Religion, Family, and Gay Teen Suicides

via HuffPost Gay Voices, by Aaron Anson

It breaks my heart to read about yet another gay youth suicide. What's astonishing to me is that I know of three gay suicides in as many months just among my Facebook friends.

That's a whole lot, considering my relatively small number of friends. Granted, I don't know them all personally, but most of us share the common bonds of like-minded values and a respect for human life.

Current events have caused me to start thinking -- a little deeper than before -- about the senselessness of these tragedies.

As I listened to the "It Gets Better" message produced a month ago by Eric James Borges (who recently took his life), I could hear the pain of abandonment in his voice as he spoke about growing up in a deeply religious -- and deeply prejudiced -- home.

This appears to be a common thread among every gay suicide I've had to ponder. Deep in the fabric of the pain that pushes them to take their own lives is hate, more than likely 
"justified" by the misguided religious beliefs of others.

Most media attention tends to focus on peer bullying as a major factor, and I agree with that to an extent. But often overlooked is the impact of the hateful bullying that takes place right in our own homes.

Dogmatic religious beliefs are the most often used defense against acceptance of gays.

That argument lacks the most credibility and is the least tenable. It's hard to fathom a parent who despises and exudes contempt for their own child, but it's happening all the time.

I have the unfortunate privilege of hearing their stories almost daily, and it never gets any easier. The emails are from gay youths thrown into a reparative therapy of the worst kind: rejection by siblings and parents.

Many are left homeless on the street, with all family communications cut off. They're uninvited to family events, and parents feel that their actions are justified by religious dogma -- it's the Christian thing to do.

Rejection exacerbates the self-defeating nature of hate on a universal level, because it was most likely heterosexual relationships that procreated gay children: black or white, pharmacist or drug pusher, president or car thief.

The simple solution would be for "haters" to not procreate. As unrealistic as that is, it would prevent some hate on the secular level of human existence.

Most aren't willing to abstain from sex; it's a price they aren't willing to pay.

My cousin was a teenager when my family first learned he was gay, and you would have thought an airplane had crashed in our backyard.

The malicious, bigoted religious rhetoric that ensued stunk to the heavens. I'm certain it contributed to my remaining closeted for the next 20 years.

When I finally did come out, you would have believed Jesus himself had shown up in the backyard that time. Their rhetoric was condescending, venomous, and loaded with ill intent.

It felt like the weight of the world was upon my shoulders. I've since become immune to the dissent, but the pain that these gay youths endure from those supposedly closest to them is simply unimaginable, and it's because they've been indoctrinated with religious beliefs that condone hate.

There are no winners in this religion-driven massacre of human life. The loss of even just one life is a love story that will never be told. If gays (or others) need any justification for rejecting religion and hate-based teachings, it can be found within the family circle, long before the impact of society.

This burden of judgment and condemnation that awaits at home is horrendous and completely unbearable for many.

Families must accept that using language that dehumanizes gays does not make them virtuous -- and it cannot make their children straight -- contrary to what religious beliefs may have taught them. Even if they can't identify with what it's like to be gay, they can still love their gay son or daughter.


Read the rest

VIDEO: Holland Goes Way Beyond "It Gets Better" in Anti-Bullying PSA

via Queerty, text by Dan Avery

The Dutch Children’s Ombudsman, a governmental child-rights group in Holland is tackling bullying in a new PSA, and they’re not pussyfooting around.

In the above clip, created by media firm Lemon Scented Tea and directed by Anne de Clercq, we follow the story of Dave, a Dutch 16-year-old who endures daily beatings and harassment at school because he’s gay. It’s one of four videos created as part of the “Every child has the right to…” campaign that puts children’s rights in the spotlight.

What’s truly unique, though, is that these stories are true. In fact, that’s David himself you see from behind in the video. Queerty reader David Pfister, who brought the campaign to our attention, says, “the film it is shaking up Holland.”

