I'm not explaining your experience to you. I'm telling you that your experience growing up in 1 place doesn't give you the ability to generalize a entire region.

>exurban Atlanta

Exurban Atlanta is not Atlanta. That's like saying the Jersey Shore is Manhattan.

> I'm telling you that your experience growing up in 1 place doesn't give you the ability to generalize a entire region.

And where did I do that? I am actually quite happy to generalize, but the only thing I've said in the comment you were replying to is that I experienced discrimination in the South. A simple factual statement that says nothing in general about the South, aside from the fact that at least one person experienced discrimination there. You're inventing statements in your head ("he's saying every last person in the South is homophobic!") and attributing them to me, based off of... nothing.

All that said, I do think there are accurate generalizations you can make about the South, or any large region. To take an extreme example, if someone said they had left the Middle East because the people around them were homophobic, you wouldn't be jumping in to defend the region because Beirut has a comparatively bustling gay scene right now.

ETA: And, on further thought, if we're going to be stridently anti-generalization, you're generalizing about Atlanta. Forsyth County, for instance, is definitely exurban and just as definitely part of the Atlanta metropolitan area. Just because you want to present a rosy picture doesn't mean you can generalize and say that every place in Atlanta is a beautiful utopia for LGBT residents.

> I'm always direct when pointing out that I left the South partially because of discrimination

Any reasonable person who reads will infer that "the South" is that thing that is discriminatory in general. If you instead meant something else you worded it very poorly.

I honestly have a hard time believing that you don't understand how the sentence "I left X because of Y." implies that X is Y.

"I left my marriage because of domestic violence." It's entirely possible to construct a meaning where your spouse wasn't the one beating you, but that's the logical inference.

If you didn't intend to generalize that the South is discriminatory overall then why didn't you just say: I left my hometown because of discrimination? What additional meaning does "the South" add to that if you really just mean:

"I left my home town because of discrimination. My hometown happens to be in the South, but I don't think the South at large is any more or less discriminatory than any other region."

>All that said, I do think there are accurate generalizations you can make about the South, or any large region.

Sure. I don't think you can based on the experience of having lived in one tiny area of that region.

>Forsyth County, for instance, is definitely exurban and just as definitely part of the Atlanta metropolitan area.

Exurban is one step away from farmland. The differences between Cumming and say the area around Little Five Points is much greater than the difference between that same area of Atlanta and San Francisco.

It’s amazing how many people are going out of their way to prove your point.

What point? That living in one small exurb in the South gives them enough experience to generalize a region of 125 million people?

Your comments indicated that such an explanation was necessary to improve your understanding.