Future gay
leaders '06

Telling true stories

Andy Marra, 21, New York City GLAAD's Asian-Pacific Islander media manager; board president, National Center for Transgender Equality

Andy Marra was born a boy in Korea and came out at 10 to her adoptive parents, conservative Christians who live near Albany, N.Y. "A lot of people think coming out is a very easy process to go through, given the overwhelming amount of acceptance that is portrayed in the media nowadays, but it's still a journey for both my parents and myself," she says. "It took time for my parents to understand who I was and why I was involved in the LGBT community and the movement." However, she's quick to add, "I'm proud to say my parents love me and accept me for who I am."

Marra's belief in the continuing importance of coming out is central to her work as the Asian-Pacific Islander media manager for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, where she helps gay and transgender API Americans "to tell their stories and share their images in a really meaningful way with the media."

Marra came into her own as a leading activist in April 2004 when she organized a protest against Details magazine for publishing a one-page comedy piece titled "Gay or Asian?" featuring stereotypes about gay Asian-Pacific Islanders. It was a watershed moment for gay API people, and at only 19 years of age, Marra coordinated a campaign among several API LGBT organizations that resulted in a 200-person-strong demonstration outside the magazine's New York office.

"It was a phenomenal opportunity," remembers Marra, now 21, who's also a full-time student at New York City's Pace University. "We were able not only to directly interact with Details but also to indirectly get the word out about the piece and the overarching issue of the invisibility of the API LGBT community in the media."

Now a prominent transgender Asian activist, Marra also serves as board president for the National Center for Transgender Equality and is a board member for the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy, which is lobbying for antiharassment protections for trans students.

"I see myself in this movement for quite some time--as long as the movement wants me to be in it," Marra says.

The politics of safety

Joseph Amodeo, 19, Albany, N.Y. Founder, Schools Are for Everyone

Last spring, when he was just 18, Joseph Amodeo ran for the Ulster County legislature in New York's scenic Hudson Valley. He lost by fewer than 200 votes out of some 7,000 cast. Still, "the election was an awesome experience," Amodeo says.

That was except for a spate of nasty letters to the editor that appeared in the newspaper from the brother of a well-known local attorney. "I'll never forget his name until the day I die," says Amodeo, who recently finished his freshman year at the College of Saint Rose in Albany. "These letters said I had rabies, that I was pro-sodomy, and that I was a rabid gay activist for the gay agenda--and that I was attempting to 'manufacture homosexuals.' "

But Amodeo was used to harassment by that point. Indeed, his desire to run for public office and make a difference in the world grew out of his experience as a senior at Marlboro High School. As an openly gay student, he had been taunted and harassed for years. Things came to a head during his final semester when he was repeatedly harassed by both students and teachers. One teacher said during a discussion of human sexuality in psychology class that "homosexuality was a gene that he was confident could one day be plucked from every child." "I got up, left the room, and dropped the course," Amodeo recalls. Another time, in front of a different class, the teacher said to him, "I know you're gay." Although Amodeo reported both incidents to the school's administration, the teacher was never reprimanded.

Looking for support, he decided to start a gay-straight alliance at Marlboro, but he was stymied at every turn. One substitute teacher told Amodeo that a GSA "would bring more violence to this high school."

Although the GSA was eventually allowed, Amodeo decided he needed to form a national organization that would spare other students the hostility he faced. His group, Schools Are for Everyone, is now working to accredit schools that offer a safe, welcoming environment to gay students. And recently SAFE spawned a political action committee to support candidates for public office who want to implement the organization's aims. "Sooner or later we're going to get equal rights, because today's generation is going to be far more mainstream and far more accepting than what's previously run this country," Amodeo says.

Count Amodeo among his generation's up-and-coming political leaders: He's considering a run for the New York State senate in 2008.

