You can say that again, and even when it's less than obvious! Back in 2016, I struck up an online mentoring friendship with a gay university student who had come to know my online writing on another forum. (Quora)

Months after I "met" him, he was agonizing about coming out to his family, although he was already out to a core friend group at uni. I helped him out by giving him pep talks, advising him to practice a coming-out speech, and eventually listening to his coming-out speech and interacting as if I were his parent.

He came out first to his mom and then his dad, and everything went great.

But here's the odd clincher of the whole thing. He all but knew his parents would be accepting and supporting. They're both self-described hippies, and over the years, they'd had gay friends over to the house and had been quite frank about the fact that their friends are gay. They had never given their son reason to believe that they harbored homophobia at all.

But such is the state of society, such is the toxicity of the air we queer people breathe every day, that the idea of coming out still traumatized my young friend.

My heart broke over how scared he was.

Now, just imagine the trauma a queer young person would go through if they WEREN'T confident their parents would accept them. It doesn't bear thinking about, really.

Thanks for writing this.

P.S. My friend has since had his fiancé over to his parents' place for dinner and even long holiday weekends. And when his fiancé broke off the engagement earlier this year, my friend's mom and sister joined him in a time-honored tradition of calling down the wrath of the universe. 🤣