I have a choice about. But if I had to live my life knowing that a lot of people, people I would have to live with and deal with, would hate me, my whole life, for something I had no choice about, something essential and defining of who I was, I don't know what I'd do.
With racial minorities there's less of a choice: you have to bare it and learn somehow to live with it. But to be gay is to be faced with the choice of pretending your whole life to be something you're not because people will accept the person you're pretending to be, or living honestly, knowing you'll be met with the hatred and the disdain and, perhaps worst of all, the sympathy and efforts to "cure" you, and that would be a really lousy choice to make, and it gives me a lot of admiration for my open gay friends - and empathy for my closeted ones.
I'm really happy that things have improved a lot since the 70s. I know that as long as good people fight the good fight they'll continue improving. But I hope people will keep reading and writing good fiction about gay people, because this book really opened my eyes in a way I hadn't been willing to admit they needed to be opened.