When Christina came out, her grandmother asked, " 'Is it because I told you you have to stay home and cook if you have a guy?' Because I was a real feminist when I was little, like 'I'm not going to cook! I'm not going to clean!' " she explains. "Now I'm like, 'No, I just don't like guys.' And she's like, 'There are some guys who cook.' And I'm like, 'It's not the cooking! I promise, it's not the cooking.' " Eventually, her grandmother understood, but she warned Christina, "Don't bring it here" to Washington Heights.

Ryan, an 18-year-old freshman at a college in Brooklyn who lives near Lincoln Center with his parents, emigrated from Hong Kong when he was 2. He's not out to them, though he sheepishly admits he's been careless a few times around the apartment — leaving Men's Health open to certain pages. He's not out to his 23-year-old brother, either, though they share a bedroom crammed with an electric piano, a television (constantly tuned to the Cartoon Network), and a computer on which Ryan estimates he spends eight hours a day: Ryan is out online, has a profile up at a site for gay teenagers, and about twenty gay friends on his Buddy List. This year at college, he's also out to a handful of friends, most of whom are girls. "I'm very cautious," he says. "I don't even use the G-word," meaning gay. Sitting at a McDonald's in midtown, he quickly surveys the nearby diners, leans into the table, and discloses his code word: grizzly.

Ryan keeps his secret because he doesn't trust a lot of people. Other kids, though, don't trust entire neighborhoods, and fear for their safety. Joshua, for instance, says he feels like he has to put on an act when he's in his Bronx neighborhood. "When I come to Manhattan, I'm kind of feminine," he says. "But in the Bronx, I have a serious face, I even walk a different way." He definitely wouldn't consider holding hands with someone up in his neighborhood. "Uh-uhnnnnn," he says emphatically. "I would be scared I'd be jumped."

Near Devin's home in the Bronx, he has been called "faggot this and faggot that" when holding hands with a date, and those instances have ignited a willfulness in him. "I will purposely hold his hand because I'm headstrong and determined. I want to reinforce that I am not afraid." (It helps that Devin, a competitive sprinter and gymnast, has studied ninjitsu since he was 4.) Even with scarier threats, like the time gangbangers lobbed beer bottles at him and his cousin (who's also gay), Devin wouldn't so much as think of contacting the police. Not only is that just not done, he says, but he rationalizes his inaction because "I think it comes with the job description, if you will, of being gay. Not being afraid because you're always afraid. So you get used to it."

David Mensah, the executive director of the Hetrick-Martin Institute on Astor Place — the social-services organization, general hangout den, and home to the two-room Harvey Milk alternative public high school — says, "We served 8,000 youths last year, and we think we just scratched the surface. We still get calls from schools requesting 'safety transfers' because their environment became dangerous once a student came out." In fact, about 90 percent of Harvey Milk's 50 students transferred there either because they felt unsafe in their own schools or because the atmosphere was so hostile that they were chronically truant.

Even though outer-borough kids say Manhattan in general and "the Vil" in particular are the easiest places to be out, Adam points out the considerable distance between Park Avenue and Central Park West: "My friends on the Upper East Side would have a really, really hard time coming out to their conservative families," he says. "With my family, like, half my dad's office is gay."

Teenagedom allows a certain lateral freedom of identity, with elaborate costume changes built into the school-year schedule: Someone comes back from summer camp a goth chick. Following spring vacation in Florida, she's a surfer girl. She hits the clearance rack at American Eagle at just the right time, and suddenly she's a hippie-preppy hybrid. And even within those roles, some shape-shifting is required — it's as if inside those overstuffed backpacks and messenger bags, teenagers carry around their multiple selves: the school self, the neighborhood self, the friend self, the family self, the online self.

Gay teenagers have to cram yet another identity into their bags: the gay self.

In a weird way, it might stand to reason that coming out could lighten the load. A kid who identifies herself as lesbian has, perhaps, found her people and can get on with her life. "I went through my stages. I was a lot of things," says D.J. She now classifies herself as "femme-agress," but freshman year she was very feminine. Then she tried being a candy raver, then she was goth for a few months. "I guess that's when I was trying to find who I was. And it took being with my girlfriend" — an 18-year-old from Brooklyn whom D.J. started seeing two years ago — "to realize you don't have to be like other people. You can be your own person."

