Mother channels her grief into action after gay son's death

[RamboLiberal]

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/text/2001405000_gayactivist07.html

She's a mother of seven from Lebanon, Pa., a physician's wife. She's cheery, self-effacing, unfailingly nice.

She is not, Susan Wheeler will tell you, a confrontational person.

Yet there she was recently, trailed by television and radio reporters, knocking on the door of U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum's office in Washington, on a mission to change his view of homosexuals.

Wheeler's aim was to get the Pennsylvania Republican — who in April had associated homosexuality with incest, polygamy and adultery — to watch the documentary she'd brought.

"Jim in Bold" weaves together stories of gay youths across America with the saga of Wheeler's son Jim. Cruelly taunted for being gay, he killed himself in 1997, five months after his high-school graduation.

Wheeler's hope for the senator: that he'd come away from the documentary knowing what she does, that "homosexuality isn't a choice, and it isn't a sin. It's how someone is born."