Horrible story I saw earlier today. John Aravosis at Americablog has a very heartfelt and accurate commentary on this sad story. I’ll post an excerpt and and a link to his full post. I couldn’t agree with him more…
This is the second young gay suicide in the press that I’ve seen this week. I like to think things have changed since I was their age, but it seems that maybe they really haven’t….
A horrific story. 18 year old Tyler Clementi, a freshman at Rutgers University in New Jersey, reportedly jumped off a bridge to his death after his roommate secretly set up spy cameras in his dorm room, filmed him making out with another guy, and then posted the videos on Twitter. (Someone set up a Facebook page in his memory.)
This is what it means to be gay in America in 2010. I think a lot of people who aren’t gay, and even many who are, like to think that we’re all rich and live in big welcoming cities where being gay is about as big a handicap as being left-handed. We say we want our civil rights, but I think a lot of people think we’ve got things pretty good, and behind closed doors, they probably call us whiners too.
And I’m sure our lives are pretty good, and just as good as straight people’s, except for the part about not being able to get married, have children in many states, keep a job – oh yeah, and that nagging desire to kill ourselves because so many of us grew up thinking we were horrible people who would never be loved, or find love.
I think it’s this kind of attitude that leads people to lecture us about “keeping the long view in mind” with regards to getting our civil rights. I wrote in response, just yesterday, “to paraphrase Keynes, in the long view we’re all dead.”
Gay civil rights isn’t a “social issue.” It’s our lives. A lot of us, myself included, grew up thinking we’d never see the age of 30 because we’d have to kill ourselves once people found out we were gay. A lot of people have no idea how hard it is to grow up being gay. To grow up thinking God made you wrong. Thinking you will never find love. Thinking your own family and friends will disown you once they know who you really are. And hearing the President of the United States – one of the “good” guys – say that you don’t deserve the right to marry the person you love.
Lost in the 21st Century 
Outrageous. The clowns who filmed and posted the film of Mr. Clementi cannot possibly have first given ANY thought of “suppose it was me?”.
Seems to me simple human kindness, or “do unto others…” could have stopped this atrocity, except religions seem to care more about the “crime” of being gay than the real (& I suspect God’s) crime of being cruel.
It will be interesting if there is a prosecution; at a minimum it was an invasion of privacy and/or filming/taping someone without their knowledge.
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