I’ve known many a gay man who has left the south because they don’t feel safe there. Certainly voting wise, the parents comment feels very true.

I've known gay men who moved to the south because they liked the culture, so where are we now?

At perfect equilibrium for gay men in the south, with a pseudo-osmotic filter allowing only hardy gay men. Meanwhile the wimpy gay men who fled are invading the rest of the country, leaving behind a trail of well-kept neighborhoods with lots of tasteful little galleries.

Having lived in Georgia and Tennessee and still having family in the Carolinas, you're either a straight white man or living in denial.

I lived in Atlanta for the better part of a decade as a brown guy right after 9/11. Was great.

30 miles outside Atlanta things were not so rosy for brown people right after 9/11 when I lived there. And now, 17 years after 9/11, Georgia is doing everything it possibly can to suppress and purge voters who might shift the state away from staunch conservatism [1]. Please don't pretend there aren't massive issues in the south preventing it from being appealing to west coasters.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/us/politics/georgia-gover...

I guess you never spent much time in the hills just an hour or so from Atlanta in almost any direction, in any of a good number of towns where “a brown guy” would have a hard time finding a restaurant willing to take his money for food.

One of my college buddies lived in Douglas, three hours south of Atlanta in south georgia. Never had anyone be anything short of incredibly polite and hospitable. Heck, I’ve been in rural Illinois, rural VA, and rural GA quite a bit and everyone’s been great. I don’t know (or much care) about peoples’ politics but I’ve always been treated respectfully.

Another brown guy checking in. My aunt and uncle practiced medicine in Murphy, NC for many years and only ever had a problem when the feds thought Eric Rudolph might be hiding in their backyard.

You’re so unwilling to stand behind your statement that you created a sock puppet account to say it for you.

Having lived in Alabama as a Catholic yankee I was met with at best extreme ignorance about my then beliefs and at worst outright harassment and discrimination for having the wrong accent and wrong Christian denomination. Within the first week of moving there, we had a Klan rally in town.

Most of the other local Catholic families, if they could afford it, moved their children to private school to escape.

The schools had corporal punishment, and demanded that we call our teachers sir or ma'am, a custom that I was not used to and have encountered nowhere else. Failing to do so landed me in detention within the first month or so.

I was there for the original Roy Moore saga.

This was 15+ years ago and in a rural community with dirt roads, so I'm sure things have changed a bit and do not apply to the whole state, but checking the school website corporal punishment is still alive and well and Alabama nearly elected Roy Moore yet again.

I would never live there so long as the current toxic blend of religion and politics dominates the Southern political scene.