My hometown, Warwick, N.Y., is a small, rural-suburban town in the Hudson Valley. Data show that Warwick has a higher concentration of same-sex households than much of the rest of the county. I wondered where all those gay people were, so I decided to found The LGBTQ Center of the Warwick Valley.

The reaction to Michelle Shocked's hate speech is a gauge of how far attitudes toward the LGBTQ community have come over the last few decades. It was an anti-bigot reaction, not an anti-queer reaction. The reaction was a litmus test of American attitudes toward homophobia.

Let's talk about tolerance for a second. I'll begin with a definition. According to Random House Dictionary, it's a noun defined as: "a fair, objectiv...

I used to be a transphobic gay man. I remember making jokes. I remember feeling uncomfortable when trans* people would walk into the coffee shop. But something shifted inside me when I saw Matrix co-director Lana Wachowski's acceptance speech for the HRC Visibility Award in 2012.

By ignoring our lack of internal cohesion and constantly blaming all of our unhappiness on other people, we are missing the opportunity to decrease incidents of suicide in our community.