Bullying of gay students--what's the solution?

'Heartbreaking' is the word that comes to mind with regard to last week's suicide of a Rutgers University freshman. Tyler Clementi leapt to his death from the George Washington Bridge, prompted it appears, by the public humiliation he received at the hands of his roommate and another student. They hid a camera in the dorm room Tyler and his roommate shared, recorded a sexual encounter Tyler had with another male, and streamed it, live, to the web.

The incredible cruelty of such a vicious trick takes my breath away. Tyler was not just outed and embarrassed, he was violated. And thanks to modern technology, he knew that his humiliation was guaranteed never to really disappear. I wonder if that might have even been the worst part, the part that drove him to think he simply couldn't get through this, because it would never really end.

And then, in California, a 13-year-old has just died after ten days on life support--his attempt to hang himself from a tree didn't succeed at first, leaving him in a coma. There was another who shot himself in Texas, another suicide in Indiana, all boys who decided they could no longer take the persecution being meted out to them by classmates because they were gay.

I have never known anyone who is gay that didn't really struggle as a teenager. To come to a level of self-acceptance and self-love required time, and that these young men didn't have more of it is a terrible tragedy and a great loss.

The thing I wonder about is, were these kids and so many others like them persecuted because they are gay, or because they are vulnerable? Is it really the homosexuality that motivates their tormentors, or are they just motivated to inflict harm and suffering, and gay kids are easy targets? Perhaps it's a meaningless distinction, but I'm not so sure.

If it really is the homosexuality that triggers the bullying, then the stock answer is that more education is needed, about both homosexuality and 'tolerance.' The reasoning is that these kids act out of ignorance and fear. That they need to be taught to see homosexuality and gay people in a different light. Once they do, their behavior changes.

But I'm not convinced kids are all that ignorant. I think some of them are just vicious. The capacity to be cruel exists in all of us, but to a greater degree in some than others. A lot of bullying goes on in schools that is _not_ targeted at gays, which supports the conclusion that the motivation is simply sadism--pleasure in someone else's suffering. Gay kids, or those who are struggling to come to terms with whether or not they are, are simply better targets than virtually everyone else, because their 'issue' tends to isolate them. Although it's changing some, confiding in parents or friends is so much more difficult because it requires disclosure the child is often not ready to make.

I wonder sometimes if kids are crueler now than they used to be, or if the popular culture just gives them so many more examples to emulate and technology gives them so many more ways to stick the knife in deeper. Either way, I don't know that the conventional wisdom--that the answer is to 'educate' them into being more accepting of or comfortable with homosexuality--is the most effective solution at their age. I taught high school for many years, so I know that it's something that makes many kids, particularly boys, _un_comfortable, and growing up is what dissipates that discomfort, in most cases. The important point is that the vast majority of these students who were squeamish about homosexuality were not out tormenting kids they thought were gay.

There are people, both gay and non-gay, who think the only acceptable end goal is for everyone to be okay with it--to regard homosexuality as inherently 'normal' and to be in favor of gay marriage, and so on. To that end, some of them label anyone who doesn't/isn't as a "hater" or a bigot.

I think that's unrealistic and unproductive thinking, though, and not the best line of offense when it comes to preventing more tragedies like Tyler Clementi's. We need to teach kids instead, that the criteria that determine their treatment of others has nothing whatever to do with their personal feelings. It has everything to do with kindness, decency, and honor.

You don't have to approve of another person's lifestyle, or be comfortable and non-judgmental about all their preferences in order to choose not to bully them. You choose not to because you're a decent human being and decent human beings don't do that to other human beings. But, how to instill that conviction in kids who didn't incorporate it at home, I don't know.