"The only exposure that we had to anyone that might be gay were more of what we perceived as the stereotypes of that," she says.
![teen gay chat line teen gay chat line](https://us-fbcloud.net/picpost/data/137/137982-qgl7kq-18.n.jpg)
Stephanie Sandifer grew up in the small town of Sulphur, La., in the 1980s. She says her exposure to people who were gay then was limited to stereotypes. Stephanie Sandifer grew up in Sulphur, La., in the 1980s. But the Internet, Gross says, allowed gay kids to find each other for the first time. "I literally did not have contact with people my own age who were gay."įor decades, being a gay kid often meant holding tight to a secret you couldn't share, or having no one to talk to about feelings you might not fully understand. So, you know, I kept quiet about it," he says. "Gay people - or people who were thought to be gay - in high school were ridiculed, or worse. Growing up in Springfield, Ill., in the 1970s, Todd Bentsen never spoke to his high school classmates about being gay. "The experience that is so common for people growing up gay in the past is: 'I thought I was the only one,' " he says. Larry Gross of the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communication has been studying gay teens for decades. That change can be seen in the experiences of two women who grew up in the same town, two decades apart.
![teen gay chat line teen gay chat line](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/5e/7c/0f/5e7c0feb2f51ffb7cbacb4ce70f82657.jpg)
But with the advent of online chat rooms and Websites dedicated to gay culture, communities formed, and that demographic began finding new support. In the past 20 years, the Internet has significantly changed what it means to grow up as a gay kid in this country.īefore the Web, many gay young people grew up in what seemed to be isolation, particularly those in small towns.