Taylor McCormick, a native of Blanco, Texas, is one of two gay UT students who were outed to their parents when they were added to the Queer Chorus’ discussion group. (Photo by Lance Rosenfield)
In case you missed it, and in what almost seemed like a sick nod to National Coming Out Day, The Wall Street Journal on Saturday published a harrowing tale about two University of Texas at Austin students who were outed as gay to their fundamentalist fathers as a result of a privacy loophole on Facebook.
Basically, both students had joined UT’s Queer Chorus, whose president added them to its Facebook discussion group, not knowing that it would bypass their individual privacy settings and share the information with their parents.
The disclosure prompted one of the student’s fathers to call her repeatedly, threatening to stop paying her car insurance and demanding that she go on Facebook and renounce both the chorus and homosexuality.
“To all you queers. Go back to your holes and wait for GOD,” the girl’s father wrote on his own Facebook page. “Hell awaits you pervert. Good luck singing there.”
The father of the other student, who’s from Blanco, Texas. didn’t talk to him for weeks. And his mother — although she already knew he was gay — is worried about how the disclosure might affect her business selling insurance.
“Every kid in this town now knows,” the mother told The WSJ. “I am sure that I have lost clients, but they are not going to tell you why. That is living in a small town.”
Granted, these dads are douche bags, they were gonna find out eventually anyway, and the students were incredibly naive to trust Facebook with their private information.
But still, let’s face it, Facebook really sucks.
