LGBT youth, the movement's new ambassadors

From PlanetOut

SUMMARY: Young people, some barely in their teens, are gay rights' newest ambassadors at statehouses from Olympia, Wash., to Montpelier, Vt.

The half-dozen lobbyists who crowded into a lawmaker's office in Sacramento, Calif., recently didn't come bearing campaign cash or votes to swap. Instead, they recounted tales of high school torment as fresh as their faces.

Ignacio Pitalua, 19, spoke about having a trash can dumped on him by other boys who suspected he was gay.

"It's a big obstacle to learning," Pitalua said, pressing Assemblyman Curren Price to co-sponsor a bill that sets specific requirements for schools to stem anti-gay discrimination.

Young people, some barely in their teens, are becoming the gay rights movement's newest ambassadors at statehouses from Olympia, Wash., to Montpelier, Vt. Their advocacy, unheard of as recently as a decade ago, reflects the slowly growing acceptance that is emboldening gays and lesbians to come out of the closet while they are coming of age.

The article goes on to say:

Yet the most effective spokespeople are not necessarily gay youth, but the straight students who joined with them to form more than 2,500 high school gay-straight alliance clubs across the country since the early 1990s.

Carolyn Lamb, director of California's Gay-Straight Alliance Network, estimates that up to 40 percent of the 400 high school and college students recently bused to Sacramento for Queer Youth Advocacy Day were not LGBT.

"Most of the adult-driven (gay) civil rights work doesn't have such large numbers of straight allies who see it as a civil rights cause," she observed.

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