________________________________________________________Produced by Camille Steed
 
[Tom, Katie's Dad] "I sensed that I knew on some level that she was quote, unquote different, and qualifying different, I could see that something-- she thought differently."
[Katie, 19, Kearney] "It was always kind of there but sixth grade was when I started thinking about maybe I wasn't just like all the other kids in school."
[Alex, 18, Louisville] "In kindergarten especially, and I do remember this, I would always try to hang out with the girls."
[Scott, 22, Axtell] "The first time I heard the word gay, I was in the optimist basketball program at the high school and I did something stupid or something wrong and one of the guys that was a friend of mine said, you know, why do you have to be so gay or something like that. He said it in a really derogatory way and I felt awkward when he said it because I knew there were connotations with that word that I didn't quite understand yet but I knew it was really bad to be gay."
[Alex] "It's fairly common around here in Nebraska to use words like gay to mean just outright bad or stupid, you know. Saw that movie, it was so gay. Or the really worst examples are things like look, he is holding her hand, that is so gay."
[Scott] "It's a little microcosm of the world so you're under a microscope all the time and you have to fit. You have to fit in. You have to be like a carbon copy of just about everybody else or if you stand out too much, it's a lot of pressure for a teenager, for an adolescent."
[Alex] "The definite downsides to that, there is no infrastructure or support group, there is no role models around you."
[Martin, 33, Fullerton] "I had to keep up such a facade, I mean, being on sports teams and being in a small school. It was-- you know, being gay was just not something that was acceptable. I mean, you really had to go with what everybody was saying. Being an individual was not really that accepted."
[Katie] "High school is such a mean place if you don't fit in, if you're not mainstream, you know, listen to the same kind of music, dress the same way. It's a bad place to be if you can't find a way to fit in."
[Alex] "Before I was very carefully screening what I did and I've always been a pretty good actor and so I was acting 24 hours a day. You know, I built up this character that was kind of like a compromise between the real me and, you know, what society expected."
[Katie]"It gets to be such a load on your shoulders after a while. I mean you come home and you're one person. You step outside the door, you're another. You go to school, you're a different person than you are when you are hanging out with your friends. You just -- after a while you can't do it anymore. It just gets to be where switching back and forth like that just wears you out."
[Tom]" It's a hard thing to understand about how then do you allow your daughter to be herself knowing that she will be criticized, knowing that she is going to be oppressed, knowing that she is going to be discriminated against."
[Martin] "Believing that I was going to be rejected or the fact that everybody liked me and thought I was a really neat person but if they knew that I was gay, that would all change. Because I was behind the scenes. I saw it. I heard what people -- you know, what people thought. I mean, I was hiding out in the open. Right there I was. I was there when they were telling the gay jokes. I was there when they were, you know, saying things about fagots and how disgusting it was and talking about, you know, whatever and there I was right there."
[Tom] "Why are these kids not able to come out and say here's my sexual orientation, here's what I know about myself, can you help me, will you support me, will you advocate for me to integrate my knowledge about myself? But I think it's dampened. I don't think people are talking directly to that issue. So I think the community is fairly constrained and I see it as -- it's kind of like a ruse. It's a lie. It says we're open, we welcome, we care but it doesn't. It pushes people away. It constrains them and doesn't advocate for diversity."
[Katie] "It's just something that people don't understand and don't think that they want to understand or don't think that they need to. And it just sets them on edge. It's something different that they don't want to be a part of. They don't want to know about it. They don't want to hear about it. And so they push it as far away as they can so they don't have to deal with it."
[Pastor Paul Coen, Campus Lutheran, UNK] "When you are talking about homosexuality that cuts really deep to the core of people. I have found that oftentimes if there's any sort of insecurity or uncertainty or wonder about it, you start questioning somebody's sexuality or bringing up issues of sexuality even in the church -- actually that's where it should be talked about -- people get real nervous and real weird and it's like get that away from me, that's different than what I'm used to, that's different than what I was taught."
[Scott] "I don't believe your beliefs are solidified until you have looked at them and challenged them and had to say, why do I believe what I believe, why do I feel what I feel, and that's why I think some people are frightened by gay and lesbian people because it challenges their belief system, it challenges things they hold fundamentally true in their lives, you know, their pillars. When you shake those, people get really scared, people get really scared. I don't blame anybody who gets scared because of that because I have been scared myself because of that. When I had to deal with the fact that I was gay, you know, it shook me, it shook me really hard."
[Katie] "A lot of the people that I know that come from smaller towns don't have support systems at all, and they maybe have a brother or sister who accepts them and supports them and they have themselves and that's it. They don't have the friends, they don't have the family who are behind them saying, you know, I will take care of you, I will protect you."
[Scott] "If you don't have a person to talk with about things that you are feeling, things that are going on inside you, it kind of festers, I guess, it grows inside you and you don't know. If you can't turn to anyone, you can't talk to anyone about it, all these questions and issues get raised in your mind and it's a circular kind of thing. It just feeds on itself and you get more and more afraid and more and more leery of your actions and you want to hold back everything and make sure you're very reserved and very much in a box."
[Katie] "It would be easier for kids going through high school if they just knew that they had their parents to go to and they didn't have to worry that their parents were going to kick them out of the house or never talk to them again or banish the rest of the family. "
[Pastor Coen] "People in the parishes are still, I think, for the most part -- within the Lutheran tradition, as well I'm guessing many traditions are still very nervous about it or just don't want to deal with it. But there's a growing portion of the church that is saying wait a minute, we have to look at this seriously, we have to see that these are our sons and daughters, these are our brothers and sisters, these are people created in the image of God, people for whom Christ has died. They're a part of our family."
[Scott] "If you want to talk about being made a certain way or made in the image of God or if God made us this way, if we think that God has some control over what goes on in our lives, then either I came out of the womb being gay or things that went on in my life have altered my -- or created me to be the person that I am. So either way, I was made to be this way."
[Martin] "There's such a new freedom. I remember the first time saying it outloud, telling somebody that I was gay and having those words come out of my mouth, it was incredible. The freedom that I felt. I mean, this huge weight was gone. But at the same time, I was petrified. I was scared to death. "
[Katie] "I would like everybody to respect me. They don't have to like who I am. They don't have to like what I'm about, who I date, what I do."
[Alex] "We are everywhere. You just don't know it. One person coming out, the first person is the hardest. Next person is easier. And the next person is a little easier."
[Scott] "Coming out is coming to terms, coming to grips with who you are."

Captioning by Nebraska Captioning Center, Lincoln, Nebraska

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