On the (small) bright side; the guy doing the censoring is apparently too much of a dick to memory-hole a topic properly.
Polemical censorship is fun, flamboyant, and exciting; but the competent professionals are the ones who know how to make a topic just never appear; and its non-appearance seem so natural as to be hard to even articulate as a question. He is not one of them.
Doesn’t change the fact that fine small towns with fine small town values have a reputation for sending their children screaming for the nearest pocket of civilization as fast as they can get out that they’ve worked hard to deserve.
For a large segment of the population online news isn’t “real.” Yes, this is a problem that will eventually be corrected via attrition, but for now, those sources are still suspect to a lot of people. Even having other print sources from outside the area isn’t a complete solution – showing that LGBTQ+ people exist elsewhere only leads to statements of “Well, sure, they have those people in $largeCity, but not here!”
One more reason I do make an effort to be out of all of my closets, even when it’s scary sometimes.
