Hugh O Youth Leadership Report

I was in sixth grade the first time I was called a “faggot” while walking the hallways of my tiny school between Math and English class. At the time, I didn’t know what the word meant, but, over the next few years, it would come to terrorize me; popping unexpectedly out of corners and causing me to cower in fear. I hid from the word, and I hid from everything associated with it. I created a wall between who I was and who I pretended to be in order to shield myself from the insults hurled by peers who validated themselves by belittling others. It wasn’t until my freshman year of High School when I began to stop hiding from the word and challenged it head on. I was once again walking in the hallway when two students behind me commented, out loud, that I was

My determination to tackle discrimination was heightened by my selection to attend the Hugh O’Brien Youth Leadership Conference, where I spent three blissful days surrounded by supportive, intelligent and committed people who taught me how to use my voice. It was there that I first came out as being gay and was thrown over the shoulders of my peers, carried in celebration, and congratulated, through hugs, handshakes, and letters that I’ve shown to others struggling with their identities, I learned that my identity as a gay male was something to be celebrated, not shamed, and that through civil awareness I could make a difference.

As I began to discover myself, I discovered the power that I had to make a change in the way people treated minorities and other outcast groups. When I came out to my school, I felt like an outcast; both a person of color in a mostly white school and a homosexual in a school coated in ignorance. However, I didn’t wave a flag of