Gay youth and society
(Trish, I can already tell you'll have lots of significant things to add to this discussion)
My birthday was Monday, and it was wonderful and ironic and there is much to write about, which I promise (mom!) I will do soon.
But there's something else on my mind today, right now, and I cannot concentrate on work or anything because of it so I might as well write it down.
Wednesday night a young man at Johnson & Wales University (right here in Rhode Island) hung himself after being relentlessly tormented about his homosexuality. He is the fifth young person in the past month to take their own life as a result of internal struggles with sexuality, teasing, embarrassment, and hopelessness. Tyler Clemeni (the Rutgers University freshman) is the biggest national story right now, the promising young violinist whose roommate set up a live-streaming webcam that recorded (and transmitted to the entire world) his private romantic encounter in his own room. The other three were barely children, all 15 years old.
In the wake of these tragedies, many groups are calling for schools and colleges to crack down on bullies (cyber or otherwise), for social networking sites to put in more controls for privacy, and huge crowds are crying discrimination, hate-crime, bullying, social sensitivity, and much more.
For me, first off, I am just devastated at the whole of it. My heart breaks over and over again for these precious young lives and the families and friends they've left behind. Like many in the LGBTQ community, I am enraged that the circumstances even exist for these kinds of things to happen, much less at this frequency (of course, one life lost this way is still one too many).
The problem is that there is no policy that can guarantee decency in human beings. There is no universal rule that can tell you how what you think is a "joke" will be taken by its target, or how many times a person has been tormented and when that last straw will come. With the existence of the internet, blogs, Facebook, and all related ways to connect with people, comes the reality that I could write ANYTHING on my own personal Livejournal, Facebook status, or Twitter page, and it could be about ANYONE. I could know something about someone and announce it to the world, and there would be nothing to stop me except a sense of propriety, empathy, or plain old good judgment. There is nothing any of those internet service providers could ever do that would make it impossible for me to do that. Therefore, we have to rely on people's individual sense of decency to NOT do things like that, no matter how funny or benign or "not a big deal" it seems at the time.
That decency comes from dozens of places: how each person was raised and what values their family instilled in them, experiences they have had personally or through others in similar situations, motivations at any given moment, ability (or lack of ability) to foresee consequences, empathy for other human beings, input from media and happenings in the world (the sense of what is the "norm" right now), influence of friends and acquaintances, and who knows what else.
I get the feeling (from media and my own experience) that the "norm" these days puts the privacy and reputation of individuals less and less in their own hands. Everything is online now - photos of your night out drinking, status messages about your broken leg, news that you kissed your best friend's boyfriend or lied to a parent or spilled coffee on your lap. Everything from the mundane to the life-changing seems to end up online, and the millennium generation seems to think that's just fine. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but the kids have no idea of the consequences of where that world seems to be headed (getting a job later in life, having ANY secrets at all, being able to stay friends with someone with whom you may disagree on a big topic). Something that 20 years ago would never have been shared publicly is now posted online without a thought.
A majority of the time that sharing is good, and lets us connect and keep in touch with each other and share the happy (or unhappy) goings-on in our lives. I'm not condemning the sharing, or the social network sites. I just see a scary trend in the mentality that has accompanied their development. Those of us who grew up in the pre-internet world remember how it was before your whole life was public, and we learned the rules of propriety in that world, so now we (hopefully) bring that sense of decency into how we engage with each other on the web. The generation that is now in middle or high school probably can't remember when phones had cords, or when you had to call someone to get directions, and probably never knew a time without a cell phone and an e-mail account. For them that's how it has always been.
But I digress into the world of online-ness. That's part of it. The bigger problem is society's attitude toward differences, of all sorts. Homosexuality is the hot-button issue right now, and I'm glad that it's finally getting the freaking airtime it has always deserved. It is times like this when something comes to light and finally gets accepted as simply being what it is and NOT being a threat to anybody. But regardless of how attitudes are beginning to shift, ever so slowly, in a more accepting direction, there will still be kids in rural Kansas whose families and friends will never understand them or accept who they are if they come out. Parents can raise their children however they want to, and can instill whatever values they choose. That won't change (nor should it, really). But that shifts the burden of creating an accepting society onto everyone, not just parents or kids or queer people or homophobes but EVERYONE.
Ellen just recorded a wonderful, hopeful video message to LGBTQ youth (and a call to action for all of us) following this awful story. A gay man named Dan Savage has launched the "It Gets Better" campaign, encouraging queer couples and adults to record their stories so the youth of this country can see that they CAN have a joyful, safe, productive, good life, living openly as who they are.
I agree that we, as members of society, all have a duty to take part in creating a world that is more accepting, loving, and less quick to condemn (for ANY reason). We need to all be kinder and more accepting of the differences inherent in all people (wow that sounded cliche and vague...). We also need to give kids, especially queer kids, the tools to survive and figure themselves out. We need to give them hope that it DOES get better, that there are safe places to live and people who will love them and lives they can lead with success and joy and acceptance and friends and families and houses and ALL of it that they might want.
