But you know what? He still played sports left-handed. His sport was baseball, and as a baseball player, being a lefty was a highly valued trait. But his handwriting was the worst, and he developed a stutter the same year he was forced to switch hands in school. Don’t tell me that those things aren’t related.

Did you know that in the Dark Ages, people who used their left hand were considered evil and even satanic? The word “sinister” is Latin for left, the devil is portrayed as left-handed, and in the Dark Ages, southpaws were accused of witchcraft and put to death. Can you imagine a world so ignorant?

Yeah, sadly, you can—because even though the particulars change, ignorance is a cockroach you can’t kill no matter how hard you try. It hides in dark, fetid places, then darts out into the open.

Which brings me to the situation I now found myself in.

Intellectually, I thought I knew what being gay meant. Same-sex attraction. Simple, right? It’s part of who you are, like your handedness, or the color of your eyes. But I wasn’t seeing the whole picture—the whole person—because for so many, it’s not a part of who you are, it’s right there at the core, defining who you are. How much more horrifying, then, when someone rejects you at your very core?

And so you end up with two choices. Either you embrace it and demand that people accept you for who you truly are . . . or you live your life in silent desperation, hiding it from the light, or even denying it to yourself. Not a way anyone should have to live. But there are still plenty of witch-burners out there—and some of them are in our own heads.

Back in my old world—my original one—I always considered myself a tolerant person and tried to distance myself from those who weren’t—although sometimes I would rationalize the intolerance of friends and look the other way. You know how when a friend says a joke that maybe shouldn’t have been said? Rather than calling them out on it, you let it go. Pretend it doesn’t matter.

But it does matter. And you know it.

I will admit—and shamefully so—that I would ignore it when a friend smirked about one of the openly gay kids at school, or said something like “That’s so gay.” I didn’t join in, but I didn’t discourage it either. I just let it go. And as my memories of this new world flooded me, I realized that I’d done the same thing here—but for a different reason. Here, I was afraid that speaking up would out me. Which meant that in this world, I was one of those people living in silent desperation.