Young Gay America

It's as powerful a movement as Stonewall, and we want to record the voices of this moment as it happens.
-- Benjie Nycum, Young Gay America

After leaving their jobs at XY Magazine in San Francisco, Benjie Nycum and Mike Glatze had a simple idea. Travel around the United States and interview gay youth along their way. Oh, and post the interviews on the Internet. Within days, a website was born. The team conducted and edited interviews on each day of the initial trip, uploading stories and images with the assistance of a volunteer webmaster. The idea was instantly successful, and the dynamic duo has since conducted interview tours of South, Midwest, and Northwest America (using their own savings). In collecting stories, there is no criterion except they come from youth. Their goal is to just collect everybody's experience, if it's good, bad, sensational, boring - in hopes that kids reading the information on the website will find common experiences.

Queer youth still don't have a voice. They still feel isolated in most cases. There are millions of young queer people out there, and they are ignored in almost every part of the media.
-- Mike Glatze, Young Gay America

According to Benjie and Mike, "Finding information and guidance is the biggest challenge for gay kids. But thanks to new technologies such as the Internet, it's now possible for even deeply closeted kids to learn about coming out, sex, and relationships - and do so anonymously. For us, technology is crucial. We can edit photographs and stories while we drive and upload them via our cell phone or hotel phone line, and by the next morning we'll have two or three E-mails from kids as far away as Switzerland, or from right down the road, saying they had no idea there were people in the same situation so close."

Benjie and Mike have learned a lot, and have a lot to tell. They point out that many original theories about the country were wrong. Among the most surprising fact revealed to them during their travels is that in many communities churches are a powerful -- and sometimes the only -- resource for gay youth.