Growing up in a mostly white, Midwestern town in the late 1970s and early 80s, watching reruns of The Donna Reed Show and Leave It to Beaver, I figured I would finish school, find a girl to marry, buy a little house with a white picket fence, and have a couple of kids who looked like me. This was the middle-class American dream, and at the time it never occurred to me that life would turn out any other way.