Tom CoatesVerified account

Really interested in this graph mapping type of alcohol consumption to high/low turnout and Republican/Democrat leaning as prepared by @mattyglesias - and also fascinated that the original tweets from him seem to have disappeared from Twitter completely. Wonder why.https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1103031078296735745 …

And if your faith, whatever it is, doesn’t agree with that, I just don’t care. I don’t believe in your faiths but I learned about them at school and was taught to be respectful of our differences. You can do the damn same thing for LGBT people.

Schools 100% should tell their students about LGBT issues, schools should absolutely make it clear you can’t catch being gay, that gay kids need to be treated the same as everyone else, that homophobia in schools is as unacceptable as racism.

I protested section 28 as a student, fought for an equal age of consent and still speak out about the horrors that confront LGBT kids - twice as likely to attempt suicide, twice as likely to succeed, 25-40% of homeless youth are LGBT, 90%+ hear daily homophobic abuse.

That teacher, by the way, *still* teaches at that school thirty years later, and I routinely wonder if he’s still saying things like this. It created an atmosphere where gay kids lived in fear and where being gay was always an insult or an attack.

I thought at the time, “how brave that kid must have been to stand up in front of his schoolmates and teachers and said that”. And I sat there as a gay kid, absolutely quiet. Two other kids I now know we’re gay kept their mouths shut too.

When I was at school, a geography teacher told a whole class a homophobic joke. Everyone laughed. And then he said the previous year someone in the class stood up and said, “what’s wrong with being gay”. And everyone laughed again.