[LINK] "Small-town gay teens strive for big-city diversity and acceptance"

[rfmcdonald]

I'm glad that I never really had to deal with these issues, whether because I never encountered them or because I never noticed them or I unconsciously edited them from my memory. Still, I am in Toronto for a reason, you know.

The anti-gay slurs were tossed around Marion Miller's classroom in rural Nova Scotia as casually as paper airplanes.

"People would be in class just throwing out death threats about, like, the two people who had ever dared to come out," recalls Miller, a college student now living in Montreal who describes herself as queer.

"People would say things like, 'My cousin, I don't talk to him anymore since he came out' and 'There's not any gay people at this school because we would have rounded them up already."'

When the disparagement was too much, Miller would slip quietly outside her classroom in Pomquet, an Acadian hamlet some 2 1/2 hours northeast of Halifax.

Miller was around 14 and had only just come out to herself, close friends and family. Her classmates, she figured, wouldn't accept her.

"I was shaken. It was really scary," says Miller, now 18. "I was like, 'Wow, does this mean I could never come out? Is this what faces me in the world, these kinds of people?"'

[. . .]

Without visible support, one expert says growing up gay in a small town can be an exercise in waiting and loneliness.

"Lots of young people that we talk to really feel like they need to keep their head down, get through the teenage years and finish school," says Jennifer Fodden, executive director of a Toronto-based helpline for LGBTQ youth.

Some 6,000 Ontarians contact the Lesbian Gay Bi Trans Youth Line each year and chat with peers aged 15 to 26 who've shared many of the same questions, concerns and experiences.

Fodden, 36, says the promise of pride parades and support groups in big cities can lure youths from their rural homes before they're financially ready. Some wind up on the street as a result.

LGBTQ youth face challenges in larger centres, too, but there's generally more support and resources are handy, says Fodden, a Toronto native who came out as a lesbian at 21.

"I had more options," she says of her coming out experience. "It was a less personally excruciating process of trying to figure out who I was, for sure."