LGBT
Related: About this forumMother’s Day On Our Radar – Mindy Forsythe Rescues A Tortured Gay Teen (trigger warning)
In an old house in Paris, that was covered with vines, lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.
What I was not good at, and did not enjoy, were the teenage years. When I think of that period of my kids lives, words like sneaky, moody, selfish and ungrateful start pouring out, so I find it best not to visit there. For me, my kids teen years were something I endured, not something I enjoyed. I would never have considered taking another teen into our home, much less a troubled one.
That experience may be why, when I heard the story of Mindy Forsythe who saved a gay teenager from hell at home, I immediately wanted to have her canonized. St. Mindy. Patron saint of lost gay teens.
From the outside looking in, Mindy, her husband Dale and their three children have the picture perfect, happy suburban family. Corey Nichols had anything but.
Fifteen-year-old Corey (right) had the bad fortune to be one of the thousands of gay kids rejected by his religiously homophobic family. Knowing how they felt, he tried to keep his sexuality hidden, but they suspected. Corey told Out In Santa Cruz that his father warned him that gay people were not only sinners, they were sin itself, and when they reached a certain age, they had to be killed. Corey says his father threatened:
If any fag lived in this house, I would shoot them in the head with a shotgun.
Corey was miserable as you can imagine. Then one night, sick and scared, he told his friend Aubrey in an online forum:
I am desperate. Things here are so bad, I want to slit my wrists. I am not kidding.
It was the luckiest moment of Coreys young life, because Aubreys mother, our shero Mindy, happened by at that moment and saw what was on her daughters computer screen.
It was like I was possessed by someone else, Mindy recalls. I knew I needed to act, and to do something, but everything I did was against my nature and not how I usually act as a person.
http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/on-our-radar-mindy-forsythe-rescues-a-tortured-gay-teen/news/2014/05/11/86029
sheshe2
(83,955 posts)Thank you so much for posting this for Mothers Day~
Well done Mindy.
gvstn
(2,805 posts)Edit: Forgot to say, Thank you for the thread. Thank you!
ColesCountyDem
(6,943 posts)... "If that were MY son, I'd kick him out of the house-- that's just WRONG!". My father looked my uncle right in the eye and said, "Gene, there not a thing wrong with my son, but there's something TERRIBLY wrong with any parent who would do that to their child, just because they're gay".
Thank you, Dad. Love you always!
theHandpuppet
(19,964 posts)Thanks so much for sharing.
It also reminds me that on this Mother's Day there are thousands of LGBT youth who are homeless because their families have turned them out on the streets. Here are some links to sites where you can help:
http://brandonshire.com/lgbt-youth-organizations/
http://www.aliforneycenter.org/
http://www.lost-n-found.org/
http://laglc.convio.net/site/PageServer?pagename=YW_YS_Homeless_Services
ismnotwasm
(42,020 posts)Part of my teenage story is being a street kid-- pre-HIV, I surrounded myself with these beautiful young men-- who were rejected by their families for being Gay, often in danger because there were working the streets. They quite literally saved my life. (Several stories on that one)
Nearly all of them are dead. We didn't know, see, we just didn't know--when AIDs hit I lost so many friends.
So while there is treatment for HiV today, to my mind currently these youths are in great danger, from predators, and random or targeted violence amount other things
I can't thank those young men, my friends I lost but I sure as hell can take up a cause that will always affect me.
nomorenomore08
(13,324 posts)A person like that must have something seriously wrong with them, somewhere.