Gay Suicides Stay in the News

The New York Times has continued to report on gay teen suicides, which in and of itself is news. Suddenly now the long-standing epidemic of LGBT teen depression and suicide is occupying the spotlight, and that's great.

In today's story, the Times discusses the significant number of teen suicides that have been reported on this month. I'm going to ask the head of GLSEN, the Gay-Lesbian and Straight Education Network, if they think this is a spike in events or a spike in news coverage: I suspect it's the former, but let's see what she says.

There is a sense, though, in reading the Times piece that school cultures and adult culture are not exactly the same thing. What is no longer considered socially acceptable for adults to say to one another or about one another at a workplace, say, still appears acceptable in American high schools. Workers in many American workplaces could not verbally assault a co-worker as a "fag" and tell him "You should kill yourself" or "You're gay, who cares about you?" -- as students apparently said to Seth Walsh, a California boy who killed himself last month. Workers who did so would, I suspect, face some kind of consequences.

But American educators seem either baffled or indifferent to the question of how to end the harassment-is-OK culture of their schools. Richard Swanson, the superintendent of the school district where Seth Walsh went to school, told the Times that the district had rules against bullying, taught "tolerance" in the classrooms, and had assemblies every few months to discuss behavior. "But these things didn't prevent Seth's tragedy," he wrote to the reporter. "Maybe they couldn't have."

Yet clearly if, over the last 40 years, we have successfully changed the homophobic culture of a large number of American workplaces, then we do, in fact, have the tools and skills to change the culture of America's schools as well. We just need to borrow those tools from one environment and apply them to another.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said, "This is a moment where every one of of us --parents, teachers, students, elected officials and all people of conscience -- needs to stand up and speak out against intolerance in all its form." That's well and good, but hardly specific and hardly focused on the very well-documented plight of LGBT youth. There is a very specific form of intolerance that we need to target, and we need to do more than issue declarations of principle. And we have a history of doing this work successfully that we can and should start borrowing from.