Mitchell Gold Tries to Break Cycle of Gay Teen Suicide

Like so many of us, successful furniture company co-founder, Mitchell Gold, asked himself growing up "Why did God create me this way?" It is a question that has no ready answer and which can leave one with a feeling that life will never get better. As a result, suicide all too often seems the best option to end the suffering. I felt that way myself in the past. Deb Price has a piece in the Detroit News that looks at Gold's efforts to help gay teens to find help and avoid the decision that death is the only solution to what family, church and society all too often say is a problem, abnormal or a sin. No one should be made to feel that they are garbage or not worthy of living a full and happy life. I applaud Gold's efforts and hope he helps save teens from making a tragic mistake. Here are highlights from Deb's column:
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"Why did God create me this way?" That's what Mitchell Gold asked himself as a teenager in the mid-1960s as he hid his homosexuality from family and friends. The better he got at the hiding game on the outside, the more torn up he became on the inside. What he called "the black cloud" swallowed him up. And he found himself thinking of ways to kill himself -- from overdosing on sleeping pills to driving off a cliff.

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Gold felt completely alone, but the sad truth is that countless other gay and lesbian teens were feeling just as painfully isolated. Unlike Gold, many gay and lesbian teens of his generation didn't make it. Many gay teens are still not making it. And this tragic pattern won't change unless all of us -- gay and heterosexual alike -- help break the cycle.

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Gold came to believe that the root of all discrimination against those of us who're gay -- whether in the military or in high school -- is religion. Not God. Not faith. But religion twisted to enable otherwise good people to rationalize their anti-gay prejudices. If only he could get folks to understand how religion is misused, Gold decided, gay people would stop getting so damaged by our society.

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He started Faith in America in 2005 to do just that, running cutting-edge ads in newspapers around the country to spotlight how religion was used in the past to defend prejudices against African-Americans and women. Now Gold focuses on gay teens with a book, "Crisis," in which 40 gay men and lesbians -- from college students to the actor Richard Chamberlain -- tell about the depression, loneliness and fear they felt growing up gay.

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Along with the book's many firsthand accounts of the difficulty of growing up gay are two powerful stories by moms. One of them, a fundamentalist Christian who rejected her daughter's lesbianism before the young woman killed herself, recalls being told, "Perhaps your daughter's death is an indictment of the homosexual lifestyle." The devastated mother, Mary Lou Wallner, says she and her husband have learned "what it was like to be the object of the church's hatred for gay people."

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[T]oo few stop to ponder whether leaning on religion to justify anti-gay discrimination is any different from how religion once was used to harm women and racial minorities. Good-hearted people who come to realize that there is no difference are well on their way to being supportive of gay teens. And that's what keeps Mitchell Gold motivated.