Check out The Advocate‘s list of the 21 top news stories of 2011. Pay special attention to numbers 10 and 18 (Tracy Morgan’s rant and the Bachmann clinic scandal) — Truth Wins Out broke both of them.

In 2011, TWO also nixed Exodus International’s “ex-gay” Apple iPhone app, went on a 12 state university speaking tour in the Midwest and the South, offered original reporting from inside the belly of the beast (including the Values Voter Summit and The Call Detroit), took on “ex-gay” road shows in places such as West Virginia, Houston and Asheville, NC, and protested the Southern Baptist Convention.

I know I’m speaking for Wayne, Evan, and myself when I say that I’m proud of the work we do at TWO and grateful to all of our supporters and contributors who make it possible. Thank you! Please consider an end-of-year tax-deductible contribution so we can continue our important work in 2012.

Filmmaker Morgan Jon Fox has been touring the nation this fall, premiering his six-years-in-the-making documentary This Is What Love In Action Looks Like. The film was inspired by the protests that began when a sixteen year-old named Zach posted a plea for help, after learning that his parents were forcing him into a now defunct “ex-gay” program called Refuge, run by Love in Action in Memphis, Tennessee. The sold-out hometown premiere in Memphis was Friday night, as part of the Indie Memphis film festival, and let’s just say the film did well:

Memphis’ Morgan Jon Fox, who debuted the final version of his years-in-the-making documentary This is What Love in Action Looks Like at Playhouse on the Square Friday, was the big winner at the closing night awards ceremony of the 14th annual Indie Memphis Film Festival.

Fox’s film, which documents the plight of a Memphis teen forced into a church-based “gay de-programming” institution and the surprising evolution of the institution’s director, picked up two awards from two different juries: It picked up a Special Documentary Jury Award and Best Hometowner Feature, the latter coming with a $1000 cash prize presented by the Memphis & Shelby County Film and Television Commission.

“I’ve shown several films here and the feeling I get having a premiere here is different than anywhere,” Fox said after picking up the special jury award. He went on to express his appreciation for having a home “so loving and supportive.”

After the screening, a lively panel discussion happened, moderated by Chris Davis of The Memphis Flyer, and featured Fox, Peterson Toscano [who is in the film, and whom many of you are familiar with], E.J. Friedman, one of the original bloggers and activists who participated in the 2005 protests, former Love In Action leader John Smid, and also your own Evan Hurst of Truth Wins Out. Here’s a snapshot photographer Michael Norris took of that panel. I’m in the middle and Smid has the microphone [click to embiggen]:

A hearty Truth Wins Out congratulations goes out to Morgan for a job well done!

On October 12, Peter LaBarbera (Porno Pete) upbraided blogger Joe Jervis for pointing out that the Ku Klux Klan agreed with LaBarbera on a particular issue. In a typical tizzy, Porno Pete had this to say:

I jest, of course. But Joe is serious–that’s the sad part. (Apparently he didn’t get the memo that the first one to call the other guy a “Nazi” in a debate is the automatic loser)

Actually, it was the Klan, not the Nazi Party. However that’s just a minor detail with the main point being that Porno Pete has a big issue with Nazi comparisons. (Although Porno Pete goes surreptitiously into gay leather events with his camera to smear an entire community, precisely the same way the Nazis filmed in the Polish ghetto for the movie “The Eternal Jew.”)

It is clear that Porno Pete believes that Nazi comparisons are for losers.

This is interesting because as Evan pointed out, Porno Pete’s buddies at the Liberty Counsel compared gay activists to Nazis on the radio this week. They did so after a cement block was thrown through a window — allegedly by LGBT activists — where Porno Pete was honoring Scott Lively, another hate group leader.

Staver: Well, when you go out and label somebody a hate group you think of the KKK …

Barber: It emboldens these people …

Staver: It also, it begins, you know, it’s the same thing that happened in the Nazi Holocaust where they start to just demonize and stigmatize and then at some point in time you don’t even think that someone’s human and then, you know, we look at it and our consciences are shocked but if you look at how it ultimately began where they began to just demonize and dehumanize them, that’s what’s happening with this labeling of hate groups.

So, where is Porno Pete? Why isn’t he denouncing the analogy made by Staver? His hypocritical silence is deafening.

(Weekly Column)

The field of contemptible anti-gay activists has long been overcrowded, like a room full of teenagers frenetically rushing a concert stage. In this cacophony of crazy it is quite a feat to rise above the din. Yet radio host and Mission America President Linda Harvey is making a name for herself by fast becoming the most homophobic woman in the nation.

