Queer Youth Not a Tragedy

[onpatrol98]

Queer Youth Not a Tragedy
By Laurie Essig (Chronicle of Higher Education)

This past week, my inbox has been flooded with messages from colleagues about how "we must do something" to show our outrage at the five suicides of gay teens that have occurred in the past three weeks in this country.

That's right—five young gay people who killed themselves apparently in response to homophobic bullying and harassment by their classmates. By now the names of these five young men are etched into our collective consciousness. Asher Brown, 13, of Texas; Billy Lucas, 15, of Indiana; Seth Walsh, 13, of California; Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers student who threw himself off the George Washington Bridge; and now Raymond Chase, 19, a student in Rhode Island.

Ellen DeGeneres made a video calling these deaths a sign that teen bullying is an epidemic. Dan Savage decided to put a call out on YouTube to stop queer youth from killing themselves. The campaign, entitled It Will Get Better, invited queers and other outcasts to "talk" to suicidal teens through videos about how different life gets after high school. Video after video discusses how the idiots who bully you in high school grow up to be miserable nobodies while you can grow up to be as fabulous as you want to be. Many schools and universities are responding to the suicides with vigils, speak-outs, and other forums for marking this national tragedy.

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Queer-Youth-Not-a-Tragedy/27380/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

[damntexdem]

1. But bullying is a tragedy.

And it leads to worse tragedies.