Message from:
The Coalition for Safer Schools of NYS, PO Box 2345, Malta, NY 12020

Email to: SARATOGANY@aol.com

The Real or Perceived Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered Student Protection Project

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New York Times Magazine, December 10, 2000
229 West 43d Street, New York, N.Y. 10036.
(E-Mail: magazine@nytimes.com )
( http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/index.html )

Lonely Gay Teen Seeking Same

JENNIFER EGAN

In the summer of 1999, when he was 15, a youth I will refer to by only his first name, Jeffrey, finally admitted to himself that he was gay. This discovery had been coming on for some time; he had noticed that he felt no attraction to girls and that he became aroused when showering with other boys after physical education class. But Jeffrey is a devout Southern Baptist, attending church several times each week, where, he says, the pastor seems to make a point of condemning homosexuality.

Jeffrey knew of no homosexuals in his high school or in his small town in the heart of the South. He prayed that his errant feelings were a phase. But as the truth gradually settled over him, he told me last summer during a phone conversation punctuated by nervous visits to his bedroom door to make sure no family member was listening in, he became suicidal.

"I'm a Christian -- I'm like, how could God possibly do this to me?" he said.

He called a crisis line for gay teen-agers, where a counselor suggested he attend a gay support group in a city an hour and a half away. But being 15, he was too young to drive and afraid to enlist his parents' help in what would surely seem a bizarre and suspicious errand.

It was around this time that Jeffrey first typed the words "gay" and "teen" into a search engine on the computer he'd gotten several months before and was staggered to find himself aswirl in a teeming online gay world, replete with resource centers, articles, advice columns, personals, chat rooms, message boards, porn sites and -- most crucially -- thousands of closeted and anxious kids like himself. That discovery changed his life.

"The Internet is the thing that has kept me sane," he told me. "I live constantly in fear. I can't be my true self. My mom complains: 'I can see you becoming more detached from us. You're always spending time on the computer.' But the Internet is my refuge."

Jeffrey and I met when he responded to an online message I posted, seeking gay teen-agers willing to discuss their online lives. When we were first getting to know each other, he made it clear that he could allow no overlap between his online gay life and the life he led in the "real world." He explained, "In our town, everybody knows everybody, and everybody knows everybody's business."

He feared that if word of his sexual orientation were to reach his parents, they might refuse to support him or pay for college. From his peers at school he dreaded violence, and with good reason: According to a 1996 study of the Seattle public schools, one in six gay teen-agers is beaten so badly during adolescence that he requires medical attention.

Jeffrey's computer is in his bedroom, garrisoned inside a thicket of codes and passwords. While he uses the Internet to communicate with high-school friends -- Jeffrey is now 16 and a junior in high school -- he has separate screen names and "instant messaging" services for these activities.

Jeffrey was hesitant to explore the online gay world at first, he said, certain he would somehow get caught. So he did the obvious thing -- the thing many Web pundits advise as a matter of safety when communicating with strangers online: He employed an alias, changed the town he came from and then threw in a few other "improvements" on his real identity. He said he came from a rich family, drove a BMW, had killer good looks and was 18 -- old enough to cruise the adult gay chat rooms.

But as his online friendships deepened, the phony elements of Jeffrey's story began to oppress him: "I was like, I can't be myself in real life, and I come on the Internet and I still can't be myself. Yeah, I'm gay, but it's a lie." In June of this year, he mustered his nerve and began telling his online friends that he was not quite the person they had believed.

By last summer, Jeffrey had an online boyfriend, whom I will call C., the first initial of his first name.

For homosexual teen-agers with computer access, the Internet has, quite simply, revolutionized the experience of growing up gay. Isolation and shame persist among gay teen-agers, of course, but now, along with the inhospitable families and towns in which many find themselves marooned, there exists a parallel online community -- real people like them in cyberspace with whom they can chat, exchange messages and even engage in (online) sex.

Gay teen-agers surfing the Net can find Web sites packed with information about homosexuality and about local gay support groups and counseling services, along with coming-out testimonials from young people around the world. Gay pornography is also available; a number of youths I spoke with, male and female, said that the availability of online porn had proved critical to their discovery of their sexual orientation.

Parents' attempts to restrict their children's access to hard-core Web sites are rarely a match for their kids' surpassing computer skills. Which means that a curious teen-ager not only has ready access to graphic material, but also can engage in sexual experimentation with peers that would be next to impossible in everyday life.

As one 13-year-old put it in an e-mail message, "I could say that the Internet made my life a living hell. ... It made me realize I'm different. I hated it ... but then I realized the Net helped me realize I'm gay. ... I'd rather find out now than when I'm 30 and married to my wife with two kids or something."

"The Internet is an inferior substitute for real-live human beings," says Kevin Jennings, executive director of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, a national organization working to end antigay bias in schools. "But it's frankly better than nothing, which is what gay youth have had before."

