I am seventeen years old, gay, and male. I attend public high school in northern Virginia; while my region is pretty liberal, anti-gay sentiment does exist.

The recent death of Lawrence King, a fifteen-year-old whose classmate shot him to death on the campus of their California junior high school, reveals that anti-gay sentiment exists in both liberal and conservative regions all over this nation.

Lawrence King's murder tears me apart. One of my first thoughts was, "I want the murderer to suffer."

Yet this morning, as I read an email from Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) founder Kevin Jennings, thoughts of vengeance were far from my mind. And now I feel sadness; not only for my brother, my tribesman, my damned near martyr Lawrence King, but also for his killer, whose name is not being revealed because of his age.