Rutgers University Student Commits Suicide after Roommate Allegedly Webcasts Him Having Sex

Here's the NYT Article:

Private Moment Made Public, Then a Fatal Jump

First, I'm absolutely appalled by this, especially this being my alma mater. Just feel so terrible that a college freshman was so taken advantage of, especially in such a vulnerable time.

Second, does anyone see this as being a potentially big case in the world of cyber-bullying?

oh god this story is so fucking awful

college freshmen are so vulnerable, they're right at the hinge of their old highschool self-censorship and trying new stuff out, and to have that exposed in this way is excruciating. you just wish the right friend had been there to stop his roommates, and to stop him. It's a sickening story.

jesus. awful.

The bullying continues even after his death, as one of Tucker Carlon's Special Education and Discount Conservatorium crew at "The Daily Caller" shits out an op-ed.

I won't even both to link to the execrable v0x d4y, but as Roy Edroso says about him, "Is someone holding a World's Biggest Asshole contest with a huge cash prize?"

omg. any chance we can fling alex knepper in jail too? that is vile.

wow really glad someone posted alex knepper's reaction to this event itt

really worthwhile opinion that we needed to be alerted to

can anyone point me towards some sweet anonymous comments on the websites of local newspapers?

j0rdan otm

Yeah, really vile.

What kills me about this whole thing, and Knepper hits on it a couple of times, is that in situations like these, its all "Hey! Gays shouldn't expect to be treated any differently than anyone else!" So, its "people have sex tapes distributed all the damn time about them. Man up! Its no big deal!"

But when it comes time for marriage, etc., "Oh NO! GAYS AREN'T LIKE EVERYONE ELSE!!!!"

Its a particularly vulnerable time when ANYONE begins to explore their own sexuality away from home, and particularly so when that sexuality is still regarded as abnormal or aberrant by a majority of people. So, yeah - the fact that he was gay or at least trying out a gay sex life at such a young age, made it that much more fraught with emotions.

I have been talking (re: ranting and ranting) to max about this and how many things about it are so deeply upsetting to me as a gay man

hope these fuckers go to jail

hopefully where someone can upload webcam footage of their anal rape

tbh, even with a corrupt/fallible court system, I don't see how they can possibly avoid going to jail

jesus shakey

xp: uh thanks for that, Shakey; if there's one thing this situation needs it's more brutalization and degradation

eh I'm in a bad mood today

I understand, bad moods make me wish anal rape on everyone around me

wait, no they don't

I'd really like to be as optimistic about their chances of doing time, but I don't know.

xps eh in that case no prob dude!

But sheesh, this kids twitter feed where he's all OMG MY ROOMMATES MAKIN OUT WITH A DUDE, like the fact that people still feel this sick repulsion to something that is, to me, so commonplace and not-exceptional and just not even notable. SO WHAT? And then let's exploit this situation and show everyone else and laugh about it

I understand, bad moods make me wish anal rape on everyone around me

afaik everyone around me is not videotaping other people's sex acts in an attempt to humiliate them but thx for strawmanning

Like, Rutgers has SO MUCH pro-queer positivity that it crushes me to see that this happened before he was able to find some support

Unless the kid's family pleads for leniency, they pretty much unambiguously committed a crime with a minimum 5-year jail term, regardless of whether you consider it a hate crime or not. I don't see any justification (outside of plea-bargaining, which would suck, but then again what exactly would be their leverage for bargaining? "We promise not to broadcast any more video of people unknowingly having sex on camera to our friends, plus we'll do PSAs to troubled teens who might do this"?) for them not doing some amount of jail time.

xp: are you sure "strawman" is the accurate term there? last time I checked, intentional hyperbole wasn't the same thing as strawmanning someone

Like, Rutgers has SO MUCH pro-queer positivity that it crushes me to see that this happened before he was able to find some support

Dude, I know. It was that way when I was there 15 years ago, and I can only imagine its gotten stronger and better established since then.

So fucking pissed about this. Kid never got a chance to be a person on his own terms before his douche roommate ridiculed him and made him feel even more awkward than an 18 year old trying things out for the first time does.

