Transcription
Vern: Hi, this is Vern Hall back again. And over the years, and it’s been a good 40 now… 44 as of May 1st. And we still can move in the community. We were not able to get married, but I still continue to be active. We would have dinners at one another’s houses for a while, and that worked for quite a while. And then there were factions within the group, so that kind of broke up. And by that time there was a far more openly gay and lesbians living in Sharon and with, you know, with the mansion being sold and everything, that just changed everything and the Sharon became a gay friendly place, and it was a beacon to a lot of other people. And since then, of course, we have gotten the gathering place started. And we do have a meeting once a month for the LGBT community. And also there is another group, Rural Service RSS. They meet here in Warnerville at the, the construction. I don’t know what to call that place. But there is at least those, two active groups within the community, and it’s no longer a place of where gay people are alone. It’s young kids know that we’re here, you know, and they see us, and they know that. Yeah. You’re not a freak of nature. There’s others like you that are adults. And so that’s kind of where I’m at today, living my life openly, as a gay person, so that people can’t say that I don’t know any gay people.
Most, almost all the gay men that I’ve spoken to in many of their lives and many of the lesbian women. Most of us know by the time we’re eight years old whether or not we’re gay, we know and whether we reject that. And because of society at large, that’s what it is. That’s the fact and what quite often happens is other kids can sense… they know. And quite often this leads to bullying. And if, like in my case, I was one of the two smallest boys in the class. Oh, the rest of the boys wanted me and Rudy Dubrovnik to go ahead and fight each other to see which one is we, and we adamantly refused to. We were friends and we didn’t want to fight each other, so we basically told the rest of them to forget about it. And that kind of kept us from being bullying too much. But the bullying was still there. It was just very subtle. It was just certain ways you would be treated differently than your classmates. And that’s why we had to be an example. And whether or not we even knew that we were being. But we had to be act as if we were in there because it’s the kids today. They’re being bullied too. I hear it all the time from people, from adults, from their parents, and we need to stop the bullying. It doesn’t make anyone, and in fact, to be honest about it, that’s one of the reasons why I don’t like Mr. Trump. He’s a bully.