I have heard chatter that people are too sensitive these days, that we all get too easily offended about everything from race, sexuality and disabilities to movie tastes and off-hand comments. On the one hand I firmly believe it is great that we are all more aware that not everybody is white upper-middle class with married straight parents and goes to church on Sunday and has a nice job and did well in school and is healthy and able-bodied. The simple fact that an adopted child or a kid in a single-parent home can feel as included as everyone else during a class discussion of "family" is a huge step forward in my book. The fact that racism is no longer tolerated in most places, that interracial marriage doesn't make most of us blink, that women can vote and work and take powerful positions in this country, all of that is progress. The flip-side is that now people joke about hyper-political correctness, about being unable to flirt for fear of a sexual harassment accusation, about self-esteem burnishing and the fear that a failed driver's license exam will "scar for life", about not mentioning Christmas without also mentioning Hannukah, Ramadaan and Kwanzaa in the same sentence. I could go on.
It came up a lot in the recent story of Phoebe Prince, the girl from Massachusetts who killed herself after months of relentless bullying. She didn't have the tools she needed, or the strength, or the hope, or the whatever else, to battle what she was faced with. Or maybe she just didn't have the resolve that particular day. Who knows. There are so many details surrounding the circumstances of her choices that we'll never know the full story. But her death caused outcry among many and people demanded that the schools put anti-bullying laws in place. Some said we should stop all bullying, others said that there will always be cruelty among kids so why try to stop it, others said forget the bullies we need to strengthen the victims. It's all tangled and complex, and I no longer even know where I'm taking this.
I wish I could have spoken to those young men, told them it gets better, that the video can be deleted and the tormentors can be punished and you can move rooms and keep going to class and graduate and go on with your life.
I wish every family that preaches intolerance (or that idea that anyone can be hated) to their kids would know the true meaning of loving every human being for who they are.
I wish that kids would stop and really think about consequences before they posted things online.
I wish that the tolerance efforts in progressive, populous places would reach the kids in the places where they are lonely and where they don't know anybody else like them.
I wish that people everywhere would understand that we DO NOT CHOOSE TO BE GAY but at the end of the day we're just people with feelings and the need to love and be loved and we're not a threat to you, at all, we just want to live, and we want you to live too.
My birthday was Monday, and it was wonderful and ironic and there is much to write about, which I promise (mom!) I will do soon.
But there's something else on my mind today, right now, and I cannot concentrate on work or anything because of it so I might as well write it down.
Wednesday night a young man at Johnson & Wales University (right here in Rhode Island) hung himself after being relentlessly tormented about his homosexuality. He is the fifth young person in the past month to take their own life as a result of internal struggles with sexuality, teasing, embarrassment, and hopelessness. Tyler Clemeni (the Rutgers University freshman) is the biggest national story right now, the promising young violinist whose roommate set up a live-streaming webcam that recorded (and transmitted to the entire world) his private romantic encounter in his own room. The other three were barely children, all 15 years old.
In the wake of these tragedies, many groups are calling for schools and colleges to crack down on bullies (cyber or otherwise), for social networking sites to put in more controls for privacy, and huge crowds are crying discrimination, hate-crime, bullying, social sensitivity, and much more.
For me, first off, I am just devastated at the whole of it. My heart breaks over and over again for these precious young lives and the families and friends they've left behind. Like many in the LGBTQ community, I am enraged that the circumstances even exist for these kinds of things to happen, much less at this frequency (of course, one life lost this way is still one too many).
The problem is that there is no policy that can guarantee decency in human beings. There is no universal rule that can tell you how what you think is a "joke" will be taken by its target, or how many times a person has been tormented and when that last straw will come. With the existence of the internet, blogs, Facebook, and all related ways to connect with people, comes the reality that I could write ANYTHING on my own personal Livejournal, Facebook status, or Twitter page, and it could be about ANYONE. I could know something about someone and announce it to the world, and there would be nothing to stop me except a sense of propriety, empathy, or plain old good judgment. There is nothing any of those internet service providers could ever do that would make it impossible for me to do that. Therefore, we have to rely on people's individual sense of decency to NOT do things like that, no matter how funny or benign or "not a big deal" it seems at the time.
That decency comes from dozens of places: how each person was raised and what values their family instilled in them, experiences they have had personally or through others in similar situations, motivations at any given moment, ability (or lack of ability) to foresee consequences, empathy for other human beings, input from media and happenings in the world (the sense of what is the "norm" right now), influence of friends and acquaintances, and who knows what else.
