Yes, we know that your parents sucked. They didn't let you stay out past nine, were always on your ass about your grades, the people you dated, the awful music that you were listening to, how their generation had more respect for their elders, yadda yadda yadda. And even now that you're grown up, they're still nudzhing at you, right?

Here's some consolation: You don't have Amy Contrada for your mom. Amy Contrada belongs to a Massachusetts anti-gay group called MassResistance which describes itself "the pro-family action center for Massachusetts -- and beyond!" After MassResistance organized a protest of a high-school production of the play The Laramie Project starring Amy's daughter Claudia, Claudia came out as a lesbian.

Oops.

Amy Contrada and MassResistance have responded to Claudia's public revelation of her sexuality neither with maternal love nor with neighborly compassion, but by dismissing her as a silly girl who is easily "confused."

"Of course, Claudia is no more a lesbian than the man in the moon. She's always had crushes on boys, and her bedroom has always been (and still is) plastered with pictures of boys," according to the MassResistance post (available online at www.massresistance.org). As Claudia Contrada started receiving more and more attention from her involvement with her high school's production of "The Laramie Project," says MassResistance, she took it one step further. "[W]hen Claudia told Amy and her husband that she's a lesbian, they basically ignored it as another silly idea that Claudia got from the latest school lunacy, and nothing more. Claudia doesn't really understand what "lesbian" is. It was all about getting attention. They did worry that she was starting to hang out with some very strange kids who had their own emotional problems stemming from "gay" and "transgender" identity issues."

This is no doubt a hard time for Claudia, but the public nature of her story is a blessing: countless teens live through the same story every year anonymously, and many of them wind up in "ex-gay" therapy or dead by their own hand. Claudia, at least, knows that there's a community of people who care for and admire her.
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Blog: Literate Perversions

“Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then finally y