Last week, Jack & I had the privilege of attending the benefit Point Foundation Honors the Arts. Point grants scholarships to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students, and is the largest foundation of its kind. We were presenting an award to a man named Jonathan Harrison, who aspires to be an interior designer and is studying at Pratt Institute, here in New York.
To say that Jonathan’s story is amazing would be an understatement. In front of a packed house, Jonathan spoke of how, in his early teens, he had been brutally raped by two men after he had confided to them that he was gay. While a student at Duke University, he came out to his family, who subsequently cut him off and refused to support his education.
Rather than be defeated, Jonathan launched himself into advocating for LGBT rights. When he was 21, he was named one of The Advocate’s Best and Brightest Activists.
Did you know that nearly 1/3 of LGBT students drop out of high school to escape harassment, discrimination and/ or violence? I guess living in New York and having close gay friends, it’s just so incomprehensible to me that in this day and age, people still face discrimination based on their sexual orientation, and that such discrimination is still so rampant.
The big media draw for this event, of course, were the Sex and The City girls, who came out in full force to support the night’s honoree, Cynthia Nixon. But to me at least, the night’s big stars were really the Point Foundation Scholars. They deserve their own blog entry, I think, so I’ll leave off my blogging about S&TC & SJP for later.
--Victorya Hong
1 comment:
Excellent story - thanks for sharing!
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