The young and the restless: while lesbian and gay youth may have more support than ever before, the first step in claiming their rights gets no easier. Stories from the coming-out front. (Young & Gay in the USA).

Instead of coming out to his parents, Matt Beierschmitt acted out. The sinewy, 6-foot-7 Beierschmitt, who had been a well-mannered jock throughout high school, suddenly threw tantrums and berated his parents after he returned home from his first semester at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania He was 19 years old, with loving, sympathetic parents, friends, out gay buddies, and access to all of the Internet resources created for questioning youth in recent years--yet he still took years to come to terms with his sexuality and felt deeply depressed about the prospect of confiding his secret to his family.

He finally came out to his parents in an E-mail. "It took them a year and a half to get used to it," recalls Matt, now 21. "I think they were waiting for me to come home in a belly shirt or something. Because nothing really changed in me, they eased up a lot. I've introduced them to a lot of my gay friends. Especially in the last six months or so, it's been really good. Now we can even talk about guys."

This young man's journey, not so different from that faced by thousands of lesbian and gay teens every year, illustrates an important reality: Although this generation has unprecedented support services and a legion of out role models, young gays' basic struggle to come to terms with their sexual identity remains deeply personal and incredibly difficult.

Beierschmitt's story is one of five captured in the remarkable new MTV documentary True Life: I'm Coming Out, debuting June 27. On the one hand, the show reflects the great strides in acceptance made during the last decade; on the other, the anguish these young people go through will ring painfully familiar to gay audiences of all ages.

Advocates' best efforts to quell the turmoil of adolescence for gay and lesbian youth have not been in vain. This difficult period is often made easier by the countless individuals gay teens interact with on a daily level: In many places across the country, understanding classmates, out teachers, gay adult mentors, and youth support groups all offer solace and guidance to counterbalance negative reactions and antigay messages. But there's a catch. Even the most available, comprehensive resources and the most sympathetic ears are of little use until the teens first make the brave choice to confront their own sexuality. As long as the youths are focused inward, they may not see what's out there to help them.

Even in the progressive enclave of Berkeley, Calif., with its myriad social services and huge gay community, Vanessa Duran says she was blinded by the closet when she was coming out at age 15. "When I look back, there were so many friends and teachers who were obviously gay," she observes. "They even said things that would lead me to believe that they were. But being so much in the closet, I never imagined that they could be gay."

In Duran's case, her community's progress in providing resources for questioning teenagers finally made an impact. Unlike most American schools, Duran's had a social-living class, which dealt with diversity issues. "At one point we had gay speakers come in, and I just started laughing at myself," she says. "I had been tripping over this stuff over the last three years, struggling and beating myself up over it."

Still, she worried about the reaction of her fundamentalist Christian mom. But when she eventually came out to her parents, they seemed more amused than distraught. "I told them I'm gay, and they busted up laughing," recalls Duran, now 17. "We've come to a quiet understanding: They know, and there's no reason for me to bring it up again. We have a `don't ask, don't tell' policy. My mom is growing to the understanding that I didn't leave church to become a sinner. I still have my beliefs and morals, so she doesn't rub in my face some quote she learned in church that evening."

But Duran is hardly keeping quiet. She's doing her part to make it easier for the next young lesbian. She has resuscitated her school's moribund gay-straight alliance from near extinction to the point where it attracts 30 members regularly. During her summer vacation last year, she even helped make a 25-minute film to raise awareness of gay issues, which has been shown in 270 schools across California. In her spare time, she regularly speaks to local queer youth groups. For her efforts, Duran was given a Courage Award last month by the Colin Higgins Foundation, a nonprofit founded by Higgins, the late gay screenwriter (Harold and Maude) and director (9 to 5), to support individuals and groups working in AIDS services and for equal rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people.

Still, Duran's experience has been drastically different from those of most gay kids coming of age in smaller towns and less progressive states--something Benjie Nycum and boyfriend Mike Glatze know well. In early 2001 the 20-something couple quit their jobs and set out in their red Volkswagen to discover firsthand the state of gay youth across the country. They sent out E-mails to hundreds of teens with whom they had corresponded during their years working at XY, a gay youth magazine, and ended up interviewing hundreds of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered youths during their six months on the road. They've now completed four trips and are planning more, all of which they document moment by moment on their Web site, Young Gay America.

"When we started, we had the idea that kids in rural areas weren't getting the same kinds of resources as the ones in urban areas--that was definitely confirmed," says Nycum, 28. Once they identify themselves and one another as queer, however, rural youths become their own best resource, he adds: "Kids in smaller towns are having a much harder time, but they are also bound together in groups that are much tighter, and they have much greater sense of their young queer community. If we were writing a press release a year ago, we'd start off by talking about suicide, but we wouldn't do that today. There's an important story to be told about resiliency and survival."