They'll have to register as sex offenders probably.

xp: are you sure "strawman" is the accurate term there? last time I checked, intentional hyperbole wasn't the same thing as strawmanning someone

here at the EC Comics School of Ironic Punishment we have no time for semantics

bad moods
read that as "bad mods"

anyone read max's tumblr post on this? he might be tired of discussing it, idk, but I thought it was interesting

Can you post it here?

it's really kind of incidental to the actual event

What makes me the most upset is the attitudes with which these actions were committed. It wasn't even malice, it was this stupid novel amusement! I want to scream at these kids SO FUCKING MUCH that you haven't the slightest clue what it's like to be a gay teen, to be called a fucking faggot, to be the school weirdo, to have your parents not accept it, etc etc. Being a gay teen is an entirely different animal, and you are stupid and naive, and you destroyed a life. It's too late. The end.

X-post - its impossible for a person whose being fits within the norm to understand what its like to be outside the norm. A joke to some - and yeah, sexuality can and probably should be joked about in a healthy way - is not one to others, especially when you're coming from such a different experience.

It's like kissing a dude gets thrown down to the level of picking your nose or something, like it's this huge lolworthy faux pas

this is horrifying. tbh the biggest thing im feeling about it (other than great sympathy for the victim) is the depressing reminder that people are tremendously callous and ignorant about how they affect others. i am not howling for the blood of the perpetrators, but mostly because they are symbolic terrifying examples of how detatched and unfeeling we can be as a species.

DAMNIT I AM SO FUCKING ANGRY RIGHT NOW, FUCK

The thing that pisses me off is that both of the perpetrators are minorities; they should know how shit like this can hurt someone.

A lot of us are. There's been a lot of alumni traffic this morning. Rutgers Pres. McCormick needs to do something more than issue a bs politically correct letter. Step the fuck up. Some messed up shit went down on YOUR watch, dude. DO SOMETHING. ANYTHING. Just SOMETHING.

The thing that pisses me off is that both of the perpetrators are minorities; they should know how shit like this can hurt someone.

Well, there's no predicting who poorly people can behave when given an easy target.

HOW poorly

god help us if we really need a rolling gay teen violence thread...

http://feministing.com/2010/09/30/youth-suicides-andrew-shirvell-and-americas-tolerance-of-anti-lgbt-hate/

but this is not the only one of these incidents within the past couple weeks (alfred brought this up yesterday)

I cannot believe that Shirvell fuck still has a job after that story broke. Thirteen year olds. jesus christ.

that alex knepper article is shameful. there may be an argument about whether bullying of this sort constitutes a hate-crime, but knepper's article doesn't make that argument -- or at least doesn't make it well.

i've been thinking about what this young man's parents are going through now.

every parent involved here is in hell right now

one set lost their child, the other two sets have just discovered they raised amoral monsters

there's a huge problem of authority figures at school not wanting to deal with gay bullying, and i think most of them find it easy to pretend that shit like this doesn't happen because it's easy to ignore things that happen in hallways in between classes and at the bust stops & shit -- and of course a principal or assistant principal is gonna sit there and go "well, i have bigger things to deal with than bullying. bullying happens in schools." but i'm not sure how many instances of gay teens -- or teens that are mocked for being "gay" even if they aren't -- killing themselves it's gonna take for this to be a crisis that is systematically addressed

there may be an argument about whether bullying of this sort constitutes a hate-crime, but knepper's article doesn't make that argument -- or at least doesn't make it well.

i mean its more disgusting that something like this happens and someone's first thought is "how DARE they call this a hate crime! what an injustice! i must write about this"

exactly

& i think something as simple as schools being really diligent about eradicating gay slurs ("fag" being the predominant one of course) and punishing kids that don't follow those rules would be a big first step towards getting this fixed

i find it really hard to blame 13 or 14 year olds -- it's so easy to fall into the mob mentality at that age -- i never would've bullied a gay kid (thankfully our community was liberal enough where this didn't happen) but i used "fag" often as a casual insult & i'm not sure i would've been the one to stand up and stop a bullying if it did happen

xp
i work for a book publisher that publishes a fairly well-known anti-gun control book. every time there's a media-reported shooting, at a school or college especially, sales tick up dramatically.

one set lost their child, the other two sets have just discovered they raised amoral monsters

I dunno, obviously this is horrific and the people involved in this are arseholes of the highest order but the assumption that they aren't tearing themselves up with guilt about this is a bit weird. It doesn't really seem to take into account the psychologies of bullying - "it was a joke, I didn't realise he'd take it like THAT". Bullies playing to a crowd often only think about the crowd reaction.

yeah, the victim is just the means to an end for someone in that situation. but what a fucked up thing to think was amusing, i wasn't an angel at school to a lot of others, but how does something lke that cross your mind as an amusement?

