The Culture That Killed Tyler Clementi

[chillspike]

Saturday, October 09, 2010
The Culture That Killed Tyler Clementi

by Sunsara Taylor

Revolution Online, October 7, 2010

By now, the events leading up to the suicide of Tyler Clementi, a gay student at Rutgers University in New Jersey, have been widely reported. On September 19, Tyler asked his roommate, Dharun Ravi, to stay out as he was having a private guest. Not long afterwards, Ravi sent a message out over Twitter, “Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.” Then, Ravi streamed Tyler’s intimate encounter live over the internet. Two days later, Ravi sent another message about Tyler, “Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes, it’s happening again.”

That same day, discussing his reaction to this online, Tyler wrote: “And so I feel like it was ‘look at what a fag my roommate is... Other people have commented on his profile with things like ‘how did you manage to go back in there?’ and ‘are you ok?’ and the fact that the people he was with saw my making out with a guy as the scandal whereas I mean come on... he was SPYING ON ME ... do they see something wrong with this?”

After that, Tyler Clementi posted on Facebook “Jumping off the gw bridge sorry.”

For three days, Tyler had been wrestling with how to respond to the invasion of his privacy, ....

Full Blog Post Here:

http://sunsara.blogspot.com/2010/10/culture-that-killed-tyler-clementi_09.html

[pnwmom]

1. Here's the "money quote," IMHO:

But this horrific death cannot be explained by focusing narrowly on two college freshmen. The even more damning truth is that their behavior was completely in step with the dominant culture of homophobia, cruelty, and destruction of privacy.