Songmaster was the one where the walkon gay character was a pedophile.

The main character and hero was also happy to explore his sexuality with another young man once he was a teenager. It screwed him up forever, which could, I suppose, be read as an anti-gay-sex statement, but the reasoning was that he had all these weird drugs in his system that would have screwed him up no matter who or what he slept with. He didn't blame the other boy afterwards or seem to experience any remorse about the decision, despite his thereafter permanent impotence.

But anyway, yeah, I'm totally over the guy in many respects.

I loved Farnham's Freehold when I was in my teens and eating up everything Heinlein ever wrote. Perhaps I should revisit it.

I read it again just last week! It suffers from much of the same terribleness that too many of Heinlein's not-aimed-at-Juveniles novels have (older, wiser man paired up through circumstances with younger, beautiful, wicked-smart-but-somehow-completely-without-agency female, for example) with some serious added racial squick.

So much Heinlein is ridiculous to read because he was ahead of his time in some ways, but completely batty and off-the-wall in others. You see it all the time in his treatment of women - I think he would have declared himself a feminist, but rarely if ever do his female characters really seem like people - they're usually more like Mary Sues of convenient sexual availability to the hero. I almost think that Farnham's Freehold was trying to be a fictional treatise against the ridiculous of racial inequality, but he failed so thoroughly at overcoming his own internal prejudices there that it just came off gross. My grandparents, parents, and to some extent even I have similar issues there (I'm ashamed of them, and am glad I've moved from the South so hopefully I'll be able to raise my kids without those instincts at all) but we never tried to write a novel exploring it in its extremes.

...that got long. Oops.

I remember seeing notices for Keystone on my highschool and college campuses (newsletters, flyers, etc.). And yet somehow, it wasn't till I was 21 that I figured out that Keystone was not some kind of clever reference to Keystone Kops, but to something to do with Christianity.

(I still don't know the specifics, but then, I really don't care.)

Then again, it wasn't till about two weeks ago that I figured out what the Hs in 4-H stand for. (I was at a farm demonstration, and they had flyers.) Yes, I am an urban/suburban creature.

Alpha-bits for the current topic: Christians of any sort were a bit of an oddity at my school, and most of those had extremely liberal interpretations of theology. It was definitely considered weird to be openly Christian in many of the circles there, but they weren't generally harassed.

The one girl who was trying to get her biology degree so as to do research that would help her disprove evolution was especially maligned, but then again she was also mean, annoying, and not especially bright. Not sure what the reaction would have been if she were a nice kid - probably quiet disbelief.

I grew up in suburban NJ, too, and religion was sort of ... something your parents made you do. There was a kind of strict divide between Jewish kids and Christian kids until high school, too.

A huge percentage of the kids I went to high school with were Catholic, and the thing to do was attend 5 p.m. mass on Saturday night, which meant collecting a program from the church and hanging out somewhere until you could safely go home and show it to your parents as proof you'd attended.

There was one group -- Young Life, I think -- that tried to make inroads for a while, and did with some kids, but it was a little ... culty-seeming to the rest of us. Most of the kids in it had "Godsquad!" written on their notebooks, and for a bunch of disaffected 80s teens who were heavily into smoking and drinking, etc., Young Life was a whole different, and not entirely appealing, world.

I was thinking mostly about college when I first responded. In high school tons of people went to church each Sunday with their families, myself often among them. In university dorms regular attendance probably would've raised some eyebrows, though not to any greater extent than the girl who called her mother every day or the person who had a car but wouldn't give people rides.

At NU, the sidewalk along the main drag was pretty regularly covered in giant chalk "YAY JESUS" murals whenever one of the Christian student groups had an event. There was nobody in my immediate circle of friends who was a regular churchgoer (except for one girl who converted to Mormonism freshman year, but there was a whole complicated backstory there), but it wouldn't have been considered unusual in the general student population.

I went to Catholic college, so it was not at all unusual for students to go to Mass on Sundays. It was also not unusual for students to NOT go. And while excessive religiosity was a bit raised-eyebrow among the theater crowd, "excessive" was pretty loosely defined, given that several of the church-goers were gay, at least three of my friends went on to get their MDiv, and I know of at least two ministers from that group...

I went to Marquette, a Jesuit university, and Mass attendance was pretty high, but you didn't get the fisheye if you didn't go. You had plenty of choices for which mass to attend--Saturday evening or Sunday morning at the huge Gesu Church, Saturday midnight at one of the dorms, Sunday morning at Joan of Arc Chapel, or Sunday night at your dorm (which many of us girls went to in our pjs, since it was a single-sex dorm). There were also Baptist and other Protestant churches relatively close by or at least accessable by city bus.

If you didn't go, though, or professed yourself as atheist/agnostic, it was no big deal to most of us. The Campus Crusade for Christ people would fuss if you were out as being a/a, otherwise it wasn't anyone's business other than your own.

I do remember the rather horrified reaction one of my dorm neighbors, who was Campus Crusade, had to seeing Jesus Christ, Superstar for the first time. "That's blasphemous!!" she said while my roommate and I walked back to our dorm singing "What's the Buzz?" at full volume.

See, all y'all are making the mistake of talking about student religious behavior in real reality. The whole "closet Christian" thing doesn't exist in any known universe, but is a really common trope in the Christian fiction market, which sells the hell out of stories about how Christians are an oppressed minority.

I went to a small Anglican college that rang the chapel bell several times to a day to let you know when prayer service was, and even then the religious people were ghettoized as "the God squad". Still, it was small enough that people mingled somewhat outside their groups.