We were pretty shaken up after watching it too.


See it here too

It Gets Better, Massachusetts Congressional Delegation

It Gets Better!

It Gets Better: Target Team Members

Check out Target's It Gets Better Video!

Does it get better? Bullying linked to long term negative mental health, HIV risk

via LGBTQ Nation, by Dana Rudolph

A popular anti-bullying campaign has been telling bullied teens “it gets better” — but the effects of past bullying often linger, according to new research.

The study, released Monday (May 16) in the May 2011 issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of School Health, reports that anti-LGBT bullying at school “is strongly linked” to negative mental health for its victims.

Among those risks are an increased frequency of suicide attempts and increased risk for engaging in behaviors that can lead to infection with STDs and HIV. The increased risks exist not only while the victim is in adolescence, but also in young adulthood.

Read the rest.

It Gets Better Because We Grow Stronger: An interview with leading gay men’s health expert Dr. Ron Stall

by Jim Pickett Director of Prevention Advocacy and Gay Men’s Health LifeLube.org/AIDS Foundation of Chicago

In 1981, severe illness in a group of young gay men caught the attention of federal public health officials who could not explain the cluster of rare, deadly cases of pneumonia. This ominous medical mystery is widely regarded as the start of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which continues to rage on every inhabitable corner of earth.

Over the past 30 years, HIV/AIDS in the U.S. has spread to many other populations, particularly low-income women of color and injection drug users. While no longer a singularly “gay disease,” gay, bisexual and transgender people remain severely impacted by HIV/AIDS in the U.S. For young gay, bi, and transgender youth of color, alarming rates of HIV rival those of some Sub-Saharan countries. What can we learn from the 30-year history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in order to forge a better, future response?

These are just some of the questions the AIDS Foundation of Chicago (AFC) is posing this year as it reflects on lessons learned from the past 30 years of HIV/AIDS. Chief among these questions is why, 30 years into the crisis, are rates of HIV highest among young gay men, particularly men of color? According to federal officials, rates of HIV among gay men are 50-times higher than any other group and, while new cases have plateaued for other groups, among gay/bi men and transgender, they continue to climb.

To help inform AFC’s 2012 strategic plan, I interviewed Dr. Ron Stall, Professor and Chair of the Department of Behavioral and Community Health Sciences in the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh, a leading HIV prevention expert. He began researching AIDS-related topics in 1984 on the AIDS Behavioral Research Project, one of the first longitudinal studies of AIDS risk-taking behaviors in the world.

Since that time he has published more than 140 peer-reviewed scientific papers on many different aspects of the AIDS epidemic, including research on determinants of risk-taking behaviors and HIV transmission, co-occurring epidemics, life-course issues important to AIDS-related risk-taking, and a portfolio of research on global AIDS issues. He is currently Co-Director of a Certificate Program in LGBT Health and is collaborating on several National Institutes of Health research projects focused on gay men’s health.

Ron and I recently had the opportunity to check in and talk about the needs of gay men and youth. Only by understanding and responding to the epidemic among gay youth and adults can efforts to end the epidemic in the U.S. have any chance of success. 

JIM: Your work concentrates on co-occurring health concerns that conspire to fuel the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Can you briefly describe this concept of “syndemics” and explain why it is so important to consider in terms of gay men's health and efforts to meet their HIV prevention needs?

RON: The term “syndemics” describes interacting and intertwining epidemics, or synergistic epidemics. Syndemics are found in many different human populations, but are very commonly found in populations that are at high risk for HIV. Syndemics research studies why HIV is so closely intertwined with epidemics of substance abuse, depression, violence and other psychosocial health problems. More important, syndemics research also studies how we can interrupt syndemic production by starting a larger health movement that works to lower risk for HIV by addressing multiple psychosocial health problems in a community. I’m part of a research group that has conducted a set of investigations into syndemic production among gay men, and we were able to show that epidemics of substance use, depression, childhood sexual abuse and violence victimization are intertwining and making each other worse and in the process raising risk for HIV transmission. Our study was the first to show that this phenomena exists among gay men, but this analysis has now been replicated in several different studies, including one among MSM in Thailand. One implication of our analysis is that there is a lot more to gay men’s health than a simple focus on HIV and that addressing these multiple health risks may work to lower HIV risk among gay male communities. 