Unlike her more sophisticated counterparts, Harvey is a zealot without a filter who appears unable to finesse her fanaticism. She is outright paranoid of an imagined gay menace that in her diseased mind is lurking to corrupt children on every street corner. For example, Harvey’s latest screed warns naïve mothers about the “threat” of openly gay doctors and nurses treating their children.

“There are a few homosexual doctors treating kids, there are far more nurses, LPNs, technicians and other health care workers in these lifestyles so you may want to consider writing a letter that you file with your pediatrician that should your child ever be hospitalized, you do not want your child to be treated or cared for by one of these members of the Children’s Hospital gay employees group except in the case of an emergency situation.”

Harvey is also opposed to openly LGBT schoolteachers and claimed on her website that that, “These teachers then become role models, in-house activists, and possible confidants for students who want to start homosexual behavior. Student molestation becomes a real risk.”

The Mission America leader is so obsessed with bashing LGBT people that she even took a swipe while commenting on the mortgage crisis: “But back to our main point, probably few such households are homosexually-headed, because few homosexuals want to settle down to any kind of permanence.” (Has she seen the latest census figures or actually met any gay couples?)

Harvey is so extreme that she believes she has the right to control the lives of LGBT people: “Our President has launched a broad scale attack on traditional values,” Harvey said on her radio program. “If homosexuals and transgenders are allowed to live and love as they see fit, we would have a whole societal mess on our hands, which is already starting to happen in some areas.”

Exactly what does Harvey mean when she says, “If homosexuals and transgenders are allowed to live and love as they see fit?” Is Harvey suggesting that she and her fundamentalist friends have the right to dominion over our existence? Does she think that she has the authority to deny us life, liberty, and freedom?

Harvey answered these questions at a March 2010 speaking appearance in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. At the event she flat out lied about Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill and even expressed her support for the deadly legislation: “The fact they are re-criminalizing homosexuality is (a) their business, (b) it is patronizing for white Westerners to be telling these folks — they are seeing George Soros funded gay groups going into Uganda. They are all through the schools, lots of promotion to kids. Poor kids, poor kids are being offered money and favors and gifts to have sex. That’s exploitation. That’s sex trafficking. And it’s being done mostly homosexually. By Western homosexuals coming in and trying to get involved in Uganda.”

It is absolutely abominable and shameless that Harvey peddled such unsubstantiated propaganda about LGBT westerners coming to Uganda to exploit children. In reality, the Westerners who are actually going to this nation are fundamentalist Christians who are exporting homophobia in an effort to take over Uganda though business contracts and the funneling of US taxpayer money into this repressive, rogue state.

More disturbing, it seems that Harvey thinks it’s okay to terrorize, imprison, and even murder LGBT people in any country that would allow it. One wonders if she would deem it a local matter if the legislation in Uganda were called the “Kill the Christians Bill.” And one also questions if her support for such brutal punishment would apply to American states had they the ability to pass such punitive anti-gay laws.

Finally, Harvey is so mean-spirited that she even gives succor to school bullies by attacking Dan Savage’s laudable It Gets Better campaign: “It’s supposed to encourage kids, that’s great,” says Harvey. “Encourage kids, say, you know if you’re having trouble, you’re getting bullied, you feel despaired, don’t give up. That would be a worthy goal if they stop there. But no they tag on to it approval of homosexuality and the implication that anybody who objects is just like those bullies out there and they’re leading you or others into suicide. That’s just wrong, it’s evil, it’s dark…”

If one wants to witness evil and darkness, look no further than the ignorant mind, cruel heart, and empty soul of Linda Harvey.

All should read this great piece by Bianca Phillips in Memphis’s alternative newsweekly, the Memphis Flyer. In it, she takes the reader back on a recap of what he and the Exodus flagship model Love In Action used to be, and describes the evolution Smid is undergoing as a result of meeting local gay filmmaker Morgan Jon Fox, whose documentary This Is What Love In Action Looks Like has been making its rounds this fall on the independent film festival circuit:

John Smid, the former director of ex-gay Christian ministry Love in Action, is a changed man.

Sitting in an office above the detached garage of his Germantown home, he has nothing but praise for the work of local gay filmmaker Morgan Jon Fox. Fox’s long-awaited documentary, This Is What Love in Action Looks Like, makes its local premiere at the Indie Memphis Film Festival on November 4th, and it was through the multi-year making of that film that Smid’s ideas about homosexuality began to shift dramatically.

