Late in my freshman year of high school, my best girl friend came out to me on the telephone. It was mind blowing. Best. Girl. Friend. Was a lesbian–The first one I’d ever known or even met (forgive the naivete… I was fourteen and hadn’t even had my first kiss yet). Clutching the receiver, I grilled her about the nature of our friendship and whether it was based on false assumptions or hopes. At the end of the long phone call I was happy to know her truth and relieved to finally understand the reason behind the tension between her and another girl in our circle. So we went on as before for a little while, until she clued in a loud mouth mutual friend with a penchant for juicy gossip.

Then things changed. They shouldn’t have, but they did. My best friend got scared, felt betrayed and paranoid. And who could blame her? We lived in a tiny town in South Carolina, right in the back yard of an active KKK chapter, so full of Southern Baptists and fundamentalist conservatives that even the Mormons were ostracized at school. So, she naturally came to me, her best friend, for help and support. Know what I did? I cracked. After thoroughly scolding her for telling the town crier her “secret” I informed her that the camel’s back had been broken. In truth, I too was scared, felt betrayed and paranoid. I wasn’t equipped to be the straight best friend of the only lesbian in, for all we knew, the entire shit town we called home at the time. What she did (come out) was very brave, what she did was right, but it was terrifying and potentially dangerous in such a closed-minded place.

I know a lot of you might say “Screw ‘em! Be yourself! It’s your right!” and I’m there with ya, people. But you probably never had a neighbor walk into your house with a poundcake in one hand, a Bible in the other, and a mouthful of words proclaiming that you and your children (“Hello!”) will all go to Hell if you don’t get “saved”. You’ve probably never walked into a parking lot and found your car covered in spit, scrawled with epithets, and the air let out of all of the tires because you color your hair with Manic Panic. And I bet nobody ever brandished a knife at you for wearing a Marilyn Manson t-shirt to school. That’s the kind of crap that happened to people who dared to be different in that small, South Carolina town I called home for over a decade.

Oh, it’s horrible. But it’s real. And my best friend opened that door on both of us. See why we were scared?

I knew that she had hopes of her admission making our friendship all the stronger. At first I had those hopes, too. In retrospect, I was a dumb, scared teenager who didn’t have any clue who I was or what I stood for. The circumstances in which I chose to sever ties were awful. And I grieved for years, not only for the death of our friendship, but for the fact that I failed my best friend when she needed me most.

Know what I want now? For people to find acceptance no matter where they are. For girls like my teenage best friend to not fear when their “secret” gets out. And for her to enjoy the same rights I, the person who couldn’t finish that journey with her, enjoy now. She deserves them.