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This is a part of my story that I wrote a few years ago for Bridges Across the Divide, "A cyberspace initiative for

August, 1997

"We're going to live in a black neighborhood."

That was my then 21-year old daughter, in the plane, in August 1997. The white suburbanite family I'm part of was on the way to live in the U.S. after 14 years in Martinique as pioneers for the Baha'i Faith. My then 19-year-old son, my wife, and I pondered a few seconds, and said "Yes, of course."

One of our central concerns, in trying to make ourselves useful in God's plan, is helping to bring together people who have been divided from each other by racism. None of us knew what good it might do for us to move into a black neighborhood, but we all felt called to do it

After we moved in, we invited all our neighbors to an open house, and have tried in various ways to develop friendships with them. One neighbor comes occasionally to pray with us for the neighborhood, the children, and the world, and talk about what God is doing and our part in it.

My personal efforts have mostly revolved around getting to know my neighbors and joining hands with them in service to the community. For a while I went to the family resource center once a week, trying to make myself useful, and gave a class to teach elementary school children to make Web pages for their classrooms. I've helped two elementary schools with their Web pages. Now I'm reading to children and teaching them Origami once a week at an after-school center. My wife is teaching at one of the schools serving the poorest people, and mentoring some of her students.

Summer, 1999

"Looking for other people in the same dilemma to talk to."

This was in a religious discussion list, posted by someone who fell in love only with people of the same sex and who felt torn between romantic longings and religious beliefs. I don't remember how I came across it. I've been mildly interested in gay issues most of my life. I've known gays, and friends of gays, and my mother was very interested in them. Searching the Web for people for her to talk to, and visiting Web sites, I learned about exgay therapy. The more I read, the more it horrified me. I started looking for people I could work with to give people with unwanted sga some better possibilities. That eventually led me to Bridges Across the Divide

I have a sort of Don Quixote complex impelling me irresistibly to gallop to the aid of people in distress, especially where I see injustice. First it was the people who lost touch with many dear friends when the GeoCities chat rooms were reorganized. I spent hours roaming the rooms looking for lost friends, and submitted ideas to GeoCities for ways to help them. Then it was the people with prize-winning and community-serving Web pages, who were shamelessly betrayed when their pages were carelessly sabotaged by the GeoCities Watermark. Now it's gays, all gays, whichever way they decide to turn, and all kinds of marginalized people.

After my arrival in the U.S. and my initiation to the Web, someone I was corresponding with talked about the way gays had been blamed for some scandal about people getting AIDS through blood transfusions. That may have been what originally inspired my research on the Internet that eventually led me the SOS I described above, and later to Bridges Across. After that SOS, I agonized a lot over the plight of people with same-sex temptations who disapprove of homosexuality, and who think there's something wrong with them. I wanted desperately to find some way to reach them and reassure them. I started working on some Web pages to help them affirm their same-gender love and practice their heterosexian convictions at the same time.

A lot has happened since I wrote that. I'm planning to write some time about my experiences with:

• Some members and former members of the Baha'i Faith who feel betrayed and threatened by Baha'i institutions
• Homeless people
• Marginalized members of my Baha'i community
• Children
• Artists