Coming Out

Coming Out Gay At 16
The Internet can be a scary place and one hears stories of people chatting for months only to discover the person at the other end of the connection is not who he seems to be. But often times people are real and genuine. I encountered one young man reaching out desperately to be heard. He happened to dial me up. This is his story.
It has been an exhausting, draining couple of weeks.
Last week I met T for the first time, a young man who at 16 knows very clearly he is gay. He lives on a farm in a very tiny community about 135 km north east of Toronto. In mid-January, he found me on the net and asked for my help. After a terrifying experience at the hands of the local school and health system, during which he was outed to his mom and urged to commit suicide so that the world would have one less gay man, he ended up in my care for a weekend, delivered to me by a frantic mom. There was some major concern about the reaction of his dad when he got the news.
T has been out of school now for about 12 days as all this has played out. There is virtually no support for gay youth anywhere near his community and even the nearest city of about 100,000 has support for gay men but not teenagers. I have been working with him and his mom to see about facilities in Toronto. There is a gay high school program here but surprisingly little else for gay teenagers beyond a youth shelter -- which is pretty scary and not terribly gay positive.
Anyway, T returned this weekend and we hung out and chatted a lot more about life and stuff. We cooked a few meals together and he went to a gay youth drop in at the local community centre (I live in the heart of Toronto's thriving gay community). We also rented Billy Eliot, a film about an 11 year old living under oppressive circumstances who manages to find his voice and the courage to be who he is. The message was not lost on T.
The more I got to know him, the clearer it seemed that his fear, while real about what...