 My involvement with queer youth programs affects my relationship with my peers. I guess the best answer to that is it's giving me new relationships with new peers and I'm finding that as I'm, you know, spending more and more time devoted to PFLAG and the Queer Youth Task Force and the Safe Schools Project and just generally walking around the planet making sure that kids are safe. I am encountering a lot of people that I love dearly and they've become my peers and everybody else can either like it or lump it pretty much. My organization could help to create a safer space for LGBT youth. Well, the organization that I'm referring to is PFLAG. PFLAG is my heart and I feel that the mission of PFLAG as I see it is to create a safe space for parents to parents and guardians and anybody who's impacted by an LGBT youth coming out, creating a safe space for them to come, be safe, excuse me, be safe, say whatever they need to say in a loving, warm, non-judgmental, empathetic environment where we're going to hold that space for them, they can throw F-bombs, they can be mad, they can cry, they can laugh and we're not going to judge them, we're just going to hold that space safe for them and then what we're going to offer in, you know, not in an exchange but next is education and it's my belief that anybody walking through our doors already is seeking to change and so it's our job to really make that kind and easy for them to do and our goal is to create safe homes for these kids so by providing this space for these people these kids get to go home to a place where they're going to be able to lay their head down safely not wake up with some kind of weird anger or anxiety they're not going to be shunned by their own families and hopefully, you know, that's going to create a ripple effect and cut down on some of the depression, the anxiety, the total loss of family and, you know, hopefully keep them from becoming addicted or any other, you know, nasty thing that happens to somebody whose family turns their backs on them I realized from a very young age that I am an ally and I think I believe I identified as queer from a very young age as well and I remember sitting in church in a very fundamentalist church in Southern California that I was brought up in and not understanding how, on the one hand, I was being told that I needed to love my neighbor as I love myself, forgive and, you know, be given this really, really beautiful message but then hear all about how other people were wrong and bad and rotten and it didn't make any sense to me there was a huge disconnect as to how God could have created all of us equal in His image and then, for me to be told or to hear that other people were bad because they didn't look like me, didn't talk like me, didn't walk like me just didn't make any sense to me so I pretty much think, I don't know, forever my favorite movie is The Princess Bride and why? because it's really funny my favorite color is green I'm obsessed with green right now hasn't always been green this has just been probably the last three years and I just looked up one day and realized I was surrounded by green my glasses, my walls, my pillows, everything so I look at green and it represents a lot of really good amazing growth in my own life and, yeah, I like green