Marie Hedrick knows a bit about hanging tough. "Everyone seemed to know I was gay before I did," recalls Hedrick, 19, who came out to her mother at age 12. "A lot of it was verbal. Kids would make accusations a lot or stop looking at me. Basically there was an attitude of `I know you want me' by the girls. There weren't really any teachers I could talk to, but I wasn't really good at reaching out for it either. If you are being harassed constantly, you don't really think of going to the teacher and saying, `I'm being harassed constantly.'"

When Hedrick did seek out a counselor at her Cincinnati grade school, the advice she received left her dumbfounded. "She told me that it was just a phase and that if I wore nicer clothes, other kids would like me more," she recalls. "I sort of looked at her. She said, `I've studied these things.' And that was the end of the conversation."

In high school Hedrick found a more proactive advocate in her principal. When a female student repeatedly harassed her in the locker room, the principal reprimanded the girl and juggled the students' schedules so they would not cross paths. And though no gay teachers were completely out at Hedrick's school, she still felt their presence. "There was 'at least one fairly open gay teacher. She never said, `Oh, I'm a lesbian,'" says Hedrick. "She used to have a poster on the wall that had a rainbow on it and had something about accepting everyone. Most of the students figured out that she was a lesbian, and that was positive because she was a well-liked teacher."

No one knows the difference between private acceptance of one's sexuality and public coming-out better than Joel Relampagos, 20, who was able to make his personal turning point into a highly visible resource for other youth: Relampagos came out to his Southern California family in front of MTV's True Life cameras.

"It was the hardest and craziest thing I've ever done," he says. "I think that you can see it in my eyes. I was completely terrified. In a way, I felt bad for doing that to my parents, but this is something that has never been done before. I knew I had to do it for all of the other people who were just as scared as I was in high school. Every time I got scared in front of the camera, I just took myself back to how I felt in high school."

After untying his tongue, Relampagos confessed smoothly to his sisters and father--who said he knew all along, the Brad Pitt posters in his bedroom having been a tip-off. Still, his deeply religious Filipino-American mom, who is divorced from his father, proved a harder sell. "The day we were filming with my mom I was really horrified," he recalls. "The thing in my mind was, Oh, my God, I'm going to come out to Mom. I knew that she really didn't want to talk about it because she really didn't want to know that her only son is saying that he's gay."

Relampagos wasn't able to tell his mother while the MTV cameras were rolling, but a week later he confronted her again, this time recording her with his own video camera. "I didn't want to give up my dedication to the project. We let the video camera sit for an hour or so and let it run," he says. "That's when so much truth came out. That's when she told me what she was really feeling. It wasn't good, but it was what I needed."

Since bursting out of the closet seven months ago at age 19, Relampagos has moved out of his mom's house and in with his father, who is more accepting of his sexuality. "My dad and I are closer than we've ever been," he says. "My mom accepts me as her son--but not as her gay son."

Relampagos says he's reveling in his newfound freedom, making as many forays as possible to the nearby gay mecca of West Hollywood. "I've been trying to be as gay as I can," he says with a smile. "I was on the gay [version of MTV's reality dating show] Dismissed. I'm having the time of my life."

Most youths don't have that opportunity--but many have learned that being as gay as they can need not be a handicap. Nick Yakimovich, 17, started telling his friends he's gay two years ago at his high school in Reading, Ohio, and he thinks his attitude was pivotal to gaining his peers' acceptance. He doesn't simply ask for respect; he demands it.

"I'm like a bully now. I'll call someone a `faggot' before they can call me that. Nobody gives me any problems," Yakimovich muses. The teen has turned his self-confidence into his own best support. "It's totally a small town, and things could have been the other way," he says. "But I guess it's just something about me."

He concedes things haven't been as easy for two other students whom classmates perceive as being gay but who have not come out and do not stand up for themselves in the same way. "If I walked in there and acted all girly and weak, things could have been totally different," he says. "I think people are more accepting of someone who is a little more mainstream."

If there's been any appreciable impact on today's straight teenagers from a decade of historic gay activism and unprecedented visibility, it may be that many are now willing to grant a degree of respect to out peers who exude a certain level of self-confidence or "coolness"--even in small towns like Reading, where gay role models and support groups are nonexistent. Take the case of Jonathan Jaxson, a Kennesaw, Ga., resident who came out on national TV on the Sally Jessy Raphael Show and also appeared as an openly gay teenager on Ricki Lake.

"All these redneck teenagers who I thought would kick my butt have been really cool about it and were on my side," he says. "Now I'm Mr. Popular at school just because I came out. Everyone became enthused, and everyone wanted to know about it."

