The cover of today's New York Times carried the tragic story of a Rutgers University freshman named Tyler Clementi who jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge last week. His suicide came three days after his roommate used a webcam to record Clementi making out with another young man, and then stream the footage onto the Internet. No doubt devastated by the events, Clementi took his life: he was 18 years old.
Clementi's death came in the same month's as the deaths of 13-year-old Asher Brown in Texas, 15-year-old Billy Lucas in Indiana, and 13 year-old Seth Walsh in California. All had been harassed and bullied by their peers in a way that focused on them being gay.
GLSEN reports that 9 out of 10 LGBT students say that they have been harassed for being gay, and, perhaps more significantly, that LGBT youth are 4-times more likely to try suicide than their straight peers.
These stories are tragic and even though the mainstream media is just now picking them up, in some ways the vulnerability of LGBT youth is not news to us. Statistics about gay youth suicide rates have been circulating for several years. But even anecdotally, we know how brutal coming out issues can be.
I am reminded of Harvey Milk's recurrent speeches about hope in the 1970s. He talked about the late night phone calls he received from the desperate. And he called on everyone gay to come out and run for office, if only because it would send a message to those lost souls. "The young gay people in the Altoona, Pennsylvanias," he would say, "and the Richmond, Minnesotas who are coming out and hear Anita Bryant on television and her story. The only thing they have to look forward to is hope. And you have to give them hope. Hope for a better world, hope for a better tomorrow, hope for a better place to come to if the pressures at home are too great. Hope that all will be all right." Milk knew how terrible it could be to be young and realizing that you're gay: he knew how lonely that could feel. And he understood that part of the work needed to be making the world safer for those who were struggling.
And in saying that, Milk was echoing what the Mattachine activists had done twenty years earlier: he was picking up a thread that they had already prepared. As historian Martin Meeker has ably demonstrated, when Mattachine, the nation's first significant homosexual rights organization, spread its roots in San Francisco in the 1950s, it expended enormous amounts of time and energy working as a social service agency. In a way, it was forced to do so. The offices were deluged with desperate letters and calls from around the country and world. And so the Mattachine volunteers learned to provide suggestions, offer assistance, and lend sympathetic hope. This was the work at the beginning of the gay rights struggle.
But how strange and sad that here we are some 60 years later, and in spite of all the progress we've made in other areas of LGBT rights and cultural representation, this remains the work. Despite what has been accomplished, for many young Americans it still remains devastatingly difficult to be gay. The homophobic culture that took root in this country in the 1930s just refuses to let go.
Sex columnist Dan Savage and his partner have just launched an "It Gets Better" Project on YouTube, inviting LGBT adults to post videos describing how much better their lives got after high school and coming out. It's a wonderful idea and a wonderful project. Clearly, it's vital that we make connections to those kids in Altoona and New York. But how I wish that the tide was already turning on this front...
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