Reading

The latest series from Washington Post writer Anne Hull (who I got to meet while interning at the Poynter Institute). She spent several months interviewing openly gay teenagers in New Jersey and Oklahoma:

For Michael, the pressure keeps building. In current-events class, some of the football players say how sick gay marriage is. Michael says nothing. He hates coming to school and tells his mom he wants to drop out.

Janice is torn. She thinks about the Matthew Shepard video she rented from Blockbuster. "If there was a group of kids mean enough, this could happen to Michael," she says. "We are still living in the middle of the Bible Belt."

One afternoon in late January, as a abitter wind pushes off the lake, Michael bundles up and goes out to his truck. Using masking tape and orange paint, he decorates the hood with menacing flames. When he proudly rumbles into the school parking lot, he later recalls, someone calls him a flaming faggot. Screw it, he thinks. Rubber burning, he peels out of the parking lot, making his formal exit as a student at Charles Page High.

Read the entire series here.