Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Not So Naive Anymore

I just finished watching an episode of Glee.  I love this show for a variety of reasons.  The music, the snarky dialogue, and the intricately developed characters all entertain, amuse and move me.  The show mixes humor and drama and music very well. Tonight's episode dealt with the attempted suicide of a young man tormented both online and at school after someone involuntarily outed him as gay.  My first reaction to the story line seems naive upon reflection.  I had a fleeting thought that the boy overreacted to his situation and that the bullying had been over-the-top for plot purposes.  However, I quickly changed my mind when I remembered a similar experience that happened in my senior year of high school.

In late January 1990, my mother who taught at the very small high school I attended, received a late night phone call regarding the suicide of a sophomore boy that I knew well and considered a friend.  I couldn't believe it when she told me what had happened.  He had gone out with one of his friends that night, came home,  went to his room, got undressed, and with his brother's gun shot himself in the head.  He killed himself because dying seemed easier than living as a gay teen in a small, rural town in New Mexico.  I think about him every now and then, and all the things he has missed.  Twenty two years have passed since his death and I am certain that his 37 year-old self would have been so much happier than his 15 year-old self could ever have imagined.  This thought deeply saddens me.

When I say I went to a small school, I mean a very small school.  We had about 100 students in grades seven through twelve.  I had 27 classmates graduate with me that year and most people considered us a large class.  Everyone knew this boy.  Everyone in town had watched him grow up and everyone knew he marched to the beat of a different drummer.  He never fit in with his family.  He suffered constant teasing at the hands of his brother, kids at school, and even friends.  He never admitted his homosexuality, but those people who are in tune with others could just tell.  I never cared one way or another about his sexual orientation.  To me, he was no more and no less than an average teenage boy trying to find his way through high school.  He was kind, he was funny, and on the surface he seemed to enjoy life.

In my naivety I never knew the level of his despair, nor the daily abject fear of being discovered to be gay.  For those of you who may read this and live in more cosmopolitan and open-minded areas of the world, New Mexico can be an incredibly backward, narrow minded, Christian-fundamentalist, and ultra-conservative place to live.  A small ranching town in the southern part of the state twenty-two years ago had to have been a living hell for someone who is gay.  He grew up around people who carelessly tossed around the word faggot, and made cruel and violent remarks about homosexuals. He learned in church that gay people comprised an affront to God and would burn in Hell for eternity.  I cannot even begin to fathom how difficult it must have been to have his entire world tell him every single day both silently and aloud how profoundly evil, malformed, and wrong he was.  I cannot understand what it must have been like to have your entire being be negated and disparaged on a daily basis.  It must have been a soul-crushing existence.  Nonetheless, he seemed to hide it rather well and when he killed himself so violently, the entire town reacted with shock and horror.

I remember feeling so angry at the time.  I harbored anger at him for not waiting two more years to get out and go live somewhere else where he would find acceptance.  I hated the students and townspeople who openly wept over his death, but had either complicity or blatantly caused it with their intolerance, their judgment, and their bullying.  I still feel sad when I think of him and the utter waste of his young life.  Even today, with all the progress that has occurred in regard to the acceptance of the LGBT community, teens who are lesbian, gay, transgendered or bisexual still have the highest rates of suicide among their peer groups. I continue to get angry at people who do not understand that being homosexual isn't bad or wrong or evil.  It just is.  Everyone should have the right to live his or her own life as he or she sees fit.  Everyone has the right to be loved, to love well and to live without recrimination, fear, and intolerance.

His death only reinforced for me my belief that all humanity is valid, worthy and beautiful.  We people come in all shapes, sizes, ideas, orientations, religions, colors and opinions and we all deserve respect, love, and tolerance.  We deserve acceptance, no matter what the details of our existences encompass.  As long as a person lives morally, treats other people with respect and affection, does nothing to harm another deliberately then he or she is a good person, and everything else about them doesn't really matter.  I wish more people in the world could see that.  We lose ourselves in trivial differences and fail to see the truth, the big picture of how humanity should peacefully co-exist.

Since his death, I've tried to provide support, affection and friendship to the LGBT people that have come and gone in my life. I've had several very good friends who have been homosexual as well as numerous students in the past who have been gay or lesbian. And I see it as my responsibility, my obligation to ensure that at the very least they know that one person loves and accepts them for who they are.  If I can help someone who feels isolated and alone feel connected and respected then I have made a difference and Corey didn't die in vain.

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