being IN COLLEGE and thinking that this is in anyway acceptable is unfathomable

My response to this story has inspired a lot of deliberation (crosspost to the gay thread).

this has to be doubly bad for the parents whose kids hadn't come out to them yet

i haven't seen anything about whether clementi was out or not tho

I dunno, obviously this is horrific and the people involved in this are arseholes of the highest order but the assumption that they aren't tearing themselves up with guilt about this is a bit weird. It doesn't really seem to take into account the psychologies of bullying - "it was a joke, I didn't realise he'd take it like THAT". Bullies playing to a crowd often only think about the crowd reaction.

I am specifically talking about the mindset that leads you into doing shit like this, not remorse felt afterwards when the target kills himself. I think that that type of playing to the crowd IS being an amoral monster.

Like yes, after the fact it's very easy to show remorse and say "I'm so sorry I did that" but why weren't you thinking about the pain and hurt you were inflicting upon the poor kid while you were doing it? At what point do you go "oh yeah it's totally cool to be a completely soulless cunt to this person"?

I am specifically talking about the mindset that leads you into doing shit like this

sadly it's a pretty common mindset, that of people who think their right to play malicious pranks on others overrides their right to be upset or hurt about it. can totally imagine the post-facto self-justification - "but i didn't mean it! it was just a joke!". that can fuck off.

bullies not known for self-reflection

these two kids and their parents could be feeling just about anything right now, from regret to embarrassment to some kind of self-righteous not-my-fault-ism. we really don't know and speculation is probably not wise.

i really do wonder about the (gender) dynamic between the two of them tho. who was trying to impress who? who was the ringleader? whose idea was it?

yeah, in my view it is both amoral, monstrous behavior and behavior that is begun lightly, unthinkingly

i'm also hoping that what seems to have been a spate in gay teen suicides of late really is just coincidence, or greater levels of reportage. the stories - plural! about the 13-year-olds who killed themselves are just awful. a curse on "related stories" on news sites and the way you can click through this endless parade of depressing stories.

hope these fuckers go to jail

― crude interloper of a once august profession (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, September 30, 2010 4:51 PM (55 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

hopefully where someone can upload webcam footage of their anal rape

― crude interloper of a once august profession (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, September 30, 2010 4:52 PM (55 minutes ago)

awesome comments, makes me feel hopeful for the future of humanity

xpost J0rdan, From the NYT article it does sound like Clementi played his personal life very close to the chest. I hope his parents knew beforehand...but yeah, awful for them if they didn't.

The thing I can't get over is that these are freshmen in College. I mean, immaturity is immaturity and it doesn't go away in college, but still, the roommate's stunt just reads as total middle school crap. "Let's do this thing in secret to completely humiliate this other person that doesn't fit in". It's just so awful.

Hurts to think about the moment of realization for Clementi. I just hate that he obv felt there wasn't a way for him to live in spite of all of that pain.

Ugh.

I think that that type of playing to the crowd IS being an amoral monster.

I'm a bit wary of phrases like "amoral monster" but I agree there's something sociopathic about the thought processes that lead you to do something like this in the first place. But...

sadly it's a pretty common mindset, that of people who think their right to play malicious pranks on others overrides their right to be upset or hurt about it. can totally imagine the post-facto self-justification - "but i didn't mean it! it was just a joke!"

^^^ This is also true, you see gradations of it everywhere. Especially in the first year of college/university, not to mention all over the internet. I'm appalled and disgusted that this has happened, but I'm not surprised.

i really do wonder about the (gender) dynamic between the two of them tho. who was trying to impress who? who was the ringleader? whose idea was it?

from what i gather, the fact that the girl was released on recognizance whereas the guy had to post bail indicates much less culpability for her? and she's been charged so that she can testify against him? idk how the legalities work.

where is the dude that Clementi was taped making out with, I wonder

well, their chances of getting done on a charge of taping someone having sex w/o consent and broadcasting look high to me on first glance. and the chance of either of them being sexually assaulted by a fellow inmate or guard within the time of that sentence guideline is pretty high too! hooray.

xp interesting lex thx

I don't know if I'd call these two "amoral monsters." I tend to reel when someone's called a monster; it shuts down conversation.

I'm appalled and disgusted that this has happened, but I'm not surprised.

the more i think about it, the more surprised i am that it hasn't happened MORE, which is terrible.

