From my perspective as a gay man, open hatred is nothing new. I wasn’t yet quite 12 years old when I was sitting in church listening to the pastor preach about Anita Bryant’s anti-gay campaign. I didnt understand much of what he was saying, but slowly — very slowly — I connected the dots to the love I felt for a friend, a love I’d been struggling to understand.

As the pastor talked about how destructive and sinful gay people are, how worthy of disgust and hatred, I realized in a kind of lightning-strike epiphany that he was talking about me.

I bolted out of our pew, squeezing out from beside my mom and dad, hurried down the aisle, and lost my breakfast in the men’s room.

That happened almost 50 years ago, but it wasn’t even close to the last time I learned that people like me are appropriate targets of public hatred.

The AIDS crisis was coming, and once it hit — boy howdy —public loathing and hatred of people like me magnified in certain quarters, even as my partner and I crossed out almost half the names of friends in our address book, because they had died of AIDS.

Later, legal gay marriage unleashed a new wave of hatred as conservative religious people demanded the right to discriminate against and exclude married same-sex couples.

That’s still going on, and now trans people are the new whipping boys/girls. The whole deplorable "groomer" trend is a manifestation of how acceptable it is to publicly hate queer people. But that’s nothing new.

How long has hating members of minorites been publicly acceptable? I can’t remember a time when it wasn’t. Shortly after that incident in church, I came to learn about how so many of fellow Baptists were committed racists who supported segregated churches and schools. Is that public hate? Of course it is.

I have never personally experienced a time where public hatred was not common and accepted.

As Elie Wiesel noted in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, we must beware neutrality. We must choose sides. Neutrality empowers the oppressor.