It’s attitudes like the one in this editorial that lead gay youth to not feel secure. Yes, God forbid that one young man’s death actually leads to a push for a more gay-inclusive, gay-accepting, society.
Big ass editorial in the Rutgers school paper, the Daily Targum, about how upset the paper is that Tyler Clementi’s recent decent has to led to an outcry about the recent spate of gay youth suicides nationwide. Here’s a taste of the editorial:
The death of University student Tyler Clementi might have been properly mourned if it were not for the massive rallies and aggressive news coverage that altered the nature of the situation. The truth is that an 18-year-old boy killed himself – he was a student just like the rest of us, someone just trying to receive an education. Yet people’s relentless agendas took his death and turned it into a cause based on false pretenses.
We did not know Tyler. It was barely three weeks into his first year at the University, and most of his neighbors in his residence hall barely knew him. Turning his death into a push for gay rights is a fallacy. Homosexuality is not the only reason for which people kill themselves. In this case, it might have pushed Clementi over the edge, but the fact that he was gay should by no means turn his death into a march for safe spaces. These groups want to be heard. They want the attention. They want their agendas to shine in the limelight.
Let me take a wild guess. The editorial writer is a conservative, straight, and a guy.
As for those horrible activists “wanting their agendas to shine in the limelight”… man what an asshole. I nearly forgot what it was like to be in college, and to have a Republican man-child writing for the school paper.
What Republican man-child doesn’t get is that had Tyler been straight, had he been filmed having sex with a girl, and had that film made its way online, he might have been freaked, he might have even still committed suicide – maybe. But the chances are much greater of all that happening when the victim is gay.
When you’re straight and the boys in college see a vid of you screwing a girl, you’re the BMOC. When you’re a fag and it happens, the entire school mocks you, points at you, and laughs. It’s just not funny when a guy f-cks a girl. It’s funny as hell when a dude does it to another dude and the entire world gets to watch, and laugh.
And what about your parents? Has GOP man-child come out to his parents as straight? How about to his aunts and uncles, to his cousins, to his childhood friends, to the people on his floor, to the lady at the front desk of his dorm, and to the guy he buys his coffee from on the way to class (let alone every single stranger he sees on his way to class)? I’m gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that after having been filmed having sex, straight kids don’t need to worry about coming out as “straight” to every single human being they’re going to see for the next few months, if not years. Gay kids do. And while straight kids won’t be berated, beaten up, killed, and disowned for being straight – gay kids will.
That’s why what happened to Tyler was such a big deal to so many people across the country. They could relate. They could relate to the shame, the embarrassment, the mockery, and ultimately the feeling that you just can’t go on. Those feelings don’t usually come from being straight. They come far too often from being gay.
What a lame ass editorial for a school paper to be writing at a school where a kid just killed himself. How about welcoming the awareness that’s been raised as a result of this death? The small good that might come from something so bad.
And finally, if the jerk who wrote this editorial thinks that the national attention, sorrow, and rage has been orchestrated by organizations with an agenda, well, then he’s not a very good reporter either. 123,959 people haven’t joined this Facebook page because some activist organization told them to.
