Do the right thing: it's easy to dismiss gay teens, but think about the consequences.(Editorial)

Like many gay men and women growing up in the 1970s, I was starved for information about people like myself. By the time I was a teenager, I was eager to find out if I was the only gay person on the planet. If not, where were those other gay people, and what kind of lives were they living? I doggedly scanned my high school library for anything with the word "homosexual" or "gay," never turning up anything in books, just the occasional piece in Time or Newsweek.

Until, that is, I learned about "the cage," a locked stack separated from the rest of my high school library by a metal fence. Older books, expensive art volumes, photography books with an occasional nude, and …