He called a crisis line for gay teenagers, where a counselor suggested he attend a gay support group in a city an hour and a half away.
But being 15, he was too young to drive and afraid to enlist his parents' help in what would surely seem a bizarre and suspicious errand. It was around this time that Jeffrey first typed the words ''gay'' and ''teen'' into a search engine on the computer he'd gotten several months before and was staggered to find himself aswirl in a teeming online gay world, replete with resource centers, articles, advice columns, personals, chat rooms, message boards, porn sites and - most crucially - thousands of closeted and anxious kids like himself. ''The Internet is the thing that has kept me sane,'' he told me. My mom complains: 'I can see you becoming more detached from us. You're always spending time on the computer.' But the Internet is my refuge.''