(on a side note, i can never get over the system of making students share ROOMS - not civilised imo)

I'm also wondering whether these deaths so close together represent a "spike" or are reporters getting more scrupulous. Even in gay Miami, crime reports will leave it to the imagination when you read about two guys assaulted while walking home.

it was definitely the roommate's idea -- this hasn't been explicitly spelled out, but obv the guy had to go somewhere while clementi was in the room with the dude, and it seems like the girl's room was that place

insofar as she didn't do anything to stop the kid, but it seems like she wasn't implicit in the idea or the execution

bullies not known for self-reflection

it's true but something about this statement feels so frustratingly inadequate.

re: the girl - basically the dude used her computer while his roommate had asked for time alone (and used it to essentially sexually assault him). whether she came up with the idea, just stood by and didn't stop it, or even had little or no knowledge of what he was doing, we don't know.

fwiw the kid's friends are already trying to absolve him from any malice or wrongdoing

http://gawker.com/5652167/students-say-roommate-had-no-intention-of-spying-on-tyler-clementi

i think the fact that she was released upon recognizance and he had to pay bail is prob pertinent in assessing levels of involvement

xp: He closed the window after sending out broadcast messages stating "HEY LOOK AT MY ROOMMATE HOOKING UP WITH A DUDE"? That doesn't add up.

it's also "nice" to see this being reported with the characteristic tact and sensitivity that the media in 2010 is known for. digging up the dude's profile and photos on gay hook-up sites is nagl, to put it mildly.

"just wanted to check on my room with my remote cam when my roommate asked for private time"

suspect...

yeah i mean all of that is bullshit xp

yeah i mean that's the worst "excuse" you could've possibly come up with

See, it's a plausible story if he'd checked to make sure strange older dude wasn't stealing his shit, saw the sexing and went "OHHHH" and shut everything down.

Sending out tweets and posting webcam links is where that story falls down.

also doing it TWICE, and i'm sure one of the stories i read said that he tried to do it to another student.

i think part & parcel of living in a dorm is that people are going to go into your room at the behest of your roommate -- you have to be a paranoid schizo (or, really, just a lying asshole) to turn on your webcam to "make sure" that nothing was being stolen as a precaution

i think "broadcasting it to the internet" is where the story falls apart

i am kind of wondering who the hookup dude is tho tbh

god this poor kid. not to overgeneralize wildly but i was a string player as a kid. i knew dozens of kids like this over the years. it's an inconsequential thing to latch on to, given the circumstances, but those pictures of him with a violin are hitting me kind of hard r/n

Well, that is entirely dependent upon the sketchiness of the people you bring back to your dorm room.

I lived with the same guys for all 4 years of school and we never had issues like this, mostly because I was the only one with sketchy friends and I didn't want them in my room; I always visited them.

(that was in response to J0rdan)

(also I'm not talking hookups, that always happened in my room so that I could brag about being the only one having regular sexual encounters)

Thing is, there are so many student suicides, like three or four at my university while I was there, but they're usually covered up pretty quickly. I'm willing to guess that bullying issues or sexuality issues or both are at the root of a fair few of them, what stands out about this particular situation is the very visible chain of cause and effect. Or one of the causes at least.

yeah my senior year there were five suicides and one murder, it was pretty insane

matt dc otm i guess, surprising how un-murky this is

goole, i felt the same re: the pictures w/the violin, the similar kids i've known (and also some of the tributes that mentioned how talented he was).

bullies not known for self-reflection

it's true but something about this statement feels so frustratingly inadequate.

i know it.

"one of the causes" is key (and why assigning blame in even a relatively clear case like this gets complicated). one of the other stories i clicked through to was of a schoolgirl who was ostensibly driven to suicide by bullies who called her slut, threw shit at her etc, repeatedly. then there was a follow-up story that revealed she'd been self-harming even before that, and at her previous school. it was really fucking saddening.

i get a tiny amount of comfort in the fact that if you google the perpetrator's name for many years to come the top results will be this story, so he can have fun with being known for that henceforth.

Not if he's got a good lawyer who can try and scrub this thing from Google (this happened three years ago at the paper I advise).

