To support local gay youth, Riverhead grad starts variety show to fundraise for school’s gay-straight alliance

Middle school is an especially tough period of time for any young teenager.

But it can be even tougher for gay kids.

Dylan Martinsen understands this better than anyone else. A 2008 Riverhead High School graduate, he remembers the difficulty of coming to terms with his sexuality while also coping with the many other physical and emotional changes that all middle school students go through.

“I really struggled in middle school,” Martinsen said. “I wasn’t sure if it was just a phase – if all boys went through this and eventually started liking girls.”

So when he learned that his former Latin teacher, Lorene Custer, started a Gay-Straight Alliance at Riverhead Middle School last year, he knew he wanted to help out.

For the past several months, Martinsen has been organizing a fundraising variety show with performances from local artists that all center around one theme: Love.

“Love is something different for every person,” Martinsen said. “I wanted to create something that shows how many ways love expresses itself in our lives.”

The variety show will not only raise money for Riverhead’s Gay-Straight Alliance, but it will try to offer comfort to young people discovering that their sexuality might not fit into a “traditional” definition of love, Martinsen said.

“It’s a really tough place to be in your life at a young age,” he said, “to confront your sexuality when society is saying, ‘No, that’s not okay.’ With this show, we want to be there for them and say that, yes, it really is okay.”

When Custer started the GSA in the spring of 2014, she was surprised by the number of students attending the meetings, many of whom were not Latin students.

“These kids literally didn’t have a voice to talk about these things before they started opening up at these meetings,” she said. “It ended up feeling like the most important thing I was doing at school.”

But for the first few months, none of the students wanted to talk. “It was like pulling teeth,” she said. “We’re talking months of silence.

So Custer started talking instead. She prepared lectures on gender, homophobia, stereotypes and race. She showed them YouTube videos of other people sharing their “coming out” experiences. She placed decorated boxes throughout the school so that students could submit their questions and thoughts anonymously.

It took a full year after the club’s formation before the weekly meetings took a different tone.

“I’m not sure what happened,” Custer said. “But once they started talking, they wouldn’t stop.”

One by one, the students began to open up. The more that they talked, the more other students found the courage to share their own stories, long buried beneath months of confusion and shame.

Every morning, my mom wakes me up insulting how I dress.
My grandma says God hates all gay people.
My dad calls me a faggot.

Ms. Custer, am I going to hell?

“No one in Latin class ever asks me if they’re going to hell,” Custer said. “This has been some completely new territory for me.”

The school district paid for school buses to send the club to the Long Island Pride Parade in Huntington last year, but now that the club is more established, it has to pay its own way to get there next spring.

“I fundraise with my Latinists, but that’s quite different from having 18 or 20 kids fundraise,” she said.

So when Martinsen, once a middle school Latin student himself, reached out to Custer about fundraising with a variety show, Custer was thrilled. She invited him to come speak to the students last spring.

“It was the first time I was able to be there and support people of my sexuality,” Martinsen said. “These kids are there to have a safe space to be able to talk and converse, and Ms. Custer really provides that.”

“An Evening Of Love” will be held on Friday, November 13 at the Jamesport Meeting House at 7 p.m. It will feature performances by musicians, writers, actors and storytellers that all focus on the meaning of love.

A GoFundMe page has also been created to raise money for the costs of putting on the show itself.

“I want the audience to have a transformational experience while they’re there,” Martinsen said. “I want them to feel like they’ve left with something more than just a good show.”