One day, someone toilet-papered our house, and I had to explain to my parents that this is what American kids do to losers. Undeterred, my dad eagerly raked the toilet paper into a garbage bag and put it in his bathroom for future use. “Free toilet paper!” he said happily over dinner.

The day in high school we were supposed to have sex ed, we had instead what I can only describe as Prejudice Happy Hour. We were told to shout out qualities that we wanted in a friend, and the teacher would write them on the board. This was intended to build self-esteem, the key to avoiding pregnancy. (The belief at the time seemed to be that self-confident people never have sexual intercourse.)

“Christian,” someone said. The teacher dutifully wrote it on the board.

“Straight,” someone else ventured. The teacher wrote it down.

A couple kids raised their hands in protest. I’d like to think I was among them, but the embarrassing truth is I don’t remember if I was.

What I do remember is the teacher defending the list’s inclusion of “straight.” If a gay person stood next to him, he explained, he would feel uncomfortable. But personally, he added, he had no problem with gay people.

I would go home and log on to our enormous, shared family PC. I had maybe visited ten websites at that point, all of them for school papers. The one exception was sfgate.com, where I could read columns by Mark Morford.

In my teenage disgruntlement, I had begun painting Texans with too broad a brush. Kind, open-minded Christians got lumped in with fundamentalists who beat their children in front of strangers. I wrote off apolitical popular kids, by virtue of their likability, as ignorant and unsophisticated. I mentally ignored the English teacher who was fond of saying, with a twinkle in her eye, “Candy is dandy, but sex don’t rot your teeth,” and instead focused on my classmate who said she was confident we would win the Iraq War, because God was on our side. (As psychology poetically tells us, other people are all alike; people within our own tribe are dazzlingly unique.) Years later, I learned through Facebook that a lot of my classmates had grown up to be politically moderate yuppies who were not so different from me.