A guidance counselor at an Albany, N.Y., public school contacted me over the weekend and said she had a student in her school who has confided to her – but not anyone else – that he might be gay. The student is 15 and I think it better not to mention his native country.

Members of his family – he is a religious community that violently opposes homosexuality in any form – have threatened him,  one brother has already beaten him at least once.

His father says he would be killed in his home country, and he told him he wouldn’t be sorry if someone did.

A religious person in his community has promised to “exorcise” the devils that are eating into his soul and are persuading him to make “perverted” kinds of love. He told this young men that they would beat this impulse out of him if necessary

The boy’s mother is supportive of her son and reached out to the guidance counselor for help. The guidance counselor contacted several gay support groups but the boy is afraid to contact them at least for now.

The student says he is safe and does not feel in imminent danger, just confused and frightened. His father is very angry, and very rigid, he says, but not violent.

The guidance counselor has found a social worker who is talking to the young man and his mother and monitoring his situation. She has been following my refugee work on the blog and thought I might have ideas about how to help this child.

Her sense of the father was that he loved his son, and would eventually accept any choice he made, despite all of his fear and bluster. She said he was more frightened of the community’s response than angry, but he was trying to scare his son away from his gayness.

I said the best help I could offer for now – the guidance counselor was on top of it – was getting him some books that might help him understand who he is and how he wants to live. And perhaps give him the strength to come out into the open. He is very frightened about his peers and their possible reactions, as well as those of his family.

I have been in touch with him and told him he isn’t the first gay refugee to  have this problem, there was support out there in the world. I urged him to contact some of the gay support groups in the area. He’s thinking about it, he has their numbers, he wants to read these books, which I will get to him this week.

I asked him if would like to read some books about this experience, and perhaps write about it in a journal or some other form, if he felt comfortable doing that. He said he would love to read  the books.

I reminded him several times that I am not a therapist or social worker and urged him to get help from professionals if he needed it. He promised me he would. He seemed  quite impressive – intelligent, thoughtful, I sensed a lot of strength there.

I am grateful to Connie Brooks of the Battenkill Book Store here in Cambridge, she and I worked together to come up with some highly recommended, award-winning titles.

One is a novel by Abdi Nazemian, about an Iranian teenager  who is terrified that he will be found out for being gay, something he can barely acknowledge to himself. The book is widely praised for being sensitive and heartrending. It is, say the critics, about the search for the courage to be oneself.

The second is Darius The Great Is Not Doing Okay by Adib Khorram, the story of a young Persian teenager suffering from  severe depression. It is a gentle story of friendship and love.

The third is a choice of mine, Tales Of The City, by Armistead Maupin (now a Netflix series). The series brilliantly chronicles the rise of San Francisco as a gay mecca in the 1980’s.

(I was actually researching relevant books about gay identity and the young before the counselor got in touch with me. I know another young refugee student who could  use them.)

Maupin focused in his best-selling book series on the young gay men and women who flocked  to San Francisco to live their lives freely and in community.

These three books looked at the experience of isolation and identity in communities and cultures that often rejected gay people or treated them as criminals.

I’m going to Albany to visit Bishop Maginn on Wednesday, and I’ll drop off these books along the way.

I understand the limits of what I can do, but I’ve learned to do what I can do, and respect those boundaries. This man has gotten  himself some good help, he seems to know how to do that, and I’ve offered to stay in touch with him and help in any small way that I can.

If he needs more help from me, I’d be happy to help him, but it seems to me that he has access to the right resources.  I don’t really see a long-term role for me beyond books, although that could be important.

And he knows how to get help. It’s nice to be able to do this, and to know that people in the refugee community are paying attention to our work.