“I’m realizing that people have the freedom in Christ to choose to live in a gay relationship. That’s not for me to judge on their behalf,” said Smid, who resigned as executive director of Love in Action in 2008. “I realize I was what the gay community often said I was: I was judgmental. I was critical. I was somewhat homophobic.”

People who were directly affected by Smid’s activities during his time at Love In Action are having varied reactions to Smid’s change in attitude, and that’s understandable. Peterson Toscano spoke to The Flyer for the article and had this to say, among other things:

“Love in Action was oppression in this concentrated form, so I was very depressed afterwards and suicidal for a time,” said Toscano, who wrote the play Doin’ Time in the Homo No Mo Halfway House as a way to cope with the damage. “I was really confused, and there was lots of self-hatred and shame. There was lots of bad training about sexuality. Nobody was trained to teach anything.”

Toscano said one of Love in Action’s core teachings was especially damaging.

“They insisted that, as queer people, we were not able to have healthy relationships. So even friendships would become twisted and perverted because we became too emotionally needy,” Toscano said. “I found myself putting up walls five to six years later as I was getting to know people. I had it in my head that I couldn’t get close to people.”

So glib apologies aren’t really going to cut it, though it does seem like Smid really is starting to grasp what he did. Peterson has talked about Smid’s “evolution” extensively on his blog, so if you haven’t read that, do so.

Lastly, Bianca also interviewed me for the article and asked what Truth Wins Out’s response to this sort of thing is. Here is what I said:

Evan Hurst, the Memphis-based social media director for anti-ex-gay group Truth Wins Out, echoes the sentiment many former clients have publicly expressed.

“If [Smid] is on a path of personal growth and starting to grasp that he played a key part of inflicting harm onto people, that’s great. [Truth Wins Out] only wishes him the best in continuing on that road,” Hurst said. “But part of our mission is to expose this industry for what it is. We’re not shy about our goal, and that’s to let every single person know how harmful these ministries are.”

Yup! So anyway, go read the whole thing to see what you’re missing.

[image via The Memphis Flyer and Justin Fox Burks]

Last month, an equality advocate named Sai launched a new viral site called gayhomophobe.com. The site (which is already receiving critical acclaim, even from across the pond!) features a countdown tally at the top of the page listing the number of days since a prominent homophobe was caught in a gay-related scandal (the currently-featured ex-homophobe is John Smid of Love in Action, who came out of the closet and recanted his “ex-gay” teachings eight days ago) along with a list of previous notables including Eddie Long, George Rekers, Larry Craig, and Mark Foley.

According to the site, Sai’s goal is to list people “who used a position of power to promote or support an anti-gay agenda, and turned out to be a closet case,” regardless of political or religious affiliation. He also includes people such as Ken Mehlman and Roy Ashburn who reversed their anti-gay views after their respective scandals and came out publicly in support of LGBT rights, in order to show that people can change (not from gay to straight, but from self-loathing to self-accepting). Check it out — it’s a very handy resource!

And now, for some news: Truth Wins Out is honored to announce that Sai has decided to donate all of the ad revenue from gayhomophobe.com to TWO in support of our work fighting anti-LGBT religious extremism and the “ex-gay” myth. Additionally, equality supporter and Google employee Lee Colleton used his employer’s gift matching service to double Sai’s contribution.

All of us here at Truth Wins Out — Wayne, myself, Evan, and the rest of the team — are humbled by and grateful for the investments that Sai, Lee, and all of our other contributors make in our work for LGBT equality. We very truly could not do it without your support.

My sincere hope is that every time Truth Wins Out stands up to anti-LGBT extremism, breaks a major news story, and fights “ex-gay” lies with facts — every time we strike a blow for equality, whether it’s convincing Apple to nix an “ex-gay” iPhone app, holding celebrities like Tracy Morgan accountable for homophobic remarks, or exposing the Bachmann clinic for its use of “ex-gay therapy” — our contributing members like Sai and Lee are aware of how great a share they have in each and every victory, and how truly thankful we are that they help to make them possible. Thank you!

To visit Sai’s site, go to gayhomophobe.com
If you’d like to join Sai, Lee, and many others in contributing to Truth Wins Out, click here.

Have you noticed that Evan has not written much this week? This is because we canned him.

