From the LGBTQ story archive:

I’m Eric Snyder, I’m from Averill Park, NY. I started out in the Cub Scouts program when I was five years old. Like, day 1 in Kindergarten I signed up. Then we went to the boy scout program when I was about 11 and that’s when I started, and it was about that time I started figuring out, am I gay, am I not gay, what am I? And then eventually in high school I figured out, Okay, I am gay, but I was still in the closet. This was around the time when people started making a big deal about the Boy Scouts, they have this discriminatory policy, like you can’t be gay or bisexual in the Boy Scouts. And I had never actually heard about it before then, I didn’t think it was a big deal but then, I was a Sophomore or whatever and was like, now I can’t come out, because I wanted to finish up with the program, I wanted to be done, I wanted to have it and not feel like I was forced out, I wanted to feel like I had completed it. As I grew older and I advanced through the ranks it got to the point where I had to complete my Eagle Scout project which is like the capstone of what you do there. But I decided, okay, I’m going to do something really, really gay. If they’re not going to allow me to do anything queer at all, I’m going to make it really loud in my project.

I had a teacher who taught Trig and he was the best teacher I ever had………

For more, see  http://imfromdriftwood.com/eric_snyder/