But, yeah, that won't happen.

btw i don't think people "learn lessons" from this kind of story because i don't think anyone who pulls shit like this assumes it will lead to actual harm (or don't care or whatever.)

i hate to say it but lots of modern communities seem to trend toward higher levels of cruelty wrt this sort of stuff, meme culture and such. obv not the same level, but considering that ilx tends to see itself as a bit high minded its easy to forget that a certain poster had a ytmnd made about a sexual incident he mentioned without his knowledge, presumably by someone that still likely posts here, and people now invoke his mom finding it for lols.

again not at all drawing a real paralell between the situations, more getting at the fact that tech culture seems virulently immune to common rules of decency sometimes.

justen totally otm

a certain poster had a ytmnd made about a sexual incident he mentioned without his knowledge, presumably by someone that still likely posts here, and people now invoke his mom finding it for lols.

have no idea what this is referring to

but then I kinda avoid the more soap opera-ish stuff around here

i'll give you one guess

I had to look up the goddamn acronym

smh collier

is it about you and deej Whiney

I had to look up the goddamn acronym

lol me too

old

i'm also hoping that what seems to have been a spate in gay teen suicides of late really is just coincidence, or greater levels of reportage. the stories - plural! about the 13-year-olds who killed themselves are just awful. a curse on "related stories" on news sites and the way you can click through this endless parade of depressing stories.

― لوووووووووووووووووووول (lex pretend), Thursday, September 30, 2010 5:53 PM Bookmark

I actually think the impression of a spike comes from the fact that teenagers are more likely to be open about their sexual orientation now, and the media is even a little bit more accepting of it, which is ultimately a good thing. The reason you didn't "see" a lot of gay 13 year old suicides 20 or 30 years ago was that the very idea of a gay 13-year-old was still not as accepted. I mean I think I knew of one openly gay kid in our entire 1000-person middle school, and he was extremely effeminate and wore very flamboyant clothing that almost looked like women's clothing, and was sort of just seen as a freak. Neither the media nor the schools nor the kids themselves were really equipped for the idea of just a regular old 13 year old kid who happens to like boys.

I mean not that there should be anything not "regular" about the kid who wants to wear more feminine clothing too. I just mean that I think people thought gays were people you had vaguely heard about who lived in Greenwich Village and had parades, not your son's classmates.

Sickening. When I left high school I knew precisely one homosexual (my cousin), but I had a healthy attitude towards the gay community (now a large portion of my friends are gay). Today's bro culture permeates through high school and early college and leads to bullshit like this.

It's a shame. It's a tragedy because things likely would have gotten better for Tyler as he got older. But the problem with being that age is that you don't have that foresight, everything in the here and now is amplified in terms of importance. It took me years to learn that and even I battled suicidal thoughts briefly, AND I wasn't someone who had his sex life broadcast on the internet to ridicule him. I feel awful for his family, and I don't fault him for the thought or the act...I just wish he hadn't done it.

At least if this brings a serious issue that is being underaddressed to national media attention, his death won't be in vain. Regardless of whether these two shitbags ever serve a day in jail, their true torment will always be living with the notion that they led to someone's demise. They may rationalize it away for months, even years, but one day it will click, and his face will be all that they see when they close their eyes. Hopefully then they'll feel remorse and denounce what they did.

Man, fuck this...

50 Cent keepin it real

that makes me want to burn all of his albums. except that if I did that for every homophobic rapper, I'd have 3 rap cds left :(. even Chuck D's comments on homosexuality have been less than enlightened over the years.

by "burn" by the way I meant "destroy".

But the problem with being that age is that you don't have that foresight, everything in the here and now is amplified in terms of importance.

Yeah one of the most tragic things about this story to me is that, having gone to Rutgers myself I know that it probably WOULD NOT have ruined his life on campus, as there's a large, active, visible LGBT community, and political leanings are generally toward the left. Sure there are douchey frat guys too but (1) I don't really think you can assume most of them are anti-gay these days, and (2) they hardly control the school culture, unless things have really changed.

god what a depressing story

J0rdan otm upthread about school administrators/teachers looking the other way when sexuality becomes the target for bullying, though i'm thinking more of the high school level.

holy shit that Fiddy tweet

Just to be clear, I meant to say that I think this kind of thing has always gone on, just that it would never in the past have been dealt with in the media as being related to sexual orientation.

christ the last thing i want to do is defend the opinions of 50 cent, but i'm pretty positive that that tweet was aimed at non-vagina eating straight males

Yeah. There is a pretty hefty amount of sustained cognitive dissonance in being (a) a hip-hop fan and (b) a person who strives to oppose homophobia.

admrl, you speak the troof about old RU. Its a shame that this kid felt so alone.

that irks me so much. i wonder if it's because they don't want to raise the furor of certain parents being all 'how dare you ADVOCATE BEING GAY to MINORS' and blah blah fucking blah forever

xp to horseshoe

My experience is that what goes on in student accommodation is a complete mystery to most lecturers or administrators or whatever. It's not that they're looking the other way, it's that the're not looking full stop. In the UK, there are more likely to be student LGB Officers or Women's Officers dealing with things like this.

admrl, you speak the troof about old RU. Its a shame that this kid felt so alone.

