I think Jensen's family was aggressively normal, in that Texas way. Backyard barbeques. Church on Sunday. Spare the rod. I think he may not have wanted to disappoint them, because hell, his parents were so happy together living like this. There was nothing wrong with it. Why try to fix what wasn't broken? Never quite understanding that one mold doesn't fit all people. He may not have even MET an openly gay person until college. Before that it was all "art fag" cracks at school, and his dad dragging him away from the books to toss the ball around. A sense of disappointing his parents anyway for going into academia rather than a working class industry. That unspoken fear of the unusual; nobody ever TALKED about diversity. "I don't care if a person's blue" secretly hiding a sense that different was alien and wrong.