Don't quit.
Don't let the bastards win.
I have been out since I was 13 in Mississippi of all places. The only place worse that I can think of might be Iran.
People did shit to me that they you done it to a dog, you would have been charged with cruelty to animals. Since I was merely a filthy faggot, teachers, cops and parents looked the other way.
I saw the harrassment and cruelty literally destroy people and vowed it wouldn't happen to me. I was going to be steel- they couldn't touch me.
I played football and took the cheap shots and pain. I did the things that people told me that faggots can't do. When people put obstacles in my path, I did what I had to do going over, around or through them.
I fought so much that I've still got scars on my knuckles. Won more than I lost and got my ass severly kicked several times.
I can not say that I didn't think of suicide. What kept me from it was that how could I make the bastards who were tormenting me suffer if I was dead? Hell no. I survived on malice alone for a while because that is what it took.
Like it or not, we're all soldiers in a war that we didn't sign up for: it's called the Culture War. Such enlightened spiritual leaders as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell declared the war and actively work to deny our rights as human beings and forment hatred against us.
It is a strange war, a dirty little war that is fought more in your head than anywhere else. We must resist the voices telling us that we're shit, we're worthless and can not accomplish anything worthwhile. We have to fight, each in our own way, to be, to acheive and to survive.
Over the generations, freedom has been fought for over and over again. William Wallace stood in front of the Scottish Klans and said, "You can take my life but you can not take my freedom." Martin Luther King dreamed of a world in which the content of the character meant more than the color of the skin.
This is our time, this is our fight and we need every soldier in the fight- not dressed in thongs and acting like jackasses at a silly parade but doing what THEY SAY can't be done, doing what THEY SAY we can not do, succeeding where THEY SAY that we will fail and breaking the barriers and bonds that society has imposed upon us.
Don't quit. You are needed. Not as a useless, pointless activist that pisses people off but as another gay person living life and living life successfully because THAT IS HOW WE WIN.