They came hoping for a miracle: a recovery, a cure, a renunciation. Many of them came knowing they wouldn't find one.

Carla was there because of her mother, who had scrounged together $600 to send the New Jersey teen to the three-day religious retreat.

Five hundred congregants filled the midwestern auditorium to capacity. For three days Carla prayed. She was told to renounce her former life. Only then would the healing begin.

Some in the audience fell to their knees. A few fainted. Carla cried. An older woman prayed over the 18 year old.

"You have to make up your mind to give it up," the woman said. Carla tried. She prayed to let it go.

But when she went to bed that night, she realized she hadn't let go at all.

She was still gay.

When Alfred Kinsey reported on human sexuality nearly 45 years ago, he found that approximately 10 percent of both men and women are predominantly homosexual. Today that figure is still largely accepted.

In recent years, an unprecedented number of entertainers, athletes and politicians have come out of the closet. Tolerance levels, however, still vary dramatically from community to community. In Hawaii, for instance, a bill sanctioning same-sex marriages is slowly moving through the courts, while in Colorado a bill barring civil rights protection for homosexuals was signed into law several years ago. (The law was overturned in 1996 by the Supreme Court.)

Most kids start actively exploring their homosexuality in high school, yet this exploration can be fraught with social and emotional danger. Why? Because teens are surprisingly intolerant when it comes to what Oscar Wilde's prosecutor called the love that dare not speak its name.

The latest edition of the Who's Who of American High School Students reports that in a survey it conducted of 3,210 high-achieving 9th-12th graders, 29 percent admitted to being anti-gay. More than a third (36 percent) also claimed that most of the people they know are anti-gay.

In contrast, only 7 percent of those high schoolers interviewed said they were prejudiced against blacks, 2 percent admitted to being anti-Asian and just 1 percent claimed to be anti-Semitic.

In Sussex County this past November, Robert McDonald, 21, filed a federal law suit against his alma mater, Jefferson High School. The charge: School officials deprived him of his civil rights as a gay student by not enforcing the school's anti-discrimination and anti-harassment policies. McDonald claims to have been the frequent object of anti-gay slurs and was physically attacked by a fellow student his junior year. The suit is pending.

From verbal insults to physical assaults, social ostracism to family rejection, alcohol and drug addiction to suicide, the problems facing gay teenagers today are daunting -- and sometimes dangerous.

A door at the end of a dark hallway on the second floor of a church in northern Jersey opens into a well-lit room. There, six teens slump on an assortment of couches and chairs. It is the weekly meeting of Gay and Lesbian Youth-NJ (GALY).

(The exact location of the support group and the last names of the group's members are kept confidential, as are the last names of all teens in this story.)

"GALY is a safe space for kids 16-21 to interact socially" says Jan, an adult GALY chaperone who asked that her last name not be used in this article. "We keep everything on a first-name basis for their protection and our own."

Stephen, a 17-year-old high-school junior, shakes his head when asked about the problem of harassment. "My school is very homophobic," he says. "A lot of anti-gay remarks are made all the time. I've had the school repaint the walls in the boys' bathroom three times already since September."

Dan, also 17, knows just what Stephen is talking about. "I've been threatened so many times," he says, "that I don't change in the locker room anymore."

Joe and Jeremy are two Rutgers undergraduates. Tonight they're sitting in a shoebox-sized dorm room talking about what it is like to be openly gay. Joe, 19, is wearing bell bottomed jeans and black platform shoes. A crucifix dangles from a leather necklace around his neck along with a chain that is looped with six variously colored rings. The rainbow rings, he says, are a symbol of diversity, of gay pride.

Two years ago, when he was in high school, Joe was taunted by a group of boys when he went for a walk during a break in classes. He was pushed to the ground and kicked, but not hurt.

Then last year, as a freshman at Rutgers, Joe was threatened one night by a group of male students after he left a friend's house.

"They were drunk," Joe says, "and because I don't have the most masculine walk in the world, they picked me out and started yelling things like 'fag.' There were 10 or 13 of them and they followed me the whole way home. I was afraid to turn around. They followed me right to the door of my dorm. I wanted so much to turn around and say, 'shut up' but I was too scared."

Clinton W. Anderson, director of the Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Concerns committee of the American Psychological Association, sees the issue of self-disclosure for teens as hugely important, but fundamentally paradoxical.

"Gay kids have a real dilemma when it comes to sharing their sexual orientation with others," Anderson says. "On the one hand, it is likely to be good for them to come out. They'll feel less alone. On the other hand, that very disclosure can result in rejection, even violence."

Indeed, a 1993 article on risk factors for gay youth published in the journal Pediatrics, reported that 41 percent of gay teens suffered some kind of violence from either families, peers or strangers.

After verbal harassment and physical violence, the most pressing problem for gay teens is a sense of aloneness, which is why self-disclosure can be so important, psychologically. At a time when nearly all teen-agers struggle to negotiate the rocky shoals of adolescence, gay youth find themselves faced with the double burden of social isolation and stigmatization.

Those burdens often prove overwhelming.

