Weston Brown's Story: A Family and School Tragedy (Ep. 8)

Courageous Conversations About Our Schools

Weston Brown was homeschooled in Dallas, Texas and had limited access to the internet, books, television, and the outside world. At age 24, he mustered the courage to tell his parents that he was gay. Their reaction was not unexpected, he said. “They thought that I was mentally ill or demonically possessed.” Brown had no intentions of battling his parents over their anti-LGBTQ views -- until, that is, he viewed a viral video of his mother demanding that a local school board in Texas remove library books that she considered pornographic or that promoted LGBTQ themes. She also urged the Board to have a local pastor decide which books should remain in the schools’ libraries. In this episode, Brown describes the painful estrangement from his parents and siblings and why he decided to speak out against his mother’s efforts to ban books in public school libraries.