Passing out
fliers for his Virginia LGBT activist group at a local
street festival, our teen diarist is met with
rejection and outright hostility—but he does
manage to get through to one individual.
Satre is a junior at Notre Dame Academy, a private
Catholic high school in Middleburg, Va., and the
founder of the Virginia LGBT activist group
Equality Fauquier-Culpeper. He writes weekly journal
entries for Advocate.com.
In my previous
installment I spilled emotion all over my keyboard,
expressing my views as a minority in my own faith. Almost
instantly I received one of the most inspiring letters
signed by “a loving Christian mother,”
followed shortly by hundreds of others from around the
country. I am thankful to say that the letters of
acceptance because of faith, regardless of
denomination, have far outnumbered the letters full of
hatred and rejection in the name of a beautiful religion.
Every time I sit
back in deep thought about the events of the past week,
it seems that life has spun me around, making me dizzy.
Equality Fauquier-Culpeper held its first annual
picnic in perfect weather last Saturday. Harris
Miller, a candidate for the U.S. Senate, was in
attendance along with members of his campaign staff. (Mr.
Miller is running against my good friend Sen. George
Allen, whom we all remember from my past
encounter—you can easily guess how I met Mr. Miller.)
As the afternoon
approached Mr. Miller told me he would soon be off to
Culpeper for the annual Culpeper Days festival. No sooner
had the picnic ended than I decided that Culpeper Days
would be a perfect opportunity to distribute
information about Equality Fauquier-Culpeper. I jumped in my
car and made my way there with a stack of fliers in the
trunk.
When I finally
arrived in Old Town Culpeper (full of historic structures
and the background for the Hush movie set) a sense of family
filled the air as the smells of food and festivity
mingled around me. Culpeper was bright with activity.
I handed my first
flier to a gentleman who smiled at me. By the time I
handed out the second flier, the gentleman ran back at me,
cussing, making snide remarks, and violently throwing
the flier on the ground. The second flier was taken
into the hands of a polite gentleman who smiled and
called me by name: “Tully, I have been following your
story—God can change you.”
“Would God
change what he created, or was I a mistake?” I asked.
No reply.
There was the
group that threw my fliers back, the Gideons who laughed,
the Klan member who glared, the evangelist who preached, the
couple who discarded, the Mormon missionaries who
stared, and finally, the woman who pulled money out of
her pocket and donated. To me, she represents someone
who truly has taken to heart Culpeper’s motto:
“preserving the past, embracing the
future.”
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Satre can be reached at tully@efcva.org and
via MySpace.com.