"I feel like I'm finally secure with who I am," says Adam. "I'm comfortable in my own skin and I feel confident." Coming out "was the moment when I merged two different identities of myself in front of my parents. Like I had my parent identity and my Bard-best-friends identity, and to have to merge those was just kind of scary. But I never felt like anyone stopped loving me, and I feel really privileged in that." A lot of gay kids, however, aren't as lucky. In New York, fully 35 percent of the city's homeless kids identify themselves as gay or transgendered; many of them have been kicked out of their homes.

Coming out for kids can mean coming into a phase of meta-homosexuality — self-observation from a slight distance, figuring out which impulses come from within and which ones they feel obligated to adopt so they'll fit the part. Each behavior is parsed and examined: Is this who I am? Is this? Or is this? Their age exacerbates the process, of course, since everything a 16-year-old does tends to be fraught with uncertainty. When Devin started going to Hetrick-Martin for counseling shortly after he came out, he says, he was "scared. No, I was terrified. I thought gay people wore big feather hats and boas and swung their heads and snapped and had attitude." In fact, the teenagers at Hetrick-Martin look and act a lot like, well, teenagers: preppy or pierced or club or Goth or hip-hop or Powerpuff — or a value-meal combo of all the above. Nevertheless, Devin admits that "vocabulary is just one of the things that have affected me since I've been at HMI." After a week hanging with the other gay kids, he says, he went home one day and found himself complimenting his grandmother's outfit: "I was like, 'Mamí, you are ovah. Oh, my God, it's working. You are so fabulous. I love it,' " he says, balancing on the hyphen between self and parody.

Sitting in an Upper East Side coffee shop with his elbows on the table, Adam gestures while telling a story, then stops mid-sentence and stares at his hand. "It's moments like this," he says, focusing on his wrist, held ever so slightly limp, "that I'm like, 'What am I doing? What is that on my arm?' "

A student of ballet since he was 6, and of modern since freshman year, Adam says it's in the dance studio at his school where he feels "I'm becoming more and more flamboyant every day. I'm not even sure if it's because I'm finally letting myself be who I am, or whether it's because I have to fall into this stereotype. I honestly don't know the answer." One thing he's sure of, though, is that growing up, he was constantly teased and called a girl, a sissy, a flower boy for dancing, and when he was realizing he might be gay, he didn't want to admit it. He says he felt that "I didn't want them to be right about me."

Adam started thinking about his sexual orientation the summer he was 13, on a Unitarian retreat in New Hampshire. He and his longtime best friend Erika shared a fascination with another boy at the camp. But when the trip was over, "I convinced myself that that was something special about that guy and it was a summer thing and not relevant to how I define myself," he says. "I was like, 'I have girlfriends!' " This internal resistance worked until about a year ago, at which point he finally came out to himself. "I'm not sure what happened in the spring. But I just started noticing guys on the street and admitting it to myself." Then he waited six months to tell his parents during that trip to Brown. (September 11 prompted his confession, since "it reminded me of my mortality and I wanted my family to know who I was.") Another five months or so passed before Adam felt slightly comfortable saying "I am gay."

Ross says he knew he was gay in the eighth grade "or maybe earlier," but waited three years to tell his parents. D.J. came to her own realization even younger. When she was 10, she had an intense flirtation and physical relationship with a 13-year-old girl who lived in her building. "That's when I began to find out that I was more interested in girls than guys, and I got happy with it."

Christina came out to herself as a 12-year-old. "I started having feelings for girls and I was like, 'Well, maybe I'm just open-minded and bisexual. It is kind of the trend.' " It seems the mid-nineties girl-power movement — which freed girls to be as emotional and sensitive as they wanted to be — left Christina thinking that "girls are just generally open to things. So it's okay if two girls kiss each other," she says. It wasn't until she was 16, and on the phone with a friend talking about a girl whom she secretly had a crush on, that she realized bisexual might not be her category after all. "It was so frightening," she says, and she immediately "went out and got a boyfriend. And I stayed with him for a month and was like, Yeeeee-ahhhh. This isn't working out. No, this isn't it."

For Ryan, the awareness came before the vocabulary: "When I was 4 — yup, 4 years old — when I first learned that word, I was like, 'Oh, that's me.' I just remember knowing." Devin, too, has known since kindergarten: "I've questioned myself as to whether I was gay or bisexual, but I've always had feelings for men."