Thirteen years ago, Corey Johnson, then an 18-year-old high school student in Middleton, Mass., the son of a truck driver and a cafeteria worker, came out about his homosexuality, and it was no small thing. The captain of his football team, Mr. Johnson also wrestled and played lacrosse and baseball. Not long after his disclosure, he was asked to speak at the Millennium March for Equality in Washington. He became the subject of a column by Robert Lipsyte in The New York Times, which, to Mr. Johnson’s great surprise, ran on the paper’s front page on a Sunday. A certain celebrity quickly attended him.

Soon he began lecturing on sexual orientation at colleges, high schools, human rights groups, dinners and conferences.

I met Mr. Johnson one afternoon last week on the 12th anniversary of his move to New York, where he has pursued gay and community advocacy and made many friends, one of them former State Senator Thomas K. Duane, a particularly avuncular man who laughs robustly and cries easily. Under his tutelage, Mr. Johnson has learned a lot about politics and more about life, enough so that now, at 31, he is running for Mr. Duane’s former City Council seat.

Mr. Duane famously won the district that covers much of Manhattan’s West Side below 59th Street (currently represented by the mayoral candidate Christine C. Quinn) in 1991, during the height of the city’s AIDS panic, as one of the first openly H.I.V. positive political candidates in the country. Lending his friend his valuable endorsement, Mr. Duane told me he phoned Mr. Johnson not long ago to talk about the campaign, asking him first, “How are we going to handle your H.I.V. status? Have you told your mother?”