This sounds like something you'd read in an Anne Rice novel:

I’ve always been in love with the word Gypsy. I know that it’s considered a slur, but I’ve never seen it as symbolic with thievery or any of the other stereotypes that some people associate with them. I know my opinion doesn’t matter because it’s not my people being insulted, but the term has always been so romantic for me. The old-school stereotypes of brightly painted covered wagons, a flair of skirts dancing around camp fires and fortune telling.

I think a lot of my ignorance about other cultures stems from romanticizing what I’ve read in cheap paperbacks. It’s no excuse, I know, but I have this weird love-affair with words and the imagery they invoke, regardless of how wrong or politically incorrect it might all seem in this day and age.

Even the modern portrayal of Travelers, I envy the closeness that they have to their people and culture, even if they’re a little xenophobic, as most tightly-knit groups tend to be. I used to know a woman who had married into a family of Travelers and she used to say how much she wished her husband’s grandmother would share some of her knowledge with her, but that they refused to expose their rituals to outsiders.

I’m so in love with the idea of that, and yet I have to wonder if maybe the isolation is the cause for so many of their woes and the way society tends to judge and reject them. I enjoy the idea of cultures having these secret rites and ceremonies that no one else has access too. There’s just this extreme romanticism in the concept of secrecy that I’m enamored with.