Suicide, Hatred, and the Intersection of Exposure and Escalation [Updated]

Posted by Unknown , Monday, October 11, 2010 11:00 PM

Gays and lesbians committing suicide isn't really a new thing, but the current level of exposure kind of is. We've entered a more-than-likely short-lived era where people at the margins committing suicide means something to the mainstream. It's hard to tell if it is spectacle, sympathy, or shock, but getting the images of suffering young men (and perhaps women, though this current news cycle has few if any) into the heads of those who mistake design for choice, psychology for stubbornness, is a good thing.

Yet there is always a reactionary pull that would rather put us in the stone age than endeavor to understand our fellow man. That pull is gaining strength, tensing, ready to spring. A devastating high-exposure hate crime in New York, where nine men tortured one man and two teenagers because they were gay, has been revealed to the nation, and the nation is taken aback. But is the nation flinching? Is there any sense of responsibility among those who have helped perpetrate the kind of thinking that would lead to such a crime being possible?

Perhaps in the case of Zach Harrington, a 19-year-old who stood up for something and could not bear to live knowing what had risen to meet him, a direct line of cause and effect can be seen by those who have refused to see much else. As in the case of the men who committed a hate crime and the man who committed suicide, no one made them do what they did. No one forced them to the point of harm. But to disown the rhetoric that helped to justify what has happened is in many ways as dangerous.

There are at least two movements that will result, or at least gain force, from what has happened. One is positive. People are banding together, trying to give a support net to those who feel they are alone and trapped in a hostile world. Athletes are speaking out against bullying. Hundreds of people have dedicated videos to those needing to hear a supportive voice. These are good things - one seeks to remove the reasoning for some of these suicides, while the other seeks to help those unsure of the value of their existence.

But the other, more sinister movement is one that thrives on misanthropy. This is the one that feeds off of deplorable hate crimes and the thought of less like-minded individuals on earth, even if it results from an unbearable suffering. This is where exposure and escalation meet, with each extending in opposite directions. Time will tell the effects, but we will see at least a few more waves as a result of what has happened, both negative and positive, before the media's waters lie still again.

It's hard knowing that it always gets worse before it gets better, that there will always be suicidal actions borne out of feelings of anguish and self-hatred, that not everyone will change. But we can hope that out of the tragedies and sick actions taken against people who seek only to be themselves, good can come.

Until Wednesday.

Update: This is one of the best "It Gets Better" videos I've seen, and it illustrates my point about disowning rhetoric.

Sarah Silverman:

The Fight for Civil Rights is Not Over.

Posted by Unknown , Monday, November 17, 2008 9:43 AM

Effectively, as I was told while discussing this with a few of my friends, California now has at least three classes of people. Heterosexuals who can marry, homosexuals who can only have civil unions, and homosexuals who have been married. That is a house that cannot stand, I assure you.

But what I don't understand is how LDS can say that the very act of protesting is stepping on their rights to free speech and voting, when they went so far as to try and blackmail opponents of Prop 8 into giving them money. Now that the Anti-Gay Blacklist is up and running, people are screaming all over the place. I've seen it called militant homosexuality, Nazi tactics, Gay Gestapo, etc. etc.

I'm not sure I have a question here, but I'm really just disgusted at what's been going on. I don't think that the blacklist was necessarily the best course of action to repairing gay-straight relations in California and in the U.S. as a whole, but I don't think it was violating any right.

I'm incensed that LGBT groups have been treated as a group that can arbitrarily be denied or given rights. Either they can marry across the U.S., or they can't. Either they can adopt children, or they can't. Either they can be foster parents, or they can't. There can be no gray area here. These episodes in California, which will only continue to get worse as the class differential starts to wear down on those in the gay community who have been denied, will either end up overthrowing the entire system of inequality there and everywhere, or do the opposite in all the same places. The anti-gay movement has begun a fight that I wish I knew it couldn't win, but hatred runs deep in people. We never know how deep until the end.

To deny gay rights across the board is to completely disenfranchise so many - these people are your mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, (and, for some and someday) sons and daughters. Many of us have LGBT friends. They are human beings like everyone else, right?

But that's not what the arguments and the laws would have you believe. How many times have you heard the argument, "If we let gays marry, then what's next! Polygamy! Incest! Pedophilia! Bestiality!" How degrading. Their right to love and marry whoever they see fit is compared to having sex with animals and small children? Not only is it a non-sequiter to give this line of argument, but it is deliberately demonizing a very human group of people.

I'm exhausted with the debate, and I have come in only in the last few years of a many decades long fight. I don't see how these arguments can stand. How they cannot be challenged. How they can actually be made into law.

Mike Huckabee recently wrote a book called Do the Right Thing. In it, he writes this:

Yes, nothing in our society matters more. Nothing. Let that sink in before you move on.

This is going to become the prevailing narrative of social conservatives, which will come back to bite in 2010 and 2012. Sarah Palin, the one 64% of Republicans would like to see on the presidential ticket in 2012, has a better record than you would think on these issues, but supports an amendment to the constitution.

What a fight there is before us. It's not best to think of it that way (you tire long before the end), but it's the only way to prepare.