NY Times: A Refuge for Gay Students When Families Turn Away

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A Refuge for Gay Students When Families Turn Away

RYAN KIM had just delivered an order - penne alla vodka and a Coke, as if he could ever forget - when his creaky old car broke down for the last time. Without wheels, he would have to quit his night job at the Italian restaurant. And with the bus drivers on strike in Los Angeles, he would have to walk a 10-mile round trip every day between his day shift as a bank teller and his room in a Salvation Army residence, what passed for home for an 18-year-old who had left it.

At that moment in October 2003, Ryan surrendered to a corrosive thought: what if he just hadn't come out as gay? If he had stayed in the closet, he would have been two months into his freshman year at New York University, which had admitted him. He would be getting tuition money from his parents. He would still be the star student, the worthy son, instead of an outcast on the edge of poverty.

But he knew what his mind and body had been telling him since his was 5 or 6 years old, a set of inchoate messages that suddenly made sense one day in his junior year of high school, when the health teacher introduced the subject of homosexuality. He knew there was finally no choice in the matter.

Part of him felt proud that he had stepped forward as gay during his senior year at Highlands Ranch High School near Denver, endured taunts in the locker room and stood up as president of the school's Gay-Straight Alliance.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/08/nyregion/08education.html?ex=1103173200&en=2c042f41632dd21e&ei=5006&partner=ALTAVISTA1

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