Just kidding. (I’m sure Porno Pete got excited there for a second)

Evan (pictured) has been on hiatus because his computer crashed. Truth Wins Out is getting him an exciting, new laptop — but we are a small organization so the $859.24 we are spending is out of budget.

If you like and admire Evan’s work, please consider a kind and generous tax-deductible contribution today to help us pay for the computer. If you are having a good year and can sponsor the entire computer — that would be extremely helpful. If you are able to contribute $100, $50, $25 or even $10 — it would help offset the unexpected cost.

Please, help us get Evan back on the blog as soon as possible!

With a contribution of $25 or higher, we will send you our famous “Thank God You Can’t PRAY AWAY THE GAY” t-shirt!! (send shirt size and address to John@truthwinsout.org)

Truth Wins Out
Post Office Box 96
Burlington, VT 05402

It seems millions of people and most major media now want an answer to our question:  Did Tracy Morgan really say all those awful, hateful anti-gay things at his show in Nashville on June 3?

The Washington Post:

“30 Rock” actor Tracy Morgan has been accused of making anti-gay comments at a recent comedy show in Nashville.

Kevin Rogers, who said he attended the comedian’s June 3 show at Ryman Auditorium, detailed the alleged statements in a Facebook note, “Why I No Longer ‘Like’ Tracy Morgan.” Rogers claims that Morgan said being gay is a choice because “God don’t make no mistakes” and that lesbians are “just pretending.”

[...]

The Ryman Auditorium responded in a statement, saying the theater “regrets that people were offended by statements” Morgan made, adding that it “does not control the content presented by people appearing on its stage, nor does it endorse any of the views of, or statements made by, such persons.” Morgan’s rep issued a statement saying, “There is no comment. Thank you.”

Truth Wins Out, a non-profit that “fights anti-gay religious extremism,” according to its Web site, has called on Morgan to respond .

The Advocate delves a little bit deeper into the chosen venue for this alleged rant — Tennessee. Wayne and I spoke with them this morning:

Morgan’s publicist has so far not returned email or phone messages from The Advocate. Truth Wins Out had the same experience, and it’s using its website to demand an explanation.

“No comment is not acceptable,” said Wayne Besen, the group’s founder. “If someone had accused me of making such remarks in a presentation, I would drop everything I was doing to clarify it. To try and sweep it under a carpet and pretend it doesn’t exist is offensive in itself.”

[...]

Evan Hurst, the group’s social media director, is from Tennessee and knows Rogers from his work with the Tennessee Equality Project, and that relationship gave him enough confidence in the account to warrant attention.

“We are pretty thick-skinned around here because you have to be,” Hurst said of Tennesseans, who have endured a recent spate of antigay legislation. “And for the number of people who were going, ‘I am genuinely offended by this, this is hurtful, and this is meant to hurt,’ I think we are looking at something different here.”

I’m so Southern, even in interviews.

I’ll be updating this post frequently, as I find more and more places covering it.  Here are a few others who have picked it up:

The Hollywood Reporter

The Hollywood Gossip

Business Insider

BlackBook

Jezebel

Plus, I found a hilariously titled article from The Tennessean two days before Tracy’s Nashville show.  The headline? What Will Tracy Morgan Say Next?

More to come…

Let’s start out our week with something light and fun, i.e. checking in with Peter LaBarbera’s last few posts to see who/what has him all mad ‘n’ sad.

1. Personal attack on Jeremy Hooper:  Peter is really, really excited that there are still a couple newspapers left that defend bigotry and hatred, so when he heard that the Manchester Union-Leader in New Hampshire was sticking to discrimination by refusing to print same-sex marriage announcements, he got a tingle in his no-nos and wrote a piece about it!  Of course, to illustrate that piece, he used Jeremy Hooper’s wedding photo and slapped the word “perversion” on it.

Jeremy responds:

Peter (presumably) has his own conscience and shame system to answer to. Nothing I could say here would exacerbate the questions that surely (or at least should) weigh on his and his loved ones’ minds.

2.  Personal attack on and straight-up lies about Autumn Sandeen:  Pete really, really doesn’t like Autumn.  He dislikes her so much that he willfully and repeatedly twists the facts of her story to serve his agenda, claiming that Autumn “left [her] wife and children,” despite the fact that Autumn has repeatedly corrected the story.  This is the set-up for a piece where Pete uses juvenile slurs against transgender people and sticks his fingers in his ears, referring to a genuine, widely recognized medical condition and its treatment as “sickening.”

