I grew up unable to say the word "pee." If it slipped out, I had my mouth washed out with soap. I couldn't swear until I was 18. I'd get slapped in the face if I did.
I've thought about that a lot over the years, because now I curse like a sailor, and I've come to believe that's not a coincidence. When you suppress a kid, when you tell them, over and over, in ways big and small, that who they are or what they say or how they exist is wrong, it doesn't disappear.
It exacerbates. It goes somewhere. For me, it came out later as foul language and, less amusingly, as years of depression I now understand were tangled up with a childhood spent desperately hiding who I was.
There was no Gay-Straight Alliance when I was in middle school. There was no safe space, no flyer on a bulletin board, no faculty sponsor, no one I knew who felt like I did. I was a popular kid, but I was lonely and tormented.
Terror reigned because I was petrified of being found out. I would have been beaten up. I know that for sure.
It got so bad that I once went into the boys' lavatory — that's what they were called back then — and furiously banged my head against a wall until a nun came in and stopped me.
So when I tell you that watching kids finally get to do what I never could, walk into a classroom, sit at a lunch table, and say, "I'm gay" or "I'm trans," or "I'm not sure yet, but I'm figuring it out," and have that be met with a shrug instead of a punch — well, that's been one of the great quiet joys of the last fifteen years.
Which is what makes King George County, Virginia, so enraging and heartbreaking. Adults treating queer kids like lepers, all but guaranteeing they are pushed into the kind of isolation, shame, and psychological distress that can leave lifelong scars.
Here's the short version, because I don't want to spend this column re-litigating it. Instead, I want to refer you to my wonderful colleague, politics and news editor Christopher Wiggins, and his excellent reporting on the story.
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In August 2025, a seventh grader at King George Middle School, southeast of Washington, D.C., did everything right. They wrote a constitution, found a faculty sponsor, got the principal's sign-off. Seventeen kids signed up for a Gay-Straight Alliance in three days.
And in those same three days, adults in that community, grown men and women with nothing better to do than hurt 13-year-olds, doxxed the faculty sponsor, plastered her photo online, and screamed "grooming" until the school board folded.
The board didn't just shut down one club. They banned all "noncurricular" student organizations at the middle school level so they wouldn't have to admit what they were really banning while, in the same breath, deciding that a club where kids skin squirrels counts as core extracurricular.
To sum it up: ripping up a squirrel, yes. Caring for queer kids, no.
Meanwhile, a separate set of policies has been stripping trans kids of their names, their pronouns, and their bathrooms, which happened in King George County in January.
Students have testified about slurs and about being punched in a school bathroom. And now the ACLU of Virginia is in federal court because a school board would rather burn taxpayer money defending a double standard than let a simple club exist.
This story is sickening, but here's where it gets appallingly cruel. I read the comments under news stories about this situation, including from the 17,000-member private King George Community Facebook group, where the type of bullying these kids are fleeing becomes evident. I was going to include a few to show how vindictively horrific they were, but I changed my mind.
Kids today have phones. They have access. And they aren't stupid. They don't need to see that hate in a column meant to show them unbridled support.
I'm not going to be the person who hands a bigger microphone to depraved demons. What I'll tell you instead is that reading those comments made my stomach turn in a way seven years of writing this column rarely has. I was surprised by how deeply this story affected me, and I think it's because there's an element of PTSD here.
There is a cruelty in this country right now, amplified from the very top since Donald Trump first took office in 2016, that has made queer kids a priority target. It has metastasized like an incurable cancer, and in 2026, it's accelerating.
Related: Donald Trump just spent a week showing us how much he despises children
It has moved from banning books and canceling drag story hours into school boards, PTA meetings, and the Facebook groups of towns most of us will never visit. And it shrilly invokes God and Jesus as if queer kids are committing mortal sins.
This morbid lie of showing "concern" for children vilifies them, and it's doing the single most damaging thing you can do to a child: telling them that who they are is shameful, wrong, sinful, and that wanting community is dangerous and metaphorically illegal.
These King George kids are doing something braver than I ever managed. They stepped forward, in public, as themselves, and the reward for that bravery was a coordinated adult campaign to shove them back into the dark.
I've written this column for more than seven years now, through a lot of ugliness. But writing about what's being done to queer kids is different. It gets me every time.
Every queer kid deserves what those 17 middle schoolers in King George, where there's even a beloved Gardening Gays Farm run by a married interracial gay couple, are trying to build for themselves before adults in their community decided it was a good idea to unleash a diabolical, pervasive cruelty these kids may spend adulthood trying to survive.
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This article originally appeared on Advocate: These LGBTQ+ Virginia kids found support and community in school. Then, bigoted adults took that away
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