I've definitely experienced that phenomenon. In fact, I once sold a bunch of office furniture my business didn't need, leftover from the company we bought the building from.

The woman who came to look at it and who eventually bought it established a quick bond with me. I advertised my gayness just very slightly, and she leaned into it. Within a week, I had an invitation to a pool party at her house, and within another week she'd set me up with one of her gay friends, and we had a nice little summer fling.

That happened in the rather well-to-do suburbs of Detroit, and it didn't surprise me at all. In fact, if I hadn't moved to a typical Republican, conservative area, I might very well have written an article similar to this one — none the wiser about a very different America.

What I mean is, I have to take just a little issue with your generalizing that people don't care about gay people anymore, don't care who we have sex with.

Where I live now in a conservative, rural part of Michigan, the opposite is true. Moving out of my fairly liberal urban bubble was kind of a slap in the face, a plunge into a colder reality.

People around here are so opposed to queer sexuality that a town very near me actually closed its entire municipal library, defunded it, rather than allow the Heartstopper graphic novels (and other queer material) to be part of the library's collection.

Librarians had even given in and moved queer material to an adults-only, restricted part of the library. But that wasn't enough for the townspeople. They wanted those books gone entirely. And they won. The books are gone, because the town doesn't have a library anymore. That's how viciously homophobic people in the United States can still be.

I get that it's easy not to see that depending on where you live, but we should recognize that the sort of acceptance you're talking about (and which is wonderful!) is not universal.

However, I do believe that sort of acceptance is growing, and I thank you for your personal story illustrating it!