Raymond Chase was a 19-year-old old sophomore from Monticello, N.Y., studying culinary arts at Johnson & Wales in Providence, R.I. In an effort to avoid the stigma of being gay, he died by hanging himself in his dorm room last Wednesday.
After years of hearing kids say, ‘You should kill yourself,’ ‘You should go away,’ ‘You’re gay, who cares about you?’ Seth Walsh went into the backyard of his home in Tehachapi, Calif., and hanged himself, apparently unable to bear the relentless barrage of taunting, bullying and other abuse from his peers. After a little more than a week on life support, he died last Tuesday. He was 13.
Billy Lucas, a 15-year-old from Greensburg, IN, hanged himself on September 9th after a constant stream of bullying and gay bashing against him by classmates at school.
Asher Brown, a 13-year-old from the Houston suburbs, shot himself after constant taunting at his middle school, which stemmed from him coming out as being gay.
Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old Rutgers University freshman, jumped off the George Washington Bridge after a sexual encounter with another male was broadcast via webcam online by his roommate, who thought it would be a funny joke to embarrass Clementi and show the gay intimate encounter to millions.
Kids are sponges. They absorb everything around them. So when these bullies directed anger, violence and hate toward these young men simply because they were gay, that was learned behavior they picked up from watching their parents, their pastors, and their politicians. It is an anti-gay rhetoric that is growing dangerously out of control in America, and these kids are being exposed to it on a consistent basis. So when they go to school and see a gay kid who’s different from them, they’ve already been taught it’s OK to react negatively, because it’s not “regular” or it’s not “normal.” They’ve heard on the news countless times from conservative politicians that gays are not equal, but are beneath everyone else and should therefore be treated differently. They’ve heard from their churches and religious leaders that gay people are trying to destroy their family and are therefore going to hell. And they’ve even heard from their own parents and families all the gay jokes, pokes, ridicule, etc. that teaches them it’s OK to mock or even attack someone based on their sexuality. But this is WRONG!
STOP THE BULLYING America!!!
It’s time for parents to take responsibility for the negative messages and learned behavior they embed into their kids. It’s time for politicians to stop injecting their own individual morality into the political debate for the sake of self-promotion and political expediency. And it’s time for religious leaders to teach tolerance and acceptance versus intolerance and superiority. Our children are dying. And it’s not because there really is no other alternative but death — but rather we adults have not actively shown them they are OK, that their lives have value, and that there is indeed a better way.
HEAR! HEAR DJ! WellSaid.