"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.

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.

That's the latest message of the once self-hating gay teen who grew up to become the successful co-founder of the Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams furniture company and an innovative gay-rights activist.

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.

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 defends 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.

"I believe this is a problem we can solve," Gold told me about his efforts to make it easier for gay teens to reach adulthood. "This is one of America's greatest moral failures. I really hope we can create a tipping point. Instead of parents and politicians trying to change gay people, they should try to get society to fully accept gay people. That's true family values — unconditional love of our children, regardless of their sexual orientation."

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."

Of course, most religious Americans would be appalled by the mean comment made to the mom. But too 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.

Deb Price of The Detroit News writes the first nationally syndicated column on gay issues. To find out more about Deb Price and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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