There has been a lot of talk about bullying these days, thanks to the brilliant “It Gets Better” campaign. Do you see bullying as something that feeds into syndemic production? What kind of research do we have around bullying and health outcomes for gay men, or more broadly, for LGBT people? 

Once you buy the idea that syndemics exist among gay men, the next question would be why is that so? We think that a very important piece to this puzzle is that gay men not only suffer far greater rates of violence victimization as adolescents, but that nearly all young gay men watch schoolmates being publicly victimized for having the same sexual orientation that they do. This sets gay men up early on to have a sense of being different, of being less than, of not being deserving, of being alone – in short, for internalized homophobia at a very early age. And these experiences predispose young gay men to be more depressed, to have greater substance abuse profiles at a very early age, to have higher rates of having sex under the influence of alcohol or drugs and to suffer greater rates of violence victimization, each of which raise HIV risk profiles among young MSM. Dr. Mark Friedman in our group published an analysis to show the associations between the experience of violence victimization and bullying during adolescence and poorer health profiles – including HIV seropositivity – among adult gay men. We are conducting additional analyses from a separate cohort study to measure how the experiences of violence victimization at a young age predict syndemic production among middle-aged gay men.  

"It Gets Better" speaks to the transience of being harassed and bullied – that we won’t be in that situation all of our lives, so we basically just need to hang on. You just explained how bullying can have negative health outcomes for people, so while the bullying may end, the consequences can continue. But there is another side to this story – yes, it gets better, but you also get stronger. And coming out the other side of bullying can make people stronger, and more able to address challenges in their lives. This speaks to strength and resilience, which I know you have been thinking about. Tell us what we know about resilience and strength in terms of gay men's health and HIV prevention. 

While it is true that there are important health disparities that cluster and make each other worse among gay men, once you start looking for resilience to fight health problems among gay men, you start seeing it everywhere. For example, gay men may use more drugs than straight men, but for all of that drug use, we don’t have comparable increased rates of behaviors that look like addition. This suggests that there is an important, but unstudied, self-regulation process at work that men use to monitor their drug use and avoid addiction. And when gay men do get addicted to dangerous drugs such as tobacco and stimulants, we have very high rates of being able to resolve these addictions on our own.  

And, of course, there are many, many men who’ve enjoyed full sex lives for decades on end and have not become HIV seropositive, not to mention the large numbers of seropositive men who’ve led full, healthy and productive lives even while battling a serious viral infection. We also exhibit important strengths in the way that we’ve always managed to build families, communities and political movements in very unfriendly contexts. Once you start looking at the data this way, you could be excused for concluding that resilience and strength in the face of adversity may be the two most important characteristics that distinguish gay and heterosexual men. 

Why do you think we have focused so singularly on weaknesses and deficits? Why haven't we flipped this script and focused efforts on building the resilience of gay men, particularly toward improve their health? Why haven't we taken the collective wisdom of men - young and old - who have successfully avoided HIV infection to inform better HIV prevention responses? 

I think that our focus on deficits among gay men has to do with the long term effects of the shock of the discovery of the AIDS epidemic among gay men. We had this terrible new epidemic that seemed to miss most other populations. The questions of why we were so vulnerable to AIDS, and the study of our unique risk factors for this disease naturally followed. And, to be fair, this research frame has resulted in some important insights around HIV prevention and care.

