Lil' story and data point:
Most of my friends/drinking buddies are straight. As a matter of fact, I am token gay in the crowd. They always make me feel welcome, I don't have to self-censor (from "s/he's cute" to discussions of "who got laid last night," I am a welcome participant in bar talk), but they all def. come from conservative backgrounds, most were in the military, and we do NOT discuss political or GLBT issues.
Well, the other day, I was reading an article about the upcoming 60 minutes piece, and I did feel the need to share. I filled the guys in on not only the fact that Manzella's brothers-in-arms don't care about his status but also that an official investigation had reviewed tons of gay evidence yet declared with a straight face, "nothing gay here."
The room literally erupted into cheers. "That's awesome!" "Bad ass!" "[unprintable] yeah!" I was startled and for a moment thought they were stringing me along. But it was true. The guys not only couldn't care less about whether a comrade is gay, but they *loved* the idea of an official investigation throwing up a little bit of civil (military?) disobedience, no matter how small, to their superiors to protect a valued servicemember from an unjust and ultimately military-weakening policy.
We are winning. And yes, that is the sound of change.

It's interesting...when I came out and started living as a woman fulltime, my parents, who are both Brooklyn-born and raised, college-educated people, were very skeptical and uninformed. Still to this day, ten years later, while both of them accept me as I am, my Dad always has a hesitation in his voice when he addresses me by name and neither of them have ever read anything I've ever written, or, at least, not that they're willing to admit to me.

Personally, I think they're still more than a bit, for lack of a better term, casually transphobic. It's not that they have a truly negative opinion of me and how I live my life, but they also don't go out of their way to make an effort to understand either. They deal with it when it's in their faces, when we see or talk to each other, but they really don't go out of their way to.

They can, however, surprise me. One night, while visiting at home, one of the next door neighbors, who is a bonafide blue-ribbon homo/transphobic asshole, called the cops because my car, which I had just filled up with gas, smelled slightly of gasoline.

The cops came and noticed what was perhaps a pinhole leak in my gas tank filler pipe. When I came outside to talk to them, they were fine and very friendly as long as they thought they were talking to a woman. The moment they took and read my driver's license and realized I'm trans they instantly became hostile and insisted that my car had to be towed and impounded.

I was furious, of course, and was going inside to cool down for a moment, but just as I was about the close the door behind me (when she thought I was already out of earshot), I saw my mother explode, call the cops "lousy bigots", and chew them out to the point where I was actually starting to worry that they'd arrest her. I'd never seen anything like it from her.

They took the car anyway, but when I came to town the following day to get it out of impound, I found it had actually been towed to a local service station and no tickets had been issued. I don't know for sure (Mom still won't confirm it one way or the other, but that usually means I'm not being told something), but I got the feeling there had been a conversation somewhere and amends were being made without the cops having to admit any guilt or be obvious about it.

There is still room for Sherry at PFLAG! Way to go girl!