Hey, the bird show. Melissa Carter has a reunion coming up, milestone reunion coming up.

Oh, God, yes. It's my 20th high school reunion. And it's one of those that everybody thinks, oh, that is so far away.

It'll be, I'll be old when that happens. And sure enough, here it is. And I can't believe that it's already been 20 years.

But it was last year, I was class president, so I knew last

year going into the fall that it was about time to start planning the reunion, because that's

one of the jobs of the class president is to do that. And so I started, you know, kind of

getting in touch with some of the other class officers and some of the other people, trying to

see if anybody in my hometown of Columbia, Tennessee had started the process yet or if I was

starting the process or that kind of thing.

Then I got really nervous about it because I actually wrote a blog last fall about the

fact that being gay is there's always coming out somewhere in your life.

I've been out on the radio for 13 years. I'm,

you know, like the, you know, people tease me about being the outest lesbian in Atlanta and here I am,

but the idea of my 20th high school reunion was really nerve-wracking because I thought, you know what,

I'm not out to these people. I actually came to Atlanta when I graduated college so that I could be out. So I didn't, you know, one of the reasons I left Tennessee was because I'm gay. So I thought, well, okay, you know what? At my 10 year, I wasn't dating anybody. So when I went back, I didn't, I didn't say anything, didn't make a big deal about it. Some other people had planned it. So I just kind of was an attendant and I went and had a good time, had a blast. But I never really, you know, everybody at that point at your tenure, they're not, a lot of people aren't married. People haven't really started their families yet. So it's not really a big deal. But I thought it wasn't like they had a chance to ask you too many questions. Yeah, because they thought, well, you date in your body, and I say no, and it was authentic.

And they're like, oh, okay, you know, da-da-da. Has Atlanta? So, but this time, I am dating somebody, and I always said, you know what, I want to be authentic and I want to, you know, keep my, you know, character intact. and I'm not going to go back like some, you know, scared 18-year-old like I had been before.

And I'm going to go and I'm going to be out, and I'm going to bring my girlfriend, and we're going to be at this reunion.

But how is that going to be received?

So I had written this, again, this blog last fall and talking about this, and then I got in touch with our vice president of the class and his name

is Garland and he contacted me back and he was like you know hey you know it's good I can't

believe it's been 20 years and then he wrote in there oh and by the way I read your blog and I had

already published that blog so I thought okay here we go so I wrote him an email. Did you get nervous?

...