Jaxson, 18--who has been hosting a monthly cable TV show called The Edge in Atlanta since he was 14--thinks coming out is just the beginning of a long, difficult growth process for gay youths, a process that some would rather escape. "There are so many people who are trapped in the drug scene in Atlanta," he says. "They are openly gay, yet they are really unhappy. They're into drugs and having sex with everyone. It's really sad, and I wanted to be different from those people."

The youths who have it the hardest may be those like Marie Hedrick, whom others perceive as queer before they themselves understand what that might mean. For Patrick Bynum, the taunts of "faggot" began in second grade at his elementary school in Ozark, Mo., a city known as the "buckle" of the Bible Belt. The level of harassment escalated gradually until it exploded in the sixth grade. Hatred was on Bynum's schedule as regularly as algebra: Once when he tried to buy a pack of gum at a vending cart, a student told him it was "50 cents for people, $1 for faggots."

When Bynum, then 12, was punched and kicked by a football player while on his way to math class one day, his mother decided she had to take action. "When we first went to the principal, he didn't want to hear about this," says Colleen Bynum. "He suggested Patrick join the Christian athletes' association. He wasn't an athlete because he had been in a leg brace over the years. It was the athletes and the so-called Christians who were harassing him.

"They wanted us to believe that this had never happened before. That `kids will be kids.' He just had to toughen up. We were in the twilight zone. It escalated until the popular thing to do was to torture Patrick. Nobody is going to call our child an abomination and get away with it."

And they didn't. In the United States of the 21st century, the Bynum family knew that Patrick didn't have to put up with the harassment--an option past generations often did not have. They pulled their son out of school and began instructing him at home. (Patrick enrolled for a time in a GLBT school in Dallas, but the family soon decided they should stay together in Ozark.) His mom also took Patrick to a youth group meeting at the Gay and Lesbian Community Center of the Ozarks in nearby Springfield, Mo., where the youth met a counselor who gave him one of his first direct contacts with a well-adjusted gay adult. "He talked to everybody," says Patrick, now 14, "He really made me feel better about being gay. He's a really cool person, and if he's gay, there must be some hope."

Meanwhile, Colleen Bynum took action against the school district, filing a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education, whose civil rights office began investigating the conduct of school administrators. Last month, after being threatened with a cut in federal funds, the school district agreed to work on putting into place a specific plan to protect gay teens in the future.

"Our goal is to make sure this doesn't happen again and make sure the school district acknowledges that they have gay students," says Colleen Bynum. At home, she says, Patrick has been learning about gay heroes like Mark Bingham, who is thought to have helped foil the hijackers of the fourth jet in the September 11 terrorist attacks. "Mark Bingham was an example of a strong gay man who gave his life to save others," she says. "Believe me, we work hard to make sure that Patrick knows there probably won't be a post office named after him, but to us, he is a major hero."

Patrick is also a hero to the Colin Higgins Foundation, which in May presented him a Courage Award that will pay for his college education.

While for most GLBT teens, coming out remains the mandatory first step in reclaiming their rights and building their support structure, the best part of life thereafter may be simply getting on with it, putting the uncertainty in the past. Jae, an 18-year-old living in Cincinnati who identifies as both gay and transgendered, recently attended his first prom dressed as a girl. "The prom was really nice. I wore a purple dress with silver glitter and a slit going down the side and spaghetti straps, and a tiara," Jae recalls. "When my feet weren't hurting, I danced a lot. I met a guy who was really interested in me. He never called."

Some milestones never change.

These days, when gay teens overcome their fears and come out to themselves and others, they are often rewarded with a life much easier than they ever dreamed--or feared, in their darkest moments. Matt Beierschmitt, for one, has left his dark days behind and is drawing on support from both his family and the gay community. Working part-time at a gay bar in Philadelphia while living at home and attending Camden County Junior College, Beierschmitt is starting fresh by recalibrating his life plan. "I love kids. I'm in love with the whole idea of a nuclear family," he says. "It was the hardest part for me to admit that I probably wasn't going to have that."

But charting one's way in life is always easier when someone else has trod the path before you, and this generation of lesbian and gay teens has a well-worn road to follow and many fellow travelers to help them along the way. "Once I started meeting people, I learned that you could live a normal life when you are older," says Beierschmitt, who last year met Craig, a 38-year-old he dated briefly. "Craig is my role model. He's a chemical engineer. His parents are totally cool. He travels around the world. He's in great shape. He's a great guy. I don't want to be famous; I just want to be financially secure and healthy. That's all I need to be."

Meers is managing editor for Paper magazine in New York City.

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