Goodness knows the GLBT community isn’t perfect. But there are moments when we do something so right that I just beam, and a recent announcement has me looking like a lighthouse with hair.

For eight years the Colin Higgins Foundation has bestowed its Youth Courage Awards on exceptional GLBT young people. For seven years I’d managed to be unaware of every one of those facts. Now, after reading about 2007’s crop of awardees, I mean to look out for the list annually.

This year’s four winners are being honored, the foundation noted, “for building bridges between disparate communities, showing courage in the face of tremendous obstacles, and transforming the world of GLBT advocacy.” Heavens, is that all?

Ali Abbas, 19, was born in rural Illinois to Lebanese Shiite Muslim parents. While growing up, he experienced the fun of anti-Arab harassment, especially after 9/11. When Abbas came out during his senior year in high school, his friends dumped him and his parents were considerably less than ecstatic.

Abbas now works to put himself through DePaul University. The $10,000 grant each award winner receives will surely help him with his scholarly needs, like tuition, books and pizza.

His goal is to boost the mainstream gay community’s acceptance of queer youth of every hue, as well as to help foster gay freedom in the Middle East. Hey, why not think big?

Also of Muslim descent is Raquel Evita Saraswati, 23. At age 15 she became a member of the national board of directors of the Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). As a student at Simmons College, she led both gay and Muslim groups on campus. Her name appeared on an international hit list of “16 Women Who Shame Islam,” resulting in threats of death, sexual assault and physical mutilation.

A mere mortal might’ve thrown herself into a closet, veiled from scalp to toenail, but not Saraswati. Now this Muslim lesbian is a leader in the Islamic reform movement.

The list of junior over-achievers continues with Ryan Bowker, 20, who grew up on the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe reservation in South Dakota. Bowker came out to his sisters at the age of nine. (That’s over-achieving right there.) His grandfather, who was raising him, later put him into counseling to straighten him out, and by 15 Bowker landed in foster care.

He managed to graduate high school a year and a half early, and earned a nursing certificate. His ambition is to become a registered nurse and return to his reservation to do HIV prevention and counseling. In the meantime, he conducts outreach to reservations and schools, teaching youth about the Native American tradition of respect for “Two Spirit” people.

So, are you feeling unaccomplished yet?

Kiya Morton, 20, was born biologically male in Philadelphia. When her mother discovered she was gay, she checked her into a mental institution, which drugged her to make her straight. She ran away and at 15 began hustling, while transitioning to become a girl. Prostitution landed her in group homes, where she had to be a boy. In a juvenile detention center, staffers physically and sexually assaulted her. She got out by claiming to be suicidal, which most of us would’ve been by then.

Then Morton protested to the powers that be about the treatment of transgender people in the system. Partly due to her, that detention center closed down, and Pennsylvania adopted new guidelines for the treatment of all LGBT youth in state care.

I say hurray for these determined young people, hurray for the late screenwriter/director Colin Higgins for starting this foundation, and hurray for its administrators, who emphasize that our community includes people of every age, color, religion and income. And some have an ability to persevere that I’d plain like to bottle.