It's hard, it's frustrating, it's beyond sad that stories like this are STILL NEEDED.

When I was 11, I didn't know what gay meant. I had never heard of homosexuality. It had never occurred to me even as a theoretical concept.

Then I fell hard for a friend of mine who was also a boy. I didn't realize at first I had a major crush going on. I just knew what I was feeling was powerful, sweet and GOOD. I didn't tell myself I LOVED my friend, but the sweet feelings filling me up were certainly based in that most positive of human emotions.

I was on cloud nine. I floated rather than walked. I ran around with a goofy grin on my face.

Then, when I was 12 or almost 12, the dots all came together for me in church. Listening to an anti-gay sermon, it all clicked. I was evil. I was worse than evil. I was DISGUSTING.

I bolted from the family pew and lost my breakfast in the men's room.

That began a period of almost 10 years that were the worst and most painful in my life, culminating in two suicide attempts my first year of college.

All because I was born gay. All because superstitious religious fools refuse to accept that actual fact, refuse to look at evidence, refuse to abandon their inane, false, utterly disproven inanities.

But then, they are the same unthinking fools who flock to a museum for creationism co-located with a so-called replica of Noah's ark. How can people be that willfully ignorant!?

Conservative religion is so evil and disgusting. What they did to an innocent 11 year old in love might be forgiveable. But they won't ask for forgiveness. They insist on continuing in their ignorance and grievously wounding even more people like the little boy I used to be.

And so stories like yours here, which should have stopped being necessary decades ago, are needed rather more than ever.

Thank you.