This article from the New York Times does a wonderful job in showing how gay youngsters are coming to terms with their sexual identity and benefiting from it. The article also relates how parents are also doing a much better job than they used to in dealing with it.
Dan Woog, a writer and longtime soccer coach at Staples High in Westport, helped found OutSpoken in 1993. He says for the first 10 years, the typical member was 17 to 22 years old. “They’d come in saying: ‘I’m gay. My life is over,’ ” Mr. Woog says. “One literally hyperventilated walking through the door.”
But in recent years, he says, the kids are 14 to 17 and more confident. “They say: ‘Hi, I’m gay. How do I meet people?’ ”
For the first 10 years, Mr. Woog never saw a parent; meetings were from 4 to 6 p.m. Sunday, so members could get out of the house without arousing suspicion. Now, he says, parents often bring the child to the first meeting.
He believes teenagers are coming out sooner because the Internet makes them feel less isolated and they’re seeing positive role models in the media.
This article details the process of a teenager named Zach O'Connor and his family as they walked together through the process of Zach coming out. The thing that strikes me the most about this is all of the "unlearning" that Zach won't have to go through. Since I've been involved with the GLBT community, I've seen many horror stories of how people coming out in their 20's. 30's and 40's have to learn a brand new set of social skills. If you've been brought up to act one way, it is an uphill battle to develop an entirely new lifestyle.
Fortunately, it appears more young men and women are avoiding that these days.
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I love this story, especially when I think of another Zach, Zach Stark whose parents forced him to attend Love in Action the summer of 2005. What a contrast!
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