A teenager jumps from a bridge and to his death because a roommate and a friend live-streamed on the Web secretly recorded video of his sexual encounter with another man.
Makes you want to run into the street and scream your lungs out in frustration, doesn’t it?
Gay and perceived-gay kids from California to New Jersey have taken their own lives in recent weeks because of bullying and gay bashing. It tells you everything about how far we have evolved as a people.
It, too, is why I sat down with Deborah Stone the other day to hear her story. What she does and how she came to do it, I figure, might be of benefit to a kid or a parent somewhere.
She is 60, a now-single mother of Sam, a Tulane University freshman whom she describes as “a talented, handsome son, who made me a better person.”
Sam is her only child. She raised him alone after her divorce when he was 3 1/2. They are, she said, extremely close.
“And that is significant,” she said, “because what I didn’t know was that he is gay.”
Deborah Stone stops you at this point in the story to explain that she is anything but homophobic, that her large circle of acquaintances has long included a gay best friend.
“But I was surprised, I really was,” she said. “I thought I would be accepting of it. My son thought I would be supportive. It was a long journey.”
He was in ninth grade then. It coincided with an incident at school where his best friend since kindergarten told Sam he hated him because he was queer, that he never wanted to talk to him again and hoped he would die.
A month later, Sam told his mother who he is.
“He sat me down,” Deborah Stone remembered. “I said, ‘Are you sure?’ How stupid. No one ever says that unless they are gay.”
She cried. She told Sam she loved him.
“I later figured out how difficult that was for him, and that you are on this journey as much as he is.”
She had always had this image of her future son, of how he’d be all grown up with a wife, kids and a couple of dogs. Now, it was all gone.
And then, almost immediately, she began worrying about his safety. She knew of this world, of what her son would face.
That night she called the helpline of the Denver chapter of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. The next night, she attended a PFLAG support group for parents.
For nearly a year, she said nothing of it to anyone.
“I went into the same closet from which he had just come out,” she said.
Their social circle disappeared. They were no longer invited to holiday parties or anything. The two shared their loneliness.
She continued with the PFLAG support-group meetings. One day, she took Sam.
“The amazing thing was the way he had a big impression on these adults, parents who wanted just to know and understand their children. He helped them with that,” Deborah Stone said.
She is now a board member of PFLAG. And she is now a facilitator of the parents group she leaned on in those first days.
“I tell everyone now about Sam, my gay son,” she says.
“I discovered it was a process of letting go into love, of letting go of what you thought he was going to be, that you have to love unconditionally.”
By the way, the hotline number she called is still in operation 24 hours a day. Here it is if you need it: 303-333-0286.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
