“I wouldn’t have chosen this.” His father adds, “You know, you tend to want your kids to have a good life, and part of that is not having people hate you.” His mother explains, “I worry about him being hurt.” CBS’ Paula Zahn asks Greg’s parents whether being gay is the life they would have selected for their son. Greg is usually fidgety when he isn’t talking – fiddling with his shoes, clicking his tongue stud against his front teeth – but as he watches himself on TV, his body calms. “Now you get to see me with long hair,” he says. Greg has found the videotape and pops it into the machine. “Of all people, why should it bother them?” “That actually surprised me,” he says mildly. People called him on the phone, said “faggot,” hung up in the halls, students would bump him and whisper, “You’re gonna die.” For a year, no one at school would talk to Dylan, even girls. Once a teen comes out as gay, other students are usually eager to remind him of it. They would have literally said to them, ‘Your daughter’s a lesbian, and she’s not welcome here.’ “After Dylan came out, school became a nightmare for him. “And I was so glad that I was out then,” Tara says, bugging her eyes, “because if I hadn’t been, they would have outed me to my parents. About a month after Tara told her mother she was gay, the Catholic school that Tara attended called her parents in and explained that they weren’t comfortable having a lesbian ninth-grader in their institution.
His parents – “my mom especially,” he says – are “pretty open people.” This is a distinction I hear often from gay teens: The world is split not into gay and straight but into open and closed. Dylan tells me that he never worried about what his family would think his school concerned him. Every gay teenager I speak with has one: For many of them, coming out was the most charged few hours of their lives, the moment the theoretical part of homosexuality ended, when being gay was no longer something over there, it was you. While Greg searches for his 48 Hours videotape, Dylan and Tara tell their coming-out stories. Tara and Dylan came out the old-fashioned way, without the benefit of television. He’s quiet, toweringly tall, with jeans ripped at the knees and shiny Frankenstein shoes. Tara Conroy is fifteen, small, busty, cheerful, with steel studs in both ears. We’re sitting in a living room with two of Greg’s friends. Asked what it was like to discuss something so personal so publicly, Greg smiles. Greg Whiting, a fifteen-year-old with red curly hair and blue fingernails, has come out as gay three times: once to his parents, once to his school and once to a national television audience on 48 Hours.