Autumn responds thoroughly here, and ends like this:

I hope no one ever manages to shut LaBarbera up. He has the right to free speech, for sure, and he should be free to exercise it. Beyond that though, I find his over-the-top style of writing quite entertaining. And, he makes a good case, by the negative example of his bigotry of trans people, as well as lesbian, gay, and bisexual people, of the real world need for LGBT people to be treated with dignity and respect by both government and corporate America.

3.  Evan Hurst and Joe Jervis are sooooooo mean.  In case you missed it, Joe Jervis pointed out that Peter is on the same side as the Ku Klux Klan on a very specific issue:  that of Jennifer Keeton of Augusta State University, who, like a child, wants the counseling department at the school to adjust their degree requirements for her “special needs,” i.e., her religion-based bigotry against gay people.  The school told her, “No, dear,” so now, of course, she’s a Religious Right cause celebre.  Peter turned Joe’s post into something it really wasn’t, as all Joe did was point out the similar goals of the two entities on the issue.  I agreed with Joe.

Here comes the fun part:  Peter is trying to “get back at us” by saying that Joe and I are on the same side as NAMBLA when it comes to openly gay scoutmasters.  Of course, this is not true, as Joe explained on our Truth Wins Out Facebook page, and which I will explain now:  Though it is distasteful and wrong that the Boy Scouts don’t allow kids’ fathers who happen to be gay to be scoutmasters, thus depriving those dads and their kids of the same opportunities that kids with straight dads have, they are a private organization and are thus completely within their rights to discriminate.  The Country Club near my house is a nice little Slice of the Confederacy, as the only faces of color you’ll see on that golf course belong to employees in white suits, or possibly the Mayor on a special occasion, and they’re not too keen on Jewish members either.  Is it gross?  Yes.  Is it a stain on our otherwise lovely neighborhood, its only benefits being its scenic nature and what its proximity does to the property values in our historic district?  Yes.  Are they within their rights as an exclusive private organization?  Surely.

And that, children, is what you call a “nuanced position.”  Wingnuts do not have nuanced positions.  Everything them to them is childlike:  good vs. evil, black vs. white, made-up words like “Judeo-Christian” vs. Big Mean Outside World, etc.

The rest of Peter’s piece involves taking an interesting piece written by Johann Hari, about gays in fascist movements [interesting because there have never been any heterosexuals involved in fascist movements -- it's a purely gay thing, y'all], spices it up with a little revisionist [completely made up] history from notorious bigot Scott Lively, who has his paws on more hate groups [the real, certified kind, not the "Peter things these people are mean" kind] than you’d expect imaginable from one human, and who basically handed Ugandan homophobes the rhetorical gun they needed in their campaign against gays in that country, and then he attempts to sum it up:

Homosexual radicals’ deranged attempts to link pro-family conservatives to racist fringe groups are part of their larger goal of demonizing and marginalizing “homophobic” Christians and social conservatives.

Uh, it’s really not a big leap:  ”Pro-family conservatives” tend to be more defined by who/what they hate than what they actually support, and it tends to come in the form of condemnation of large groups of people.  Irrational fear and hatred of other races is very, very similar to irrational fear and hatred of sexual minorities.  It’s  no coincidence that social conservatives cynically exploit race in their fights against reproductive health, while simultaneously believing/being worried that every Muslim is a possible terrorist, while simultaneously imagining that gay people they’ve never met having equal rights will affect their lives in any way.  The only thing our equality will ever change is white fundamentalists’ self esteem, because their self-created pedestal over society, which they have enjoyed for decades, is being eroded by the advancement of minorities.  The only thing that is happening is that slowly but surely, their unearned status is being brought down to size with the rest of us.  And I’m sure that messes with ‘em somethin’ fierce, as we Southerners say.  But their status was never merit-based in any way!  There is nothing special or worthy about Fundamentalists that suggests they should have the keys to society.  Indeed, when one looks at the statistics, one finds that on most “moral questions,” fundamentalists do no better than anyone else, and often do much, much worse.

Anyway, he rambles for approximately 1400 paragraphs, and even figures out a way to talk about fisting, which is like, his favorite subject besides that photographer in New Mexico who [tragedy!] had to abide by the same laws as everyone else as a business owner, who he also mentions.  Oh, and he takes some time to cry and lie some more about Catholic Charities being “forced” out of business in Massachusetts.  Of course, they freely chose to close up shop, unwilling as they were to follow the same laws as everyone else.  [Sensing a pattern here?  It's sort of like dealing with preschoolers who don't like to share, and moreover, have not had good naps that day.]  It’s kind of a Wingnut Fever Dream Greatest Hits.

