A gay teenager from Tennessee dazzles a Hollywood crowd with his story of being bullied and standing up for himself. Bravo!

From the New York Times:

Ho-hum, and back to the lobster dinner: The 600 people gathered here last Friday for a $10,000-a-table charity event — the Glsen Respect Awards, dedicated to fighting bullying in schools — came largely from the movie and television industries, and you can’t impress Hollywood with celebrities. 

But then a skinny, soft-spoken 16-year-old from rural Tennessee took the stage. Forks dropped, followed by jaws, as Andrew Lawless spoke about being terrorized at school because of his sexuality. Last winter, he walked into a school bathroom, where two boys shouted gay slurs and slammed him into the walls. “Then I was dragged into a bathroom stall, where my safety was taken from me,” he said. 

He took a gulp of air. “I became a victim of sexual assault.” 

The jaded crowd was suddenly fighting back tears, not only because of what happened to Mr. Lawless, and in 2013 no less, but because the event had instantly turned from just another Hollywood fund-raiser to something very personal. No longer was the ballroom packed with some of the most powerful gay men in show business, from the chairman of NBC to the chief creative officer of DreamWorks Animation to the programming president of HBO. The room was abruptly filled with scared 16-year-old boys walking the medieval halls of high school. 

“All of these people rushed to shake my hand and hug me and tell me they could identify with the bullying,” Mr. Lawless said afterward, sounding a bit shellshocked. “I was trying not to get emotional, but the outpouring was kind of crazy.” 

Glsen, which stands for the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (and is pronounced “glisten”), was founded in 1990 by a Massachusetts teacher named Kevin Jennings. Now under the leadership of Eliza Byard — Mr. Jennings left in 2008 to run the Obama administration’s anti-bullying program — the nonprofit has grown into one of the leading gay-rights groups in the country, standing beside (or at least near) older, larger and better-known organizations like the Human Rights Campaign.