Online boyfriends and girlfriends were common among the gay teen-agers I spoke with. In some cases, the relationships had a sexual component, but what startled me was the level of closeness and intimacy teen-agers derived from these cyberrelationships. Jeffrey said that he and C. planned to attend the same college, and had even discussed marriage and the adoption of children.

Toward the middle of August, I e-mailed Jeffrey and didn't hear anything back. I wrote again; nothing. This is not especially unusual -- one liability of Web communication is that people sometimes disappear abruptly. Vanishing friends and intimates are frequent laments among gay teen-agers.

While the Internet provides a safe haven for countless gay teen-agers who don't dare confide their sexual orientations to the people around them, it is also a very easy place to get burned. It's not just that people disappear -- it's that in the end, you're never really sure who they were in the first place. And they don't really know you. Nor should they, many people say -- it's just too dangerous.

It was the end of September before I finally heard back from Jeffrey. "I am terribly sorry that I have not e-mailed you," he wrote. "My relationship with C. has 'gone down the drain,' so to speak. ... I am suffering from clinical depression."

The breaking point came during a discussion of monogamy. "From the beginning, C. told me, 'You're the only one. I could wait my whole life to have sex with you,"' Jeffrey recalled. But more recently, C.'s views on that subject seemed to shift. "He said: 'The distance is really getting to me. What's wrong with a little meaningless sex once in a while?' I was completely crushed."

Eventually, the two had it out. "He's like: 'You're really running this into the ground. We never met. It's not that hard to get over,"' Jeffrey recalled. "I was like, 'It's obviously a lot harder for me than it is for you.' He's like, 'I'm sorry, things change."'

Jeffrey found himself casting about frantically to understand the intensity of his despair. "It's like, Oh, my God, I'm crying over someone I've never seen, I've never touched. It's kind of scary."

As the months of e-mail and instant messages wore on, I felt a growing desire to meet face to face with one of the teen-agers I'd been speaking with online. Perhaps it's a natural outcome of so much disembodied communication; I was beginning to understand why, despite the dangers, a lot of teen-agers take their chances and try to convert the sterility of typing on-screen into the hapless vagaries of human contact.

I proposed the idea of a visit to Jeffrey, and he immediately agreed. In early November, I flew to a large Southern city and drove to the restaurant where I'd arranged to meet Jeffrey. He was feeling somewhat better about C., he said, but admitted this was partly because of the fact that he had guessed C.'s password and had begun checking his e-mail.

Shortly after that, Jeffrey noticed a new screen name among C.'s correspondence and opened it. Sure enough, it was from another boy. Jeffrey had since cultivated a friendship with the unsuspecting boy, who eventually did mention that he had been communicating online with someone named C.

In this way, Jeffrey had managed to monitor the relationship, occasionally deleting e-mail from the boy to C. that he didn't want C. to read. He was pleased that the relationship hadn't progressed very far and that C. and the new boy hadn't met in person. Jeffrey knew what he was doing was wrong, but he couldn't seem to help it.

When I spoke to Jeffrey at the end of Thanksgiving weekend, he had some news: He had managed to connect with a live human gay person, a 24-year-old man whom he drove to meet in a nearby city after first encountering him in an Internet chat room. They had dinner at a mall and shopped at the Gap and at Old Navy and at several music stores. At the end of the evening, they kissed, something Jeffrey had never done before.

"I had to do a double take," he said. "Whoa, OK. You're gay and so am I. I'm actually here, doing this."

"It was so incredible, because it was like, I could go back and do it all over again today," he said. "And he's not just a screen name, it's not just typing and it's not just a picture. It's three-dimensional, you know? Reality. It was awesome."

· Jennifer Egan is a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine.

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This message has been distributed as a free informational service for the expressed interest of non-profit research and educational purposes only.

PRIMER WEBSITES

Unity Through Diversity (Long Island)
http://www.geocities.com/WestHollywood/Castro/3212/
GLSEN --- Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network
www.glsen.org
Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund
www.lambdalegal.org
Safe Schools Coalition of Washington
www.safeschools-wa.org
The P.E.R.S.O.N. Project Home Page
www.youth.org/loco/PERSONProject/

Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays
www.pflag.org
Empire State (NY) Pride Agenda
www.prideagenda.org
GLAAD
Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation
www.glaad.org
LIGALY Long Island Gay and Lesbian Youth
http://www.ligaly.com/

"The Real or Perceived Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgendered Student Protection Project"
("Being safe at school should not be a radical concept".. Jamie Nabozny)

A project of:
Coalition for Safer Schools of New York State

John Myers
Director of Operations and Programs
PO Box 2345
Malta, NY 12020
(518) 587-0176

Email: saratogany@aol.com

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