I get the feeling (from media and my own experience) that the "norm" these days puts the privacy and reputation of individuals less and less in their own hands. Everything is online now - photos of your night out drinking, status messages about your broken leg, news that you kissed your best friend's boyfriend or lied to a parent or spilled coffee on your lap. Everything from the mundane to the life-changing seems to end up online, and the millennium generation seems to think that's just fine. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but the kids have no idea of the consequences of where that world seems to be headed (getting a job later in life, having ANY secrets at all, being able to stay friends with someone with whom you may disagree on a big topic). Something that 20 years ago would never have been shared publicly is now posted online without a thought.
A majority of the time that sharing is good, and lets us connect and keep in touch with each other and share the happy (or unhappy) goings-on in our lives. I'm not condemning the sharing, or the social network sites. I just see a scary trend in the mentality that has accompanied their development. Those of us who grew up in the pre-internet world remember how it was before your whole life was public, and we learned the rules of propriety in that world, so now we (hopefully) bring that sense of decency into how we engage with each other on the web. The generation that is now in middle or high school probably can't remember when phones had cords, or when you had to call someone to get directions, and probably never knew a time without a cell phone and an e-mail account. For them that's how it has always been.
But I digress into the world of online-ness. That's part of it. The bigger problem is society's attitude toward differences, of all sorts. Homosexuality is the hot-button issue right now, and I'm glad that it's finally getting the freaking airtime it has always deserved. It is times like this when something comes to light and finally gets accepted as simply being what it is and NOT being a threat to anybody. But regardless of how attitudes are beginning to shift, ever so slowly, in a more accepting direction, there will still be kids in rural Kansas whose families and friends will never understand them or accept who they are if they come out. Parents can raise their children however they want to, and can instill whatever values they choose. That won't change (nor should it, really). But that shifts the burden of creating an accepting society onto everyone, not just parents or kids or queer people or homophobes but EVERYONE.
Ellen just recorded a wonderful, hopeful video message to LGBTQ youth (and a call to action for all of us) following this awful story. A gay man named Dan Savage has launched the "It Gets Better" campaign, encouraging queer couples and adults to record their stories so the youth of this country can see that they CAN have a joyful, safe, productive, good life, living openly as who they are.
I agree that we, as members of society, all have a duty to take part in creating a world that is more accepting, loving, and less quick to condemn (for ANY reason). We need to all be kinder and more accepting of the differences inherent in all people (wow that sounded cliche and vague...). We also need to give kids, especially queer kids, the tools to survive and figure themselves out. We need to give them hope that it DOES get better, that there are safe places to live and people who will love them and lives they can lead with success and joy and acceptance and friends and families and houses and ALL of it that they might want.
I have heard chatter that people are too sensitive these days, that we all get too easily offended about everything from race, sexuality and disabilities to movie tastes and off-hand comments. On the one hand I firmly believe it is great that we are all more aware that not everybody is white upper-middle class with married straight parents and goes to church on Sunday and has a nice job and did well in school and is healthy and able-bodied. The simple fact that an adopted child or a kid in a single-parent home can feel as included as everyone else during a class discussion of "family" is a huge step forward in my book. The fact that racism is no longer tolerated in most places, that interracial marriage doesn't make most of us blink, that women can vote and work and take powerful positions in this country, all of that is progress. The flip-side is that now people joke about hyper-political correctness, about being unable to flirt for fear of a sexual harassment accusation, about self-esteem burnishing and the fear that a failed driver's license exam will "scar for life", about not mentioning Christmas without also mentioning Hannukah, Ramadaan and Kwanzaa in the same sentence. I could go on.
It came up a lot in the recent story of Phoebe Prince, the girl from Massachusetts who killed herself after months of relentless bullying. She didn't have the tools she needed, or the strength, or the hope, or the whatever else, to battle what she was faced with. Or maybe she just didn't have the resolve that particular day. Who knows. There are so many details surrounding the circumstances of her choices that we'll never know the full story. But her death caused outcry among many and people demanded that the schools put anti-bullying laws in place. Some said we should stop all bullying, others said that there will always be cruelty among kids so why try to stop it, others said forget the bullies we need to strengthen the victims. It's all tangled and complex, and I no longer even know where I'm taking this.
I wish I could have spoken to those young men, told them it gets better, that the video can be deleted and the tormentors can be punished and you can move rooms and keep going to class and graduate and go on with your life.
I wish every family that preaches intolerance (or that idea that anyone can be hated) to their kids would know the true meaning of loving every human being for who they are.
I wish that kids would stop and really think about consequences before they posted things online.
I wish that the tolerance efforts in progressive, populous places would reach the kids in the places where they are lonely and where they don't know anybody else like them.
I wish that people everywhere would understand that we DO NOT CHOOSE TO BE GAY but at the end of the day we're just people with feelings and the need to love and be loved and we're not a threat to you, at all, we just want to live, and we want you to live too.