Me. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.

Episode 48. Oh, oh, oh, oh, Oh, oh. When people ask Rob Hill why he does the kind of work that he does, he explains by telling them a story about his mother.

In 2012, I was going to leave Mississippi.

And it was right before the election, the presidential election.

And I was talking on the phone to my mom, and she said,

you're not going to vote for Obama, are you?

And I said, yes, I'm, of course, I'm going to vote for Obama. And she said, and I said, why wouldn't you vote for Obama?

She said, well, he's for gay rights.

And we had never openly talked about the fact that I'm gay.

She knew it, you know, but it was one of those things I guess she thought that maybe I was suppressing it, I was denying it, you know, because of my

faith or whatever but I got on the phone and called my partner and I said let's get the hell out of

here.

So that's what Rob did. His partner Ryan got a job in Manhattan. They found an apartment. They got ready to move there. They started packing up. They were going to leave their home state, leave the bigotry and the prejudice,

the intolerance behind.

But when I was on my phone with my mom talking to her about that, and she didn't like that I was

leaving. to her about that and she didn't like that I was leaving and she said don't go to New York and I said why and I said because they all go there

and so what she was afraid of is that people were going to assume that I'm gay, which I am.

Rob's mother was in that place that a lot of southern mothers are when they sort of kind of know that their son is gay or their daughter is a lesbian or anything

in the LGBT- spectrum and they are concerned not so much with the fact of it because they love their child.

They're just concerned what everyone else might think.

And in this situation, the first thing that popped in his mom's mind was,

what will people think if my son goes to New York?

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