Thought for the Day

[bcholmes]

The last few weeks have seen a flurry of stories about the supposed rise in queer suicides, particularly by youth and young adults. But while the deaths are undoubtedly tragic, they are by no means unusual and have not increased in number; they are simply being reported on more often. The exact reasons why the press would, at this time, take such an interest in queer suicides are the subjects of a future piece. For now, I want to complicate the narratives and stories about queer youth that are being spun in the media and in our cultural discourse.

It is necessary to pay attention, as we have been doing, to why queer youth in particular are more than four times as likely to commit suicide than their straight peers. It is even more important to pay attention to how we deploy and even, on occasion, distort their reasons for doing so. Attempts to provide both reasons and solutions for the problem are often shamelessly manipulative and display a rank ignorance of the many multiple contexts in which queer youth live and die.

Take, for instance, the short but hyperbolic video by Sarah Silverman, where she says: "Dear America, When you tell gay Americans that they can't serve their country openly or marry the person that they love, you're telling that to kids, too. So don't be fucking shocked and wonder where all these bullies are coming from that are torturing young kids and driving them to kill themselves ... because they learned it from watching you."

[...]

No. Those are not the reasons why queer children and youth kill themselves. In 2009, 11-year-old Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover killed himself in Massachusetts after being taunted, on a daily basis, for being gay. Walker-Hoover did not identify as gay. He lived in a state where gay marriage has been legal since 2004.

There are, of course, several instances of queer-identified youth killing themselves after being bullied on account of their sexuality. And, certainly, the extreme right's hostility to gay marriage or gays in the military does create a climate where there is at least a segment of society used to engaging in hateful rhetoric about queers.

But none of this justifies a logistical leap to the point of arguing that allowing gays to get married or join the army will somehow make people hate queers, or people they think of as queers, less. When a queer gets bashed, the basher isn't thinking, "I hope this person isn't the married kind because THEY would be all right." The issue facing us is not how to make the bigots love us, but the bigotry they express. Which is to say: twisting and turning gay marriage into a solution for queer suicides is an abhorrent tactic to bolster the cause of gay marriage, on which there is no consensus in the LGBTQ community. The simple truth is that people hate us and will cause us harm. They may hate us because they secretly see themselves in us and are terrified of what that means, or they may hate us simply because they see us as the evil to be wiped out. But they hate us and they will cause us harm. The fact that we might be able to marry will not make a bit of difference to such deep-seated hatred.

[...]

Chicago has the most militarized school district in the country and there is tremendous pressure on the schools' minority populations to join the army. The DREAM Act, which would give a chance at citizenship to undocumented youth brought here by their parents before the age of six, has a military option: students can enlist for two years in order to gain a path to citizenship. The districts' military schools already heavily recruit African-American and Latino/a students, building on a prevalent idea that students of color are more likely to need discipline that they supposedly lack in their families. In addition, military service is offered as an economic ladder, promising upward mobility to these students. Students also face tremendous violence in their school neighborhoods: In 2008, more than 500 schoolchildren were shot in Chicago.

When I raise these issues in relation to queer youth, I am often told that these are not queer-specific. But queer youth are also undocumented, at risk of being shot and live in a district where they are preyed upon by the aggressive recruiting tactics of the military. All of these circumstances are a result of the violence of the state, which promises liberation through the possibility of being killed but will not guarantee that students might go to school without the same possibility. Being harassed for being queer only compounds matters for these students.

There have been cases of undocumented youth committing suicide for fear of being deported. And surely it is also possible that some of the suicides we hear of come about because a combination of poverty and lack of support in schools. Yet, sociologists and cultural critics rarely acknowledge poverty as a cause of death while "sexual orientation/gender identity" is a cause that they find easy to grasp. When the undocumented are discovered to also be queer, the media focuses on the idea that they face the possibility of violence in their countries of origin, bolstering the myth that a state so violent as to refuse legitimacy to these youth can actually now provide protection from the presumed repression of another state. But students, like anyone else, do not live in vacuums where only their sexual identities define their existence. They are acted upon by multiple issues. More importantly, they are also capable of political will and agency. Would queer students want to join a military that will not allow them to serve openly? For that matter, would they even want to serve at all?

[...]

The point is that queer bullying cannot operate in a vacuum. A school that is hostile to queer youth is not likely to be safe for many of its other students. The logic that queer suicides have to do entirely with sexual identity erases the complicated realities of what it means to be an LGBT or queer youth, and it turns queer youth into apolitical people who just need to be rescued.

— "Queer suicides: Complicate the issue"

Long excerpt. But I really like the points it was making.