But the GSA did begin to change things. Ahn says the club "showed that a community could exist even in a hostile environment. Just by our existence, we let LGBTQ students feel more welcome and comfortable at their school." Teachers and straight-identified kids got involved too: "During our first Day of Silence, even some teachers participated, and the organized and widespread effort showed that there were far more people at the school were accepting than anyone previously realized." Ahn says this show of support might surprise anyone who views the South as uniformly homophobic:

[T]here are a lot more supportive people here than a northerner would expect to find. Much of the assumption from the North is that the whole of the South is this monolithically oppressive place full of rednecks and hillbillies who shoot gay people on sight. But it's really not that case. There are pockets of very supportive, loving people, allies and other LGBTQ people. And I'm very glad to have found and brought together those people at my high school.

Many current students I talked to said the same thing. The South isn't all anti-gay -- but a lot of the people there are. Ben, the current president of the Walton GSA (that's him with his eyes closed in the pic above), told me that while "there is definitely homophobia alive and breathing in the South," younger people are more open-minded. He explains, "my generation is the first that grew up with the internet -- the ability to gain any piece of information from any source at any times. This gives us an advantage to see what the world thinks, not just what our parents or communities think." Anna Turkett, who helped found the GSA at the Alabama School of Fine Arts in Birmingham, said her high school was actually a liberal haven, the first in Alabama to add sexual orientation to its non-discrimination policy. Before she started there, though, she went through a lot of "isolating comments" -- a boy made fun of her for having posters of girls in her locker, parents didn't want her around their kids. And at ASFA, she found that it was actually the younger kids who were least receptive to the GSA -- they'd come from a culture where it was okay to be discriminatory, and they hadn't yet learned that ASFA wasn't like that.

Not all schools are such havens. Says Mickie Elliott, a member of the Walton GSA, "unfortunately, a lot of teachers, administrators, and students at our school are not supportive of our club. Some students call our GSA the 'gay club' or feel weirded out when you say that you are part of the Gay-Straight Alliance." Stillwagon agrees -- she says Walton's actually "a lot less homophobic than many other places in the south," but still, "I never felt fully comfortable being out." She explains,

Anti-gay churches abound (particularly Johnson Ferry Baptist Church). Many students look down on homosexuality and and most on gender variance (if they're even aware of it). Queer students either stay in the closet or, if they're open about their orientation, are known as "that gay kid". There's a lot of ignorance in the community.

Ryan, who's part of the GSA at ASFA, is even more critical:

The South is really awful. It's not really easy anywhere, but it's particularly bad down here because of how thick the religious culture is. Church is expected of you, and if you don't go to church people sneer at you and start to gossip. I knew people in middle school who basically had to be in-the-closet atheists. So when a kid comes out, or at least tries to, the parents and teachers don't even have to tell the kid he's going to hell, because it's like they've trained their kids to say that in their place. It's pretty frightening, the religious conservatism. Obviously, not every Christian down here is evil, and there are a lot of gay Christians. It's just the militant and abusive Christians that make life for gay kids in public schools (no pun intended) hell.