ANTI GAY BULLYING.

I'm devastated by all these LGBT suicides. Really, really devasted. I'm also seeing a phemonenon that Shawn and others talk about but in regards to race- that is, the ability of well meaning outsiders to make an issue about them.

I'm going to ignore the fucking hideous tarhearted people that would blame these suicides on the kids that killed themselves. They're not worth my time. On our side though I've seen so many comments that are along the lines of, "this has nothing to do with being gay, bullying is just plain bad!"

Fuck you. This has everything to do with being gay. Your being bullied because you were over weight or wore glasses is not the same as silently suffering for an entire childhood because you're an outsider from your own community. It is not the same as being cheated out of an education because you're afraid to go to school, not just because of bullies, but also the teachers who purposely ignore them. It is not the same as sometimes never feeling safe in your own home. It is not the same as having entire religions set to destroy you. Most importantly, it is not the same as being a small, innocent chld in a society that thinks it's fine to contantly degrade you, push you out, vote on your civil rights etc.

Gay kids make up 20-40% of all homeless youths. Gay kids are 3-4 times more likely to commit suicide than their straight peers.

It. Is. Not. The. Same.

 

Comments

[isaac]

I just hope you didn't take that thing I linked to as some sign that I fall into the "all bullying is bad this has nothign to do with being gay" camp. I just think that school district should have the everloving shit sued off of them.

I was bullied quite a bit as a child, to the point where I was afraid to be left in my house alone when an early teenager and had all sorts of crazy nightmares etc. etc. and so forth. But I would NEVER equate the two... what I went through pales in comparison to my queer friends who were beaten up by their own families, had their lives threatened, attempted suicide etc. Are there similarities? Of course, but that's beside the point. The particularities of the gay experience are what matter here, not the universal aspects (there are times when the universal aspects are what matters, this just ain't one of them).

I sympathize with people's attempt to understand through relating to their own experience. I think there's a difference between people trying to do that ("Oh, I know something of this, i was bullied as a child...") and people who use that relational activity to dismiss what gay youth go through (the "this is just bullying!" camp you talk about). The question for me is... how can we leverage that first camp? How can we use the common experience of bullying that lots and lots of people go through as a doorway to their compassion through which they can understand the particularities of anti-GLBT bullying and why it's different, and worse and why some specific things need to happen because of it?

I say this because I recognized the particular horribleness of anti-queer bullying through my own experience of being bullied. I certainly started at a place of seeing the similarities, and this took me to a place of seeing the differences and thus the urgency of the problem.