In the Aftermath: Queer Youth & Suicide

On September 22nd, an 18 year-old named Tyler Clementi jumped off the George Washington bridge connecting New York & New Jersey after his roommate had streamed a live internet feed of Tyler’s encounter with another man in his dorm room.

Tyler was a first-year student at Rutgers University, sharing a cramped room with another freshman named Dharun Ravi. Dharun placed a webcam in the dorm room and, from another students’ room, watched Tyler making out with another young man. Dharun’s Twitter & Facebook posts leading up to the incident indicate that he was uncomfortable with the fact that Tyler was gay. Tyler’s posts on an online message board show both his anger at the invasion of his privacy and the homophobic voyeurism it entailed, and his uncertainty over how to deal with the situation. After Tyler discovered Dharun’s webcam pointed at his bed for the second time two days later, Tyler went to his residence advisor. The next day, he jumped into the Hudson River.

Tyler is one of five teenagers in the month of September alone who took their lives after enduring repeated harassment that targeted their sexuality. 
Somewhat surprisingly, and heartbreakingly, Tyler was one of the oldest of the five. 13 year-old Asher Brown shot himself in the head on Sept 23rd in Austin, Texas. 15 year-old Billy Lucas hanged himself in Indiana on Sept 9th in Indiana. 13 year-old Seth Walsh died in hospital on Sept 29th after attempting to hang himself in Minnesota, and gay 19 year-old Rhode Island student Raymond Chase died after hanging himself the same day.

Whether or not any of these young men (in general, suicide rates for women are notably lower, often accounted for by the lower ‘success rate’ of the means women often use) self-identified as gay is possibly irrelevant. The bottom line is that they believed that to be called gay or to be assumed to be gay was worse than death. And while it’s highly unlikely that the homophobic harassment they received was the sole reason they decided to commit suicide, the cumulative effect of it no doubt precipitated that decision.

Queer & questioning youth are much more likely to attempt suicide than non-queer youth. A 1999 NZ study by Fergussen, Horwood, & Beautrais corroborated a myriad of international findings, stating that that 38% of queer youth reported suicidal ideation, vs. 28% of non-queer youth; and 32.1% of queer youth up to age 21 had attempted suicide, vs. only 7.1% of non-queer youth. That’s over four times as likely. The reason is not, of course, anything inherent in being sexually attracted to members of the same sex. Rather, it is the social stigma around being queer that makes for suicidal predisposition:

“The process of realizing that one is gay and having to accept it is not just an immediate stressor and can actually narrow one’s options further by taking away coping resources, such as friends and family.” (Kitts, 2005)

In the wake of Billy Lucas’ suicide, Dan Savage – as if I didn’t love him enough already – has created the It Gets Better Project. The goal is to tell kids that, well, it gets better. Eventually, you will find a community. You will find people like yourself. You will not be alone.

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Tags: coming out, Dan Savage, homophobia, New Zealand, Queer, suicide, Tyler Clementi, Youth