May/December relationships gone bad

I'm just about to prove to you why you are my bitch. :)

I don't blog, so you guys have to put up with this shit. When I was seventeen my best friend took seven hours one day of torturing himself (and me) to tell he was gay. I had known him for ten years, we had cried together when dogs died, talked about our parents' divorces, our respective experiences with physical abuse by our fathers, everything. He had known and suufered with this knowledge alone for several years. Still, he could not bring himself to tell me this. I work (and worked) in the substance abuse prevention field, working with adolescents. Despite the fact that roughly ten percent of the world population (a slightlyunderreported statistic in my opinion) is gay, About forty percent of the kids I deal with that are identified as being at-risk, or actively involved with drugs, have some sort of gender or sexual identity issue as well. Homosexual teenagers are more likely to fail academically, more likely to have eating disorders, take drugs, be victims of and agressors of social violence, including date rape and bullyng, and nearly three times as likely to kill themselves. In a strange reversal of roles I come to this site to act like a kid. My job requires me to be the mature example to a large group of troubled kids, so I blow off steam and come in here and act like a teenager. I don't mean t make anyone feel like I'm criticizing, but I want to live up to an ideal I espouse to the kids I work with. I want to incorporate my values into everything I do, not just the few hours a week I see them. One guideline I always establish for the groups I run is Gay is Not An Insult. No matter what you believe about sexual "preference" or "orientation" the fact remains that at least ten percent of our children are struggling with an issue and bias that the other 90% can not comprehend. I am white so there are issues of race relations that I can not be privy to. I am male so no level of sensitivity will make me realize what it means to live in a culture dominated by male ethic. I am straight and never for a second needed to reconcile my sexual desires with what society thought was right. I have never had to stop and consider that the person I had sexual desire for might be so offended by it that group of their friends would chain me to tree and throw rocks at me until I was dead. I'm not looking to debate the causes, lay blame at anyone's feet or even try to modify anyone else's behavior. I just know there are children out there right now struggling with this. I don't know what the solution is, but my piece of it for today is to write this and continue to make a real effort to follow my own rule everywhere I go on this site and in life.