Finally, he asks, “Could the American state become a national, homo-fascist agent?”

Uh, I don’t know Peter.  Could unicorns come to life and force us all to eat sparkly cupcakes?  Could pie be any more delicious?  Could puppy fur BE any softer?  These are all questions, to be sure.  I don’t know what kind of questions they are, but they’re certainly questions.

Read his entire million word piece if you have nothing better to do with your life.

Readers may have noticed that we’re boiling over here over the fact that three gay kids that we know of have killed themselves this month, having been bullied mercilessly to the point that they felt they had nothing to live for, and that their only escape would be death.  Dan Savage has stepped into the fight with his new YouTube project, It Gets Better, wherein successful, happy LGBT people talk directly to the kids who are in the middle of what can be the hell of middle and high school, with that simple message:  ”It gets better.”  And he’s right.  Any kids reading this:  it does get better.  From my 7th to 9th grade years, I was bullied and harassed day in, day out by a bunch of malcontent assholes who, for whatever reason, saw me as a weak link and thus an easy target.  For some of them, calling me a “faggot” twelve or thirteen times a day was just What They Did.  That’s quite a hell for a kid who, up to that point, wasn’t much interested in “people” in the first place.  Going to school became a daily fight, and what I wanted, more than anything, was to disappear.  I was fortunate, though.  I was never seriously physically harmed; the administration and teachers at my public schools at least sort of tried to do something about it; I had loving parents who fought for me like wolves, even when I wanted them to back off; and I had music as an escape.  One of the unfortunate aspects of being bullied is that you often feel like you’re the only one, but the truth is that there are always others dealing with just as bad or worse.

Kevin Dean is a personal friend of mine who graduated from the same private Christian high school I did in Memphis, Tennessee. [Readers might be interested to know that this is the same school where Michael Oher, whose story was told in The Blind Side, went.  That was a few years after us, but the point is that this was a Good School.] When I attended that school, I had somehow ended up on the other side of the social divide, had lots of “popular” friends, and was able to finish my high school years with relative ease.  Little did I know that, before I came to that school, my friend Kevin was one of those who had it worse than I ever did, much worse, at the hands of people who probably didn’t have the first clue what they were doing, but because of the way they were raised — again, Christian high school — obviously got the message that it’s okay to pick on/beat the shit out of the ones they perceived to be weak, different, “faggots,” or anything else that didn’t conform to the norm.  Would my experience have been more like his if I had gone to the [to use the word loosely] “Christian school” instead of the public school when I was younger?  I don’t know.  Kevin wrote this essay last year, about his personal experiences with bullying, in the wake of another gay teen suicide, Eric Mohat, aged 17.  In its original incarnation, the second part of the essay was Eric’s story.  I’ve updated it, with Kevin’s permission, to include the stories of the boys who have died this month in Indiana, California and Texas.  I think you should all read it.  It’s after the fold, because it’s not short, but read it, print it, share it with your kids, hell, share it with other people’s kids.  And let them know that yes, it does get better.  Kevin can be reached here, and if you have a story to tell, send it to me.

Bully:  A Story in Four Acts

by Kevin Dean

I’m in gym class, 5th period on a random Tuesday of my 7th grade year. The gym teacher, a mammoth black man who seems completely disinterested in anyone who isn’t on his football team, has stepped out of the locker room for over five minutes. My classmates are becoming rowdy, snapping each other in the face with towels and slamming lockers. One boy is showing another boy a cigarette he has in his pocket. These are the times I start to get worried.

I’ve just transferred from a smaller satellite school to the main campus of Briarcrest and I only know a handful of people. I’m scrawny, with big frizzy hair and braces. My parents aren’t the richest people in the world, so I am wearing jeans from JC Penney and an Oxford shirt from Sears. I have enormous feet, which my mother has trouble finding shoes for. The ones we settle on are white clunky off-brands, and they make me look like I have robot feet, especially with my tapered leg jeans.

To make matters worse, I’m slightly effeminate and incredibly shy. I don’t like sports, and I don’t make friends easily. Not only am I dealing with the average teenage angst, I’m also questioning my sexuality, looking at boys in ways I know I shouldn’t. I’m horrified someone might find out my secret, so I tend to stay hidden as much as possible. I have three or four friends that I sit with at lunch, but other than them no one really knows my name. I’m not sure I want anyone to know my name.

(Read More)