Trevor by James Lecesne

began to read. For the first time in years, I was reminded of just how confusing it was for me as an adolescent—how painful and lonely. There on those pages was my story. I immediately wrote the first few lines of a story about a thirteen-year-old boy who confides to his journal. I called him Trevor.
    Dear Diary,
    Tonight I walked into the living room while Mom and Dad were watching TV. Fell dead to the floor. No response from them. I think that television reruns have replaced their natural spontaneity. I mean, unless I’m on the eleven o’clock news, I don’t think they’d care. And even then they might sleep through it.
    Eventually Trevor discovers that he is different—different from his parents, different from his schoolmates, and different from his best friend. Trevor is a poignant and humorous portrait of a boy in crisis, but it’s also about anyone who has ever felt as though they just can’t get it right and they don’t fit in no matter how hard they try.
    It wasn’t that difficult to find the inspiration for Trevor. All of us have felt this way at one time or another, especially during our teenage years when we are just beginning to piece together the story of ourselves. Fortunately, my story was close at hand and my journals were stuffed with poems, rants, dreams, prayers, vows, ideas, and remembrances of what it meant to be fourteen, fifteen, sixteen . . . The irony was that just as I was beginning to discover myself, I was becoming a stranger to the people I loved the most—my family. I felt that they couldn’t know me, not really , because if they knew who I was they would most certainly reject me. I couldn’t live with that—not even as a possibility. And so I kept myself a secret from them, moved further and further away from them, and began to explore life and love without them.
    I went on to perform Trevor onstage as part of my solo show, Word of Mouth , and eventually the show found its way to the HBO Comedy Festival in Aspen and then Off-Broadway where, incredibly, I won the prestigious New York Drama Desk Award for best solo performance of that year. One night following a performance of Word of Mouth , I met Randy Stone and Peggy Rajsk, and they asked me to consider writing the screenplay for a short film based on the story of Trevor .
    The resulting 18-minute film (produced by Randy Stone and directed and produced by Peggy Rajski) went on to win many awards, including an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short. It was an exciting time as we watched our little film find an audience and spread the word that gay was okay—and during a period when LGBT issues were just beginning to find their way into the news. The times were changing and Trevor was in some small way able to contribute to that change. In 1997 when we sold the film to HBO, we thought it might be a good idea to flash a telephone number at the end in case there happened to be a kid out there who could relate to the character of Trevor and needed someone to talk to. We wanted to let young people know that it was all right to reach out and ask for help. Someone would always be standing by to listen to their problems. But after doing some research we found that there was no national 24-hour crisis intervention and suicide prevention lifeline for gay teens. And so we set out to create one.
    Three months later, The Trevor Project was launched, and finally lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning teens had a place to turn. That first night we received over 1,500 calls, and we’ve been at it ever since. Every year we receive approximately 30,000 calls from young people around the country. Of course, not every call requires a rescue and not all of the young people identify as LGBT, but every call comes from someone who is struggling with issues of identity and is a person between the ages of 13 and 24 who is in need of someone who will listen. Thrown out of their