That's an interesting story of yours. Strangely, I don't have one like it. I never met any "out" gays until I went to college in Berkeley - which I chose in part because I thought getting a wider experience of the world than the isolated suburbs provided would be good for me - and fell into local sf fandom which had plenty of them. "Oh," I thought, "gay people. How interesting." But they were just people like everybody else, no odder - or less odd - than everybody else, and I just left it at that.