Sometimes These Cuts are Deeper Than They Seem

This past week has been difficult for American GLBTs and the extended GLBT community in general.  I am deeply saddened to hear of the recent suicides of middle and high school students Asher Brown, Billy Lucas, Seth Walsh, Tyler Wilson and university student Tyler Clementi.  The primary known justification for ending their own lives?  In-school bullying and harassment by their peers.

The question might arise in your minds though: Why would someone who had the support of his family not report the bullying?  That answer, though simple to write out, is maddeningly complex. 

Imagine you’re different in a way that’s usually viewed in a negative sense by most of society.  You spend years even just contemplating telling your family in the first place.  It’s one thing to preach acceptance and quite another to practice it when given the opportunity within your own family.  This is what I feared most about coming out to my father.  He was such a wonderful, thoughtful person who spent time with his children and was as much a friend as a disciplinarian, and I didn’t want that to change if I could help it.

Coming out is a process that has far-reaching effects.  It’s not just about telling your family.  It’s about including your extended relatives and, in some instances, your religious community.  You can’t really bring your significant other to a family gathering or invite them to Sunday morning services if you’re not being completely honest with those around you, can you?  So, in many ways, you already feel like you’re a burden to the people you care about most. 

My father once told me in the months leading up to my wedding about how difficult his own experiences with coming to terms with my sexuality were.  Not only did he have to make sure he was treating me as he had before the news, he now also had to be constantly on guard and prepared to defend me against every numb skull who decided to make a derisive comment at any moment.  It was exhausting, but worth it in the end, he admitted.

In my own mind, I justified my silence as a means of protecting my family.  It was my choice to be open about myself (although I would argue that my being gay in the first place was anything but a choice on my part), and choices have consequences.  This is how I justified the four years of taunts, pranks and physical bullying I never reported to any school official or breathed a word of to my family.  I suffered physically and emotionally, and I suffered alone.  While I had the emotional support of my family throughout high school, there were still times when I felt depressed and, yes, even suicidal.  There were days I feigned illness to avoid having to go to school and face my peers.  I don’t agree with or advocate suicide as an appropriate response to school bullying, but I guess in my own way I can understand why, in a moment of emotional despair, these boys chose suicide over the option of waking up and having to endure one more hostile encounter with a classmate.

Now, after months of being happily married and working a job I find fulfilling and challenging, I look back on my time in high school in a state of mild disbelief.  Do I occasionally still come across people who make unsolicited verbal judgments about me based on my sexual orientation?  All the time.  But the level of emotional despair I felt in high school is a fleeting memory now, and I am a stronger person today as a result of it.

I only wish the boys who’ve already been lost had known that from the outset.