Model citizen

Jason Haas, 23, Brooklyn, N.Y. Public speaker and LGBT advocate

After two years of near-constant antigay harassment in middle school, Jason Haas decided to sue the Boston public school district. That's when his career in activism began. "The kids were just relentless, and the teachers turned a blind eye to the physical and verbal abuse that was going on," he remembers. "My mom was at the school in seventh grade almost every other day." So he called up the New England legal rights organization Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, and the group told him he had a case. "It was no contest--everything added up," he says, noting that "it was blatant oversight and negligence" by the two schools he had attended. "I ended up leaving one because it was so bad. It was systematic violence and discrimination."

Haas eventually settled the case, but he didn't want money. "My mom and I saw it as just taking money out of a school system that needed it," he says. So the settlement required all public schools in Boston to adhere to the safe-schools program that was already in place, whereby faculty and staff members were supposed to act as liaisons for LGBT students who needed them.

In his freshman year of high school he got involved with a gay-straight alliance and, with the help of a Boston theater director, put on a schoolwide assembly in which he gave a speech that likened racism to homophobia. It prompted a move into public speaking, or "speaking out, using my voice as a tool for social change," he says. The effort culminated during his senior year, when he launched a speaking campaign that took him to local middle schools, high schools, and even a few colleges.

"I spoke about my experience coming of age and going to school in an environment that not only was intolerant but also violent and abusive," he says. "I spoke about how I turned my experience into something positive." He also brought his experiences to bear as chair of the Greater Boston Regional Student Advisory Council to the Massachusetts board of education.

As a student at Hamilton College in upstate New York he continued speaking out, chairing the school's diversity committee, organizing the first gay-straight student pride rally, and founding an enterprise called the LGBTQ Empowerment and Action Project, which sought to "make institutional change," as he puts it. "I saw a need to become more political, to engage in grassroots activism as well as working with administrators, faculty, and staff to create resources" for gay students, Haas says. "We worked on LGBT recruiting, on identifying LGBT-friendly employers, and making a database in the career center."

Haas is currently on leave from Hamilton and living in New York, where he's pursuing modeling and acting opportunities. And he's working on a one-man theatrical show about his life as, he says, "a working-class gay black boy." "It's about all this stuff--race, sexual politics--but at the core of it, it's a coming-of-age story. Hopefully, people can relate to it."

But if this "performance-as-activism thing" doesn't pan out, "I always dreamed about being in Congress," he says. "Barney Frank was a big hero of mine. He still is."

Children will listen

Maggie Crowley, 23, Boston Assistant director, Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry

As a student at Miss Porter's School, the tony Connecticut girls' prep school that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis once attended, Maggie Crowley only knew one out lesbian: the school's hockey coach and athletic director. "She was a lovely woman, I'm sure, but I was not a sports player and was kind of scared--I was always trying to get out of the sports requirement," recalls Crowley, who preferred ballet and modern dance. "I was coming out, and as far as I knew, everyone was straight."

She soon learned that wasn't the case when during her junior year she got involved with the Connecticut group Love Makes a Family, which was lobbying for a statewide coparent adoption law that would allow LGBT people to adopt their partners' kids. The law passed, and Crowley was hooked on activism.

"I was so young, and I did the work. I learned to make phone calls, to set up an e-mail group, to hold and run a meeting," she says. "But I really learned about people's personal histories as gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender. I would be in the car with somebody getting a ride to a meeting that was an hour away, and they would tell me their coming-out story. This one woman had a cousin who had been murdered by another family member after he came out. That all had a tremendous impact on me."

As did meeting gay kids her age--and the children of the gay adults she was working with. "As I was helping to lobby at the statehouse, I met families with children, and I've kept in touch with some of them," says Crowley. "It's been a few years now, and I've seen their kids grow up from babies and toddlers that I would take out of the hearing room and walk around with, tugging at my jewelry. Now they're in elementary school!" She pauses to consider, then says, "When I really get to the emotional core of why I'm doing this, it's the history and the stories, and the kids that I got to know."

