It was really baffling to me that colleges preferred to take people who got 2s and 3s on their AP tests to someone who scored 5s, so long as they had parents who would fork over thousands of dollars. At a poorly funded rural high school where most people were members of FFA, outscoring my classmates wasn't hard, and there weren't many collegebound to begin with, outside of the people with welloff families. It was frustrating to see them get to go instead of me because I didn't have tens of thousands of dollars for the tuition bill. (I mean, a lot of them were in the low to mid twenties on their ACT scores...)
In the US, higher education, like most everything else, is a business. That's not cynical, that's a fact. With the exception of a small handful of wealthy schools, most universities are looking out for their bottom line. Don't let the glossy brochures and cozy advertising copy confuse you. And you might as well get used to it, because the country is moving further in that direction.
On a more positive note, try to google: scholarships for gay kids
It returns a lot of promising hits.
Good luck.
Some fuzzy intuitive probability suggests that for every 20 people in the high school, there should be one testing at or above the 95th percentile nationwide. The emphasis word "entire" suggests that your high school was large. Was it awful? What's the story there?