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"Once a pastor came to our church and he preached a sermon about how God had destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah to teach a lesson about gay people. Not just that gays were sick and wrong themselves, but that everyone around them were hurt by their presence. That He was willing to wipe out everybody to punish the gays. This really got to me. I thought that not only was I sick and wrong, but that God would punish the people around me. It had never occurred to me that I would wound people by my simply existing. And it seemed kind of true. We were poor, we lived in a town that was fairly depressed at the time, my mother was in the hospital... and it seemed to me like evidence that God really is hurting everyone because I'm gay. I didn't want to be the person that nobody would want, and I didn't want to be the person that would hurt other people. So I walked down to the bridge and climbed the center arch, the highest point, and got ready to jump."