According to a soon-to-be-published article in the American Journal of Public Health, 28 percent of bisexual and homosexual men have attempted suicide -- seven times the national average for heterosexual men.

Part of the reason may be that while Amerian society as a whole has become more tolerant of homosexuality, it is still regarded in many circles as an illness, a form of deviance.

Twenty-five years ago the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality from its diagnostic and statistical manual for mental illnesses.

In 1993 the Amerian Psychological Association went further, adopting a resolution that urged its members, among other things, "to support a safe and secure educational atmosphere in which all youths, including lesbian, gay and bisexual youths, may obtain an education free from discrimination, harassment, violence, and abuse, and which promotes an understanding and acceptance of self."

Some mental health professionals, however, still view homosexuality not as a sexual preference or genetic predisposition, but as a pathological condition that is treatable. Teen-agers who express homosexual desires, according to these professionals, do so because of a developmental disorder.

"Same-sex attractions are really about unmet emotional needs," says Joe Nicolosi, a clinical psychologist and director of the 700-member National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality. "These needs sometimes feel sexual, but that does not mean that they actually are sexual."

Based on his own anecdotal evidence, Nicolosi cites a one-third "cure" rate for his homosexual patients, which includes many teen-agers, some of whom are brought in to see him by their parents. By "cure," Nicolosi explains, he means "the reduction of homosexual attractions to insignificant levels."

"I believe the idea of a gay person is a constructed identity that has been bought into by the culture," he says. "There's really no such thing as a gay person."

Dr. Richard Isay, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Cornell Medical College in New York and the author of "Being Homosexual: Gay Men and their Development," disagrees.

Isay argues that homosexuality is not only real, but has nothing to do with unmet emotional needs. "In my work I've found no distinction between the parenting of gay patients and the parenting of heterosexual patients," Isays says, leading him to conclude that constitution not environment accounts for sexual orientation.

Moreover, Isay believes that gay men and women, and especially teenagers, who have been treated by conversion therapists, such as Nicolosi, often suffer severe emotional and social consequences as a result of the attempt to change their sexual orientation.

Several New Jersey public schools have attempted to tackle the problems of prejudice and harassment -- and, by extension, the psychological issues they create -- through the use of diversity counselors. In 1985, Madison was the first community in the state to create the position of a diversity coordinator. While the coordinator's main focus has been to create educational programs dealing with gender and race, projects dealing with sexual orientation are also included.

A few years ago, Joe Russo, the diversity coordinator at Madison High School from 1992-96, helped set up a school showcase of gay-themed artwork and writing.

"It was a gay pride celebration in which gay teenagers at Madison played a role," says Russo. "It was definitely controversial. Some parents and students were upset with the display when it was put up and wanted it taken down. But it stayed."

Joe has been lucky. When he finally came out to his parents a little more than a year ago, he discovered that though they were surprised by his announcement, they were neither angry nor rejecting.

"My father cried for a week," Joe says. "My mother, too. But I'd told her a few weeks earlier than my father and she accepted it faster. With my dad it took about six months, but now he's wonderful. He says, 'You are the way you are. I accept that.'"

Though Joe had wanted for years to tell his parents he was gay -- he admits to having homosexual feelings as early as age 10 -- he only came out to them after leaving home to go to Rutgers.

"I started to worry when he went away to college," Joe's mother explains. "He didn't call; he didn't want to come home on weekends. It wasn't like Joe. I thought he was on drugs. And then when he finally did come home he acted so nervous. So when we were out together in the car I said to him that I was going to be sick if he didn't tell me what was wrong. He said, 'Mom, I'm gay.' Then he asked if I still loved him. I hugged him and cried. I was actually relieved he wasn't on drugs, but later when he went back to school, I had so many questions. I was afraid about AIDS. I just didn't know anything about what it meant to be gay."

Joe's mother eventually found her way to a local chapter of Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (P-FLAG), a national organization that serves as a support group and information center. There are a half-dozen branches of P-FLAG in New Jersey.

"I was afraid about going to the first meeting," Joe's mother says, "but in my heart I knew I needed to talk. It was a wonderful experience. One gentleman who was gay told me he came to one of the meetings even though he had a conflict because he wanted to check up on me to see how I was doing. That kind of support helped me so much. My husband never wanted to go. He thought a lot about it and prayed a lot, that was the way he needed to deal with it."

Coming out of the closet, for Joe as for other teens, is enormously liberating. Several months after he told his mother and father that he was gay, Joe was invited by his parents to take a camping trip with them -- and to bring his boyfriend along.

Carla, who once felt she'd failed her mother, now talks openly with her about her life. They even share laughs over the latest gay-themed episode of "Ellen."

And Dan can tell you the exact moment -- in September 1996 -- when he finally felt free.

"I was watching an episode of 'The Real World,'" he says, "and in the show one boy kissed another. I started crying. Really crying. And I said to myself, 'OK. No more. No more lies. No more bulls--. I'm gay and I'm not ashamed.'"

c. 1997 Newark Star-Ledger