Thread by @KEBrightbill

I have some thoughts about homeschooling and pop culture gaps, and also about people assuming that your pop culture gap has something to do with being homeschooled.

First, making a big deal about somebody's pop culture gaps just makes them feel more like an outsider, so don't do it. Everybody, and I do mean everybody, has pop culture gaps unless they're a Tarantinoesque encyclopedia of everything pop culture no matter how obscure.

The problem comes when your pop culture gaps are because your parents and your subculture kept you from experiencing the same pop culture and your peers and it was outside your control. That makes every pop culture reference you don't get a reminder of what you missed.

For example, I've got big pop culture gaps from when I was in college and could get 3 channels over rabbit ears with a tuner card in my computer. I don't care about that. I do care that I never really heard George Michael until karaoke in Vietnam.
kathrynbrightbill.com/2016/12/26/on-…

I missed that common 80s/90s kid experience of being a kid who didn't necessarily know they were queer but was drawn to certain artists, and it was because I grew up in an evangelical culture where Sunday school teachers loved to lecture us about secular music.

My evangelical and homeschool-related pop culture gaps are primarily musical. Pop culture gaps I have with TV are partly because my parents used to be really late tech adopters so no cable (I was in middle school before we got a microwave, mind you), and just not watching things.

I know nothing about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, for example, entirely because I was a proto-hipster and deemed the show far too popular to watch. That might have been different if I'd have been part of playground discussions, but probably not.

On the other hand, I've got pop culture knowledge of shows like Murphy Brown, Golden Girls and Designing Women that I was probably too young for, but my parents liked them so they'd let me watch.

It bugs me when people assume that the fact I've seen, say, maybe 10 episodes of Friends ever, had something to do with being homeschooled. It didn't, I just don't like Friends. Not every pop culture gap a homeschool alumni has is because of homeschooling.

When I talk about how I wish I had more queer rep in the shows I watched as a kid, and that I wish I'd had shows like #Supergirl and #LegendsOfTomorrow, or well, all the @GBerlanti superhero shows, that's not a homeschool thing. It's a Hollywood thing.

I've been watching old school Dynasty and my takeaway has been that it's a good thing my parents didn't watch it because everything to do with Steven Carrington is a complete and total trainwreck of terrible messages.

Missing out on parts of pop culture is kind of a mixed blessing. I use Dynasty as one example, but my sister and I were talking a while back about streaming some of those shows we didn't watch in the 80s and realizing we missed out on a ton of racist pop culture messaging.

A lot of shows from the 80s and 90s have not aged well at all because of all the casual racism and sexism. Watching Mr. Rogers and Reading Rainbow was, in retrospect, the better option.

I lucked out because the TV shows that my parents actually liked when I was a kid were ones that are remembered by how progressive they were. Which is obviously not the experience of every homeschool kid, but it's important to remember that experiences aren't monolithic.

Homeschool alumni have a lot in common no matter what part of the country they were homeschooled in because of the way ideas percolated though conventions and homeschooling manuals, but just because you know one homeschool kid doesn't mean you know us all.

On a related "mixed blessings" front, I suspect that part of the reason I'm comfortable adapting to other cultures is because I learned to be really sensitive to cultural cues so I didn't come across as the "weird homeschooler" stereotype. It's helped me blend in places.