Eventually Crowley lobbied for safer schools in Connecticut for LGBT students. She also joined the fight for marriage equality, working with Freedom to Marry and MassEquality to lead youth efforts during the state's 2004 constitutional convention, in which legislators failed to stop same-sex marriage rights from taking effect.

Now, having graduated from Emerson College with degrees in dance and political communication, she's making sure that marriage equality is not undone by a proposed 2008 Massachusetts ballot initiative. "It's so vital that we counter the voice of the religious right, who have co-opted the language of faith," she says. "I speak with wonderful, lovely people every day who care very much about this issue--they have gay and lesbian couples in their congregations. We're up against the Catholic Church, where they are not ashamed to whip out the petition or the postcard and pass it down the aisle during Mass. I'm going to be with marriage in Massachusetts until it's secure. That's a commitment I've made to myself. It's really important that we secure it."

Voice of her generation

Celia La Luz, 18, San Francisco Radio journalist; Point Foundation scholar

Even before Celia La Luz knew she was lesbian, she was taunted and harassed in school to the point of wanting to stop speaking. "I've always looked boyish, and everyone made fun of me, calling me 'lesbo'--who knew they'd be right," says the resident of San Francisco. "When my friends became aware of it in middle school, they didn't want to deal with everyone making fun of me--and making fun of them for hanging out with me--so I basically had no friends. I literally couldn't speak to anyone. I became completely shy, and when I would speak it would feel like I was out of practice. I wasn't used to the sound of my own voice."

She became so depressed that on the day of her European history Advanced Placement exam as a high school sophomore two years ago, she took an intentional overdose of ephedrine pills and was rushed to the hospital. But thanks to an understanding therapist who referred her to San Francisco's Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center, and a friend who got her involved in the center's OutLoud youth radio program, La Luz has finally found her voice--and that of the other queer kids she's interviewed for pieces on the show like "Bi Chic."

"It was just what I really needed to be able to talk again and be myself," says La Luz, who helps her family with the money she makes as an OutLoud youth producer. La Luz lives with her parents--her mom is an ex-hippie from Arkansas, her dad a disabled Vietnam vet--in the southern part of the Mission neighborhood in a house La Luz describes as "kind of a shack."

"As I'm talking to you now, I'm sitting on my bed, which is wedged between the refrigerator and this window that used to lead to a balcony that collapsed because it just rotted away," she says. "The reality is, I had to work as soon as I could."

However, she says, "working with the radio has really exposed me to a whole new world out there. I'm making my own life here, which is the only solution to growing up poor." It also helps that she was recently named a 2006 Point Scholar, receiving a hefty scholarship that she'll use to attend Reed College in Portland, Ore., in the fall. There, she plans to continue her burgeoning journalistic career.

"One of the most positive things we can do as LGBT journalists is to make people realize that 'Yeah, we're normal, and this is what's going on in our world,' " La Luz says. And she has already seen the impact of her journalism on others, including her father, who wasn't exactly thrilled when she came out to him. "He just said, 'Don't make me hate you like I hate those motherfuckers!' " she recalls. "And I walked out and of course cried horribly. It was really hard getting my father to come around."

Until, that is, he heard one of his daughter's OutLoud pieces, which La Luz's mom, a longtime National Public Radio listener, was playing on a boom box. "I think he was just proud in what I was doing," she says, "no matter what it was about."

Ms. Outspoken

Cathy Carmack, 18, Rock Island, Ill. GLSEN Jump-Start leader

In seventh grade Cathy Carmack was a member of the "in crowd," an athlete and an all-around popular girl. That was until she came out and her friends "freaked out," she recalls.

Carmack shared the news with a couple of close friends, and word spread overnight. "I remember walking into the gym and everyone just stopped talking and looked at me," she says. "I was like, OK, they know. This can't be that bad; they're going to understand; those are my friends."

But when she went to join them, "they all scooted back, and I knew that there was no going back. I was out, and I was going to have to deal with whatever came with it."

