Fresh Start

My daughter, Alyson, began checking out colleges in her junior year of high school. On one of our first visits, she and I were finishing up an interview with the dean of admissions when she asked if I could step outside so she could have a moment alone with him. Later that night, I asked her what she had said to him. "I asked him if the college was gay-friendly," she said, "because I am." That was when I first learned that my daughter, then 16, was a lesbian.

Navigating the tension-filled college-application process is difficult for most teens. But when sexual orientation and gender expression and identity are added issues to the college search, it becomes an even more daunting process. This week, anxious high-school seniors, including my daughter, are receiving their final college-admissions decisions. For lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth, these decisions can be critical. On top of the standard academic criteria, they're seeking a place that provides a safe, accepting environment that allows them the chance to be themselves and find others like them—something many couldn't find in high school.

Thanks to the Internet, a growing number of LGBT support groups and greater awareness fostered by celebrities who are out of the closet, conditions have improved for LGBT teens, as compared to the more negative environment of decades ago. There are now college guides aimed at gay teens and an increasing number of support groups for high-schoolers. But LGBT youth still face enormous challenges, living in a society "that rejects them far too much of the time," says Charles Robbins, executive director and CEO of The Trevor Project, which operates a 24-hour crisis and suicide-prevention helpline for LGBT youth that receives 18,000 calls a year. This makes the inherently difficult teenage years even worse, he says. A survey by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), released in October 2008, found that 86 percent of LGBT students were verbally harassed, and 44 percent physically abused. For kids dealing with this kind of abuse in high school, a supportive college campus is more than just an academic matter.

My daughter Alyson hasn't suffered outward persecution at her high school in the Midwest; her friends have been supportive of her sexual orientation, but she still feels like the odd woman out in a teen world dominated by heterosexual parties and proms. She believes that a love interest and relationship isn't in her high-school future. "I feel weird at parties because everyone else is straight," she says. At a recent LGBT teen leadership conference in Denver, she socialized with college kids and learned, for the first time, what it was like not to be an outsider. "Every single person around me was LGBT. It was incredibly refreshing and awakening. For once, I wasn't a deviant from the norm." So Alyson is making sure that her college years offer her that same comfortable feeling, vigorously researching schools to find that kind of environment.

Yoni Siden, 18, a college freshman, was also looking for a campus where he could feel comfortable. Siden came out three years ago to his parents and even in his liberal community of Ann Arbor, Mich., he has been called a "faggot" since sixth grade. During ninth and 10th grade, he was pelted with fruits and vegetables multiple times a week in the school's lunchroom and in his junior year was run off the road by an SUV filled with boys from his high school. "It was clear to me that I was not welcome or accepted," Siden says.

After spending his high-school years in fear, Siden made certain his college experience would be better. He methodically researched schools, interviewing the admissions counselor on the school's LGBT-friendliness and openly discussing his sexual orientation in his application. He decided on Loyola University. The university's location, in a large city, Chicago, helps him feel safe for the first time, and he can openly engage with a large community of gay peers. "I never have to wonder if the look that someone just gave me was going to result in a gay-bashing. It's been wonderful in that way."

Jacob Weldon, now 25 and living in New York, became estranged from his parents during his senior year in high school after he told his father, a police officer and former Marine, that he was gay. (He's now reconciled with them.) Growing up in a conservative town in Texas, he became accustomed to having "fag" scrawled across his windshield. Now, at Columbia University, he says he's blossomed. "I can hold my boyfriend's hand if I want to" and not be afraid of being beaten up, he says.

Teens are coming out younger than ever before, and while that can mean more harassment of the kind that Weldon endured, it has also given rise to a host of social-support groups. Caitlin Ryan, director of the family-acceptance project at The Cesar E. Chavez Institute at San Francisco State University and an author of the first comprehensive study on LGBT adolescents and their families, says that while gays in the 1970s came out on average in their 20s, that age is now 13½. The number of high-school gay-straight alliance clubs has jumped from 1,000 in 2001 to 4,000 today, according to GLSEN. With more openness, and additional resources, it's easier for gay teens to take sexual orientation into consideration when going through the college-selection process.