…at a bloody university to boot.
HR, anybody call HR?
But seriously, there are little groups that are almost a culture to themselves (and they’re not always what you think). On the plus side, I used to live in a heavily agricultural area, predominantly Republican country, and went to school with a bunch of guys who honest to god wore wranglers and cowboy boots/hats on the daily, and not in some sort of ironic hipster way. Two of them were buddies from high school and had a calf roping dummy in their yard to practice their roping, so you can guess what they’d think about gays… But you’d be wrong. The subject came up one day, and I was told a story of them (with a bunch of other guys) working a hay yard (basically loading trucks with hay bales), and one of their buddies always being kinda withdrawn and depressed. They finally figured out he was gay, and basically the whole group of mini-cowboys had an intervention to get this guy to open up and let him know that they were all ok with it.
I’m sure there are as many of not more horrible stories about rural areas not being accepting, but sometimes you get pleasantly surprised.