Fortunately for Carmack, her friends came around, and at Rock Island High School, in a city a few hours west of Chicago and just across the Mississippi River from Iowa, she was soon popular once again, this time because she was out and proud. "I like when I tell people, 'Hey, don't say 'That's so gay,' or 'Don't use the word 'fag,' because it's offensive to me,' and they're like, 'Oh, I'm really sorry, I didn't know,' " says Carmack, now a senior. "Then they'll hear someone else say it and be like, 'Didn't you just hear Cathy?' "

Indeed, when the principal, who claimed he never heard the word "homophobia" before, canceled the school's Day of Silence this April because of a conflict with a day of mandatory testing, hundreds of students threatened to walk out in support of Carmack, who was organizing the event. Carmack asked them not to, saying she didn't want the day to become negative.

Carmack's high profile as an out student has been an inspiration to her closeted peers. "A lot of them told me that they came out because they saw me do it, that I gave them the courage to be able to be who they were," she says.

Carmack also single-handedly persuaded her school district last fall to add sexual orientation and gender identity as characteristics protected by its nondiscrimination policy. And when she traveled to Washington, D.C., earlier this year as part of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network's Jump-Start team, which trains high school students in activism, she prevailed on her congressman, Lane Evans, to sign on to a federal safe-schools bill pending in the House. And she got one of her U.S. senators, Dick Durbin, to begin the process of introducing a companion bill in the Senate.

"I think, next to the [nondiscrimination] policy, that is probably the thing I am most proud of," she says. "It was one thing to make my school safer, but it's a whole other thing to have an opportunity to make every school in the entire country safer."

And as for her latest achievement? "I was just voted Most Outspoken in our senior superlatives, by a landslide," says Carmack, who's heading to the University of Iowa in the fall. "I like that one."

Educating the South

Antonio Locus, 17, Durham, N.C. GLSEN Jump-Start leader

When Antonio Locus was in the eighth grade he wrote a private letter to his best friend telling her he was gay. He was stunned when she then read it aloud in front of a group of classmates. "They just stood there and said, 'I'm going to make him cry. I want to make him feel bad about himself; he's a faggot!' " Locus recalls.

During that first year of coming out Locus was harassed, he says. "But now that they know me, they're just like, 'Oh, he's cool; he could beat me up,' " he says.

Since becoming a member of GLSEN's Jump-Start team in January 2005, Locus has tried to end the harassment that other gay and lesbian students still face.

"I did not have any idea what I was getting myself into," he says with a chuckle about his first Jump-Start retreat in Minneapolis. Then 16, the Durham, N.C., resident had been recruited by GLSEN when he contacted the organization while writing a story on gay-straight alliances for his school's newspaper. "That was my first time ever riding a plane, and I was scared, but when I got there I felt relief, because everyone was so nice to me and so cool," he recalls. "I learned a lot of valuable things." Valuable things such as "how to go back to my school and just take action--start a GSA, get people involved, and make people feel positive about themselves."

As the only Jump-Start organizer in Durham, he's done just that, helping to coordinate the GLSEN-sponsored Transgender Day of Remembrance last fall at the local queer youth center, where participants learned the sometimes deadly extent of harassment against trans people. Now he's planning his secondary school's first teacher trainings on LGBT sensitivity.

"We are a very diverse school, but still there is harassment, name-calling, and we just want to cut that out," Locus says. "We had to educate the teachers first, because the teachers are key."

Locus's efforts as an activist are also helping to create a sense of community for LGBT folks in a part of the South where few people are out. "I can't say that I know that many gay people, because I don't come across them a lot, and the ones that I do know are on the down low," Locus says.

Which is why in the upcoming school year he plans to broaden his outreach to other Durham schools, including a nearby high school that's predominantly black. "It's important for me to try and help those people there," says Locus, who dreams of making it big on Broadway when he's older. "I know my school is not the only school that needs help."