Like many young people, 18-year-old Aju Tristan is conflicted about many things. He's an aspiring model, but he's also interested in pursuing psychiatry, writing and photography.

He was born in Tobago, but he feels an attachment to the United States, where he'd spent most of his childhood. He likes girls, but he also finds himself attracted to boys.

He wants to be open about his sexuality and show his face without shame alongside this story, but he's afraid of what that would mean for himself, his family and his friends.

"I'm sick of feeling that I have to pretend to be someone else to belong, to feel safe in my own country," he says, not for the first time, his voice tense with frustration, as he walks through a pretty middle-class neighbor in St. Augustine with four female friends and a reporter. The young women walk in pairs, arms around each other's waists and holding hands. The reporter asks Aju if he thought it unfair that they could get away with that and men couldn't.

One of the women — she has a heart-shaped face and wears braids — answers: "Oh, we get harassed, too."

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) young people have to deal with many issues that other young people deal with and many that they don't, but perhaps the biggest difference between the LGBT youth experience and that of most straight young people is that gay teens have the added burden of constant harassment, shame and sometimes even fear for one's life.

"This is around the age in your life when most people are really saying, 'This is what I am,'" says Luke Sinnette of the gay support group Friends for Life, referring to 18 and 19-year-olds. "It's generally around those years you'd find teens accepting who they are and coming out or not accepting who they are and turning into the down-low guy or something. Of course, it does not help that people are now targeting you in a particular kind of way."

"Coming out" refers to the process of admitting you are lesbian, gay or bisexual to yourself and to others and "the down low" is a popular expression for gay men who acquire girlfriends and wives and otherwise pretend to be straight while secretly having sexual relationships with men.

Aju, a willowy young man with a style and carriage he admits could sometimes be effeminate, describes a daily pattern of harassment from schoolmates and strangers on the street in Tobago, where he lives and goes to school. He's the target of verbal abuse three to five times a day, he says. "On a Friday, it will be like 10-plus," he adds.

"I've had people come up to me in the street and tell me certain things — anywhere I go in Tobago," he says. "It doesn't happen as often as it used to. I guess because I cut my hair now. But before, people who would pass me on the street, they would call me names. Sometimes people driving in cars would stop, watch me, call me names, threaten me and drive off — 'You effing this, that and the other!'"

Aju's reaction in the past was usually to not react at all. "I would not say anything," he says. "I would just walk away. I would feel upset."

But more and more, he finds himself losing patience.

Recently, he was walking through "town" — his word for Scarborough — when someone threw a rotten apple at him, hitting him on the leg. When he confronted the group of young men from whose direction the missile came, they insisted the guy who threw it hit Aju accidentally.

"Instead of just saying sorry, he came and he asked me, 'why you act like that, why you behave like that, why you does walk around like that?' I started to cuss," says Aju, his accent a mix of American and Tobagonian.

"I don't know what's coming over me, but these days I just don't take it anymore. Sometimes I yell, I cuss and I carry on," he says.

But people's reactions sometimes carry a real threat of danger. Attacks against gays, even those resulting in murder, are not unheard of in Trinidad and Tobago.

Aju says he hasn't been threatened to his face in school, but occasionally word would get to him of a schoolmate who wanted to beat him up, stab him or even shoot him.

"I sometimes help out at a hair salon," says Aju, who lives with his mother and younger brother and sister. "I'll come home in the wee hours of the night, like really late sometimes, and passing the guys on the corner it's really uncomfortable because sometimes the verbal abuse gets so wild, it kinda feels as if they're coming to do something. It's very tough. I get scared sometimes. I just walk away like if nothing is going on. Most times, I have my iPod in my ears. But I can feel people staring at me."

The debate is still raging about whether gays and lesbians are born the way they are or became that way later on. But gay men and lesbians often show cross-gender traits from a very early age, indicating that the behavior is an integral part of their personalities and something they have no control over.

Not feeling you can be who you are can have a detrimental effect on a person's well-being, says Marcus Kissoon, a behavioral science and social work university student who helps run a clinic offering mental and physical health services to LGBT people.

"Gay people from young have been forced into a world of secrecy," says Kissoon. "Sexual identity, if not nurtured well, leads to stress, depression, suicide and delinquent activity."

Aju finds comfort and peace of mind through the support of friends, gay and straight. He describes how one of them - a schoolmate whose religious faith means she isn't completely comfortable with Aju's sexuality - stood by him despite pressure from her friends, who would get up and leave when Aju approached.

"They wouldn't even acknowledge me being there sometimes," he says. "I told her that it's so uncomfortable me being your friend, you know, and she said, 'Yeah. Sometimes they tell me, 'why you're liming with that fag?'' I told her, 'I don't know if I'm destroying your reputation being your friend. I don't want to do that to you.' And she tell me, 'You're my best friend, I don't give a damn what they have to say.'"

As to the religious arguments against homosexuality that many people - even teachers, he says -  approach him with, Aju has a response.

"If God hated this so much, He wouldn't have created me," he says. "He would not have created others like me. He wouldn't have stood for it to be on Earth. We wouldn't be here."

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