While he uses the Internet to communicate with high-school friends - Jeffrey is now 16 and a junior in high school - and to pursue his avid fandom of the group 'N Sync, he has separate screen names and ''instant messaging'' services for these activities. Jeffrey's computer is in his bedroom, garrisoned inside a thicket of codes and passwords.
From his peers at school he dreaded violence, and with good reason: according to a 1996 study of the Seattle public schools, one in six gay teenagers is beaten so badly during adolescence that he requires medical attention.
When we were first getting to know each other, he made it clear that he could allow no overlap between his online gay life and the life he led in the ''real world.'' He explained, ''In our town, everybody knows everybody, and everybody knows everybody's business.'' He feared that if word of his sexual orientation were to reach his parents, they might refuse to support him or pay for college. Jeffrey and I met when he responded to an online message I posted, seeking gay teenagers willing to discuss their online lives. It was around this time that Jeffrey first typed the words ''gay'' and ''teen'' into a search engine on the computer he'd gotten several months before and was staggered to find himself aswirl in a teeming online gay world, replete with resource centers, articles, advice columns, personals, chat rooms, message boards, porn sites and - most crucially - thousands of closeted and anxious kids like himself. But being 15, he was too young to drive and afraid to enlist his parents' help in what would surely seem a bizarre and suspicious errand. He called a crisis line for gay teenagers, where a counselor suggested he attend a gay support group in a city an hour and a half away. ''My mother's always saying, 'It'll be so wonderful when you meet that beautiful Christian girl and have lots of grandchildren,' and every time she said that, I was like, That's it: my life is going to be hell.'' ''I'm a Christian - I'm like, how could God possibly do this to me?'' he said. But as the truth gradually settled over him, he told me last summer during a phone conversation punctuated by nervous visits to his bedroom door to make sure no family member was listening in, he became suicidal. (He asked that I withhold not only his last name but also any other aspects of his life that might reveal his identity.) He prayed that his errant feelings were a phase. Jeffrey knew of no homosexuals in his high school or in his small town in the heart of the South. But Jeffrey is a devout Southern Baptist, attending church several times each week, where, he says, the pastor seems to make a point of condemning homosexuality. This discovery had been coming on for some time he had noticed that he felt no attraction to girls and that he became aroused when showering with other boys after physical education class. In the summer of 1999, when he was 15, a youth I will refer to by only his first name, Jeffrey, finally admitted to himself that he was gay.