Dan Savage on Gay Outcasts

Dan Savage posted a letter from a lesbian high school kid who wrote him about the bullying she gets at school.  She has been made to feel like an outcast in her little southern town.  Savage gave her brilliant advice.  Here's an excerpt:

"And while you're talking to yourself in the mornings, TALI, tell yourself this, too: "Fuck my school, fuck my classmates, and fuck this town." The shits conspiring to make you miserable, TALI, are unlikely to have lives anywhere near as interesting as the one on which you're about to embark. Your classmates are making you miserable now because they know, deep down in their little black hearts, that their lives are going to be duller than day-old douche water compared to yours. Their lives aren't going to be dull because they're straight, TALI, but because the value they place on conformity—that's the reason they feel they have a right to abuse you now—is a prison they've constructed around themselves.


Right now they're making you feel like an outcast, TALI, and the malice stings. But what exactly are they casting you out of? Your high school? Their asshole cliques? That shit town? You haven't been cast out, TALI; you've been liberated. Freed. Sprung."

Damn, I wish somebody had told me that when I was 16. 

Read the rest here.