Gay teen suicides: Harassment's price

The story I’m about to tell you is a personal one, but it is, tragically, not even close to being uncommon.

Five gay teenagers have killed themselves in the past three weeks alone, including a 15-year-old student in Greensburg, Ind., and a 19-year-old just last Friday.

This is a national problem of epidemic proportions.

My parents found out I was gay in a suicide note. Needless to say, this was devastating to them and to me. After years of serious bullying in high school for being gay — despite the fact that I wasn’t even sure if I was gay yet and wasn’t even close to coming out of the closet — I had developed pretty serious self-esteem and depression issues that I still struggle with to this day as a result of harsh bullying.

These recent suicides point to a larger problem I experienced firsthand: We have a very serious gay bullying problem in this country.

I was bullied in high school for being gay. Other students would play a game where they would shove their friends into me in the hallway as a joke, as if even brushing by me in the hallway was repugnant and disgusting.

On another occasion, a student walked out of the classroom we were in rather than work with me during a group project. The teacher saw it and did nothing. The same student also mentioned me being dead on numerous occasions in the same class to his friends while the teacher was in the room. I’m not sure that the teacher heard him, but I do know that he knew something was going on.

Again, he did nothing.

I anonymously e-mailed the administration on at least two occasions to tell them that the school was not safe for gay people and that I felt threatened there.

They responded by saying that my high school didn’t have a gay problem and that they treat all students the same, whether they are “Polish, white, or Asian.”

Years later, the same high school that I was bullied at was embroiled in a law suit filed by the ACLU on behalf of a lesbian teenager who was denied approval to attend the prom in a tux with her girlfriend. Clearly, they do not treat their students equally.

These are not unfortunate, but limited occurrences that happened a few times to a single gay student. They are facts of life for gay students in high schools across our country.

I went through this harassment every day I was in that high school, and it drove me to attend a boarding school for gifted and talented students to get away from the constant bullying. At that boarding school, I found dozens of other gay students that escaped from similar circumstances at their home high schools. This is not a limited problem. This is affecting schools throughout our state and across our country.

Our schools have summarily failed to protect gay students from severe harassment and bullying. Schools have a legal and moral obligation to take action to protect their students from harassment, and schools that have failed to do this need to face consequences.

Young people are dying because of this failure. Five have died in the past month alone.

Let’s make their deaths at least serve as a catalyst for making the lives of gay students in schools across our country safer.


E-mail: zammerma@indiana.edu