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How can I help?  [message #59719] Wed, 25 November 2009 17:42 Go to previous message
timmy

Has no life at all
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13828



I think I first asked myself this question in 1996 when I first came online. I didn't admit I was gay until two years later, but I still wanted, somehow, anyhow, to help.

I had no idea what I wanted to help with, or if I dared help, but I wanted to.

During that time I used a crowbar to open my closet door even a little. I needed help to open it. There wasn't, I realised, anything anyone else could do to help me except by example. So that made me start to live my life in public, albeit under a pen name, so that others could watch, maybe laugh at me, maybe take strength from my successes and my disasters.

I saw, today, a cry from the closet. Someone I know well has to remain closeted. It is not a free choice for him, and he has helped more than any of you can know. He would love to say whom and how he has helped, but he will not, and I will not say for him because it would break his confidence.

I know very little about how some of you have helped. And I know how hard it is to help. I was homophobic as a teen for survival, for example.

So would you like to share what you do, what you will do, what you have done? There is no ranking, no contest here. Wearing a World AIDS Day ribbon is pretty brave and helps, yet seems so small, too...



Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
 
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