PHILADELPHIA -- Benjie Nycum and Mike Glatze weren't sure what they would find when they began traveling the country two years ago to record the stories of gay youths. They certainly never expected they'd end up documenting a dramatic social shift.
But it's all there on their Web site, younggayamerica.com: hundreds of stories that counter the stereotype of gay kids as harassed and suicidal.
There's 17-year-old Liz, launching her Colorado town's first gay pride event; 15-year-old Emily, in Pipe Creek, Texas, happily counting herself among more than a dozen gay kids at her school; Nathan in tiny Waverly, Neb., talking nonchalantly about being the only out gay person at his high school. Says Nathan about his peers' unruffled reaction: "Being gay was just something else about me."
"Not only are gay kids out and able to be themselves, they're also feisty and empowered," Glatze observed about the more than 1,000 interviews he and Nycum have done in more than 60 towns. "These kids don't internalize that there's something wrong with them. They know that the people who are prejudiced are the ones who are wrong."
Partners in life as well as work, Nycum, 30, and Glatze, 28, have a mission: promoting positive self-images and a sense of belonging for gay youth. And they support it all with the earnings from their day jobs.
For their labor of love, recently received the Tom Stoddard National Role Model Award at Philadelphia's Equality Forum. The annual symposium, formerly known as PrideFest, also featured a photo exhibition of portraits shot during Young Gay America road trips.
'We had this hunch'
Glatze and Nycum said they got the idea for Young Gay America when both were working in San Francisco as editors at the magazine for gay youth XY. Nycum is the author and Glatze the editor of The XY Survival Guide: Everything You Need to Know About Being Young and Gay.
"We wanted to see what America really looked like out there," Glatze said. "We were hearing from kids, and we had this hunch."
So with the help of Web-designer friends Andy Brown and Teddee McGuire, whom they credit as Young Gay America cofounders, the two set up a Web site and hit the road in a rental car. Thanks to some newspaper articles about the project, word spread. "We started getting 10 e-mails a day from kids saying 'come interview me,' " Glatze said.
Nycum and Glatze, who provide safe-sex information on their Young Gay America site, post the poems and essays of readers and spend hours each night answering e-mails asking for advice. The Internet, they said, has helped to spark this revolution in the lives of gay youth.
"If there is a demographic that knows how to get information," Nycum said, "it's youth. Coming out used to be a 20-year process. Kids today can get on the Web and know in 10 minutes everything is going to be okay."
Also, Glatze said, "one of the major reasons a 14-year-old barely has to think about the idea that gay equals struggle, is because people have been fighting to create a different world for decades."
Glatze and Nycum, who have been together for seven years, are part of a generation that has benefited from the fight for gay acceptance. Both came out in college (Glatze went to Dartmouth, Nycum to Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia). Neither met with much drama.
In fact, Nycum is still close friends with his former girlfriend, whose questions about their relationship prompted his coming out. "And my parents were incredibly supportive," he said.
Nycum's father employs them both in his Halifax architectural firm and lets them live rent-free in an apartment in a building he owns. He has even let the two borrow his cell phone and minivan for their road trips. "Young Gay America would be impossible without that help," Nycum said.
Struggle goes on
Hopeful as they are, the struggle for acceptance isn't over, they said. Plenty of kids across the country are still suffering. Many are called names at school. Some find no support in their own families. One boy they met in Montana had to leave his home and could not stay in one house for more than a few months because his tormentors would find out and vandalize the place. And many of the young people they have interviewed report that school officials block their efforts to start gay-straight alliances, organizations aimed to help promote tolerance.
"There are more than 2,000 gay-straight alliances in schools in the U.S., and they're popping up all over," Nycum said. "They can help create the integration that is so crucial to gay kids' feeling a sense of belonging."
What the two would also like to see are more positive images of gay youth. "There should be 10 magazines that have happy images of gay kids and 10 TV shows that have gay characters who don't have depressing lives," Glatze said.
He recalled a boy they met on their travels named David: "He's on the honor roll. He was just elected class vice president and everyone knows he's gay. He doesn't need to hear that gay kids are going to have a hard life. He is out there winning elections and getting ready to go to law school, and there are so many kids out there like him."
