“It changed me for the better” Junior Jaylin Pringle said as he referred to his experience of coming out as gay.

Jaylin, who is originally from North Carolina, now lives in Greenbelt, Maryland. He noted that his favorite class is orchestra with the “benevolent Dr. Yarborough”. He also said he loves pizza and Chipotle, and says his favorite artists has “always been and always will be Beyonce”.

His experience at a residential camp at the University of Georgia, he says, played a major role in his decision to come out. One of his supervisors, who looked after Jaylin and his dorm mates when they weren’t in their college classes, was “gender-queer”. The proper way to address them, rather than using the traditional gender-specific pronouns ‘he’ or ‘she’, would be ‘they’. Jaylin explained that they were not gay because they identified as “non-binary” and not “specifically as male”.

“They inspired me to be more comfortable with myself” he said. Seeing “how confident they were” and how “they didn’t let other people define them” really stuck with Jaylin. He said it was a source of “representation” almost “daily” which he otherwise wouldn’t have been able to experience.

He went on to explain that being around a group of people who identified with different parts of the LGBTQA+ spectrum offered Jaylin a secure set of friends to “fall back on” even if “the worst” happened when he decided to come out back home.

Jaylin said first that he came out to his “close personal friends” near the beginning of this past September, and then later came out on social media.

Jonathan Bertiz, a fellow member of the ERHS Rugby Team, who has known Jaylin since September of 2015 when he first joined the team said that all of his teammates “accepted him with open arms”.

Alex Rea, a student at McKinney North High School in McKinney, Texas, met Jaylin during this past summer at the Duke University Talent Identification Program (TiP) camp when they were in the same Foreign Policy class. As of now, she said she’s known him for “about 5 months”  and said her favorite thing about Jaylin is their “similar values and sense of humor” and his “spot on“ Hillary Clinton impression.”  She added that although he came out to a large group and not personally to her, she “had no problem with it” and that it only added “positive things to him and his personality”.

Donovan Harvey, a former Eleanor Roosevelt student who now attends Hofstra University, met Jaylin through the Debate team at ERHS when he joined his freshman year. He pointed out that he admires Jaylin’s drive that he displayed when debating, even after he wasn’t “personally as successful as he would have liked” in his first tournament. Harvey noted that although he was “surprised” when Jaylin came out – a reaction which Harvey referred to as a “negative reflection of heteronormative society” – he explained that was “happy for him” and that it was really nice for him to reach the level of “comfort” required to come out.

He said he wouldn’t change anything about the way he took on coming out, aside from the fact that he would have rather “told his mom” rather than her asking him.

Fortunately, he says that the people close to him as well as people he doesn’t know have accepted him, but he went on to add that even if they didn’t, he wouldn’t care because “his mom knows” and he values her opinion the most . He said that his extended family was “proud” of him for coming out, although at time their response was a bit “passive”.

As of now, Jaylin is choosing between a career in Constitutional Law, Music, or Screenplays.