That said, over time, it has also become clear that there are lots of men – indeed the majority of gay men – who’ve exhibited significant resiliencies when it has come to dealing with the HIV epidemic. The time has come to understand more about these resiliencies so that we can learn how better to respond to the many health problems affecting our community. Put another way, if we are interested in finding effective ways to treat substance abuse among gay men, are we better off studying men who became addicted or men who became addicted and quit on their own? Or men who use and don’t become addicted? Each group is important, but it may be that the men who resolved substance abuse on their own are the experts from whom we can learn the most valuable lessons. 

What are you currently doing to change the deficit dynamic, what can we look forward to? 

I’m working with a group of very smart colleagues to propose a theory of resilience among gay men, and to propose a research agenda to study strengths among gay men. There is an old saying that the most practical thing that one can do is to come up with a good theory. The time for a good theory to explain resiliencies among gay men – and make use of these strengths to promote health in our communities – is long overdue.

Next Monday AIDS Foundation of Chicago invites columnist and “It Gets Better” creator Dan Savage to its spring luncheon to discuss the role bullying plays in HIV infections – and what we can do about it. Please consider joining us.

VIDEO: Apple's It Gets Better

The Real Story Behind Gay Bullying in American Schools

via Salon.com, by Thomas Rogers

When 18-year-old Rutgers student Tyler Clementi jumped off the George Washington Bridge on Sept. 22, he meant to kill himself -- he probably didn't mean to spark a national uproar. But Clementi's death, along with a series of ensuing gay teen suicides, has prompted an intense conversation over the problem of anti-gay bullying. Dan Savage's "It Gets Better Project," a video project aimed at gay teens, has solicited heartbreaking contributions from everyone from President Obama to Tim Gunn (who admitted his own early suicide attempt) to the employees of Google.

But gay suicide is hardly a new problem -- and, by most accounts, homophobia is on the decline in American culture. So why are we suddenly so concerned? As Stuart Biegel, a professor at the UCLA School of Law, explains in his new book, "The Right to be Out," anti-gay prejudice remains a pervasive problem in American schools. Despite tremendous legal strides over the past two decades, gay students are still punished more severely than their straight counterparts, their pleas for help are often ignored, and, most surprisingly, many LGBT teachers still feel enormous pressure to remain in the closet for fear of reprisal from parents.

Salon spoke to Biegel over the phone about the current state of gay bullying laws, what parents can do if their kids are attacked and the flaws of the "It Gets Better" campaign.

Read the interview.

Pixar's It Get's Better - sooo beautiful

It Does Get Better - But Not Because of YOU

"When you grow up, you little depressed gay teenagers, when you grow up you can deal with people like me. I'll judge you. Don't worry. You don't have to have the homophobes judge you, because we will."

Obama Tells Teens: "It Gets Better"

Via Whitehouse.gov - Some words of hope by President Obama for Dan Savage's It Gets Better project. Now if we could only get him to strike down institutionalized discrimination with DADT and ENDA, then we'd be in business..

Bullying Only One Part of Violence Against Gay Youth

The nation has been totally swept up in Dan Savage's "It Gets Better" project, but Gender Just is skeptical about how much better it gets:

We have seen an overly simplistic and un-nuanced reaction to the recent violence; from Dan Savage telling young people to wait it out until "it gets better" and from Kathy Griffin declaring that passing Gay Marriage and overturning Don't Ask Don't Tell would somehow stop the violence in our lives, we have found this response to be as misguided, irrelevant, and offensive as the conservative LGBT Movement itself.

While youth violence is a very serious issue in our schools, the real bullies we face in our schools take the form of systemic violence perpetrated by the school system itself: a sex education that ignores queer youth and a curriculum that denies our history, a militarized school district with cops in our schools, a process of privatization which displaces us, increasing class sizes which undermine our education and safety. The national calls to end the violence against queer youth completely ignore the most violent nature of our educational experience.

Read the entire post at Gender Just.

Be patient and tough; some day this pain will be useful to you

From the It Gets Better campaign