Living Out Loud with Darian

Teenagers are coming out to their family and peers much earlier nowadays thanks to a culture that is less homophobic than it has been to previous generations of gays and lesbians. However, for some gay youth coming out can be a difficult but necessary task if you live in the bible belt.

Out.com takes a look at the lives of several teenagers from the gay youth group Stand Out Youth in the small town of Savannah, Georgia.

Out sent photographer Danielle Levitt to Savannah, Ga., to document what it means to be young and gay in the South today.

For all it's relative progressiveness -- Savannah is home to two art schools, a Marc Jacobs boutique, and an American Apparel store -- Levitt found the city's response to cultural shifts in sexual identity a bit dated. "I assumed that I could troll the streets or search the Internet and find an abundance of queer kids. I quickly realized that, in fact, tradition has a stronghold on its inhabitants, and that Savannah's process of coming out is a slow one."

But for the five brave gay men and women of color pictured above, coming out was not an option but a necessity. And they did so in a major way in their hometown and to the world in the pages of Out Magazine.