― Sauvignon Blanc Mange (B.L.A.M.), Thursday, September 30, 2010 7:01 PM Bookmark

lol I'm not admrl.

also you have to lol at the way that post got tagged

Andrew Belonsky in 50 Cent

I don't buy that all about 50, given his Perez Hilton comments. the funny thing is in the Italian gangster community, cunnilingus is viewed as a weakness.

christ the last thing i want to do is defend the opinions of 50 cent, but i'm pretty positive that that tweet was aimed at non-vagina eating straight males

O RLY

and what's yr take on his "I just shot up a gay wedding. made me feel better" tweet

He's quoting a new lyric, Shakes.

The first tweet is fucked, but the second one is definitely about straight men who refuse to give head, which is a thing.

i don't think j0rdan was trying to paint 50 cent as not a homophobe, but rather just saying that gay men weren't necessarily the target of that particular tweet. i mean it's pretty well-documented that he's a homophobic asshole.

so it's just a coincidence that he posted that tweet today?

or is there some other "STRAIGHT MEN THAT WON'T EAT PUSSY" scandal that broke today that he was responding to

you guys trying to wring homophobia out of that 50 Cent tweet encouraging pussy-eating is like watching Fox News reporters get apopleptic about the World Trade Center Mosque

Whiney, fuck off.

I've forgiven lots of faggot-baiting in hip-hop but at this moment -- right now -- I don't want to equivocate.

Honestly yes, I think it's probably a coincidence.

how should i know? and to be clear, i'm not trying to defend him either. 50's a moron and it's a pretty obnoxious statement no matter who its intended audience is xp

the nature of sexuality can be a benefit to people like myself, who code as 100% straight and didn't want anyone to know otherwise in middle school or high school. both because of the community i lived in, the kids i was able to be surrounded by (AP classes etc) & because of the nature of my outward appearance/voice etc i was able to escape college w/o being discriminated because of my sexuality. even tho i never had a girlfriend or anything, this was of course by my own design, and i was lucky enough to be able to pull it off with ease.

but by the same token, i feel like the nature of sexuality makes it much easier for authority figures to turn a blind eye to gay discrimination in kids that aren't inverting gender stereotypes in their clothing appearances or what not. there are likely tons and tons of teachers & principles & security guards who don't want to deal with student conflict, let alone student conflict as it pertains to something as touchy as teen sexuality, and it seems like there's nothing these kids can really do to bring attention to that aside from, you know, killing themselves.

i don't think j0rdan was trying to paint 50 cent as not a homophobe, but rather just saying that gay men weren't necessarily the target of that particular tweet. i mean it's pretty well-documented that he's a homophobic asshole.

― william buttinski's 'the disintegration snoops' (donna rouge), Thursday, September 30, 2010 6:07 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

this

jesus, soto, i'm just saying it's a coincidence

just for the record any posts I make insinuating 50 Cent should kill himself because he's a talentless hateful douchebag should also be considered strictly coincidental then k thx bye

My story is J0rdan's, and as a result I now think some things would have been a lot easier if I automatically 'coded' gay.

i think the fact that 50 had already make an explicit joke about killing gay people means that the tweet where he doesn't make it explicit means that it probably isn't about gay ppl

i think when you have to blog for towleroad you might be more susceptible to reading homophobia into things that aren't homophobic

but this is a stupid argument to have because who cares about 50 cent's thoughts on gays

my first reading of the 50 tweet was that it was of the "forgot gay men exist" variety -- like addressing straight men who don't go down on ladies -- but yeah, given his other recent shit it's not like he has any excuse for forgetting that, and even that reading is shitty in its own obvious way.

on topic, I sort of worry about always-more-complicated-than-that events somehow adding up to create some cliche narrative of "tragic troubled-gay-teen suicide," since there's always coverage of something like this that zooms in on that aspect. and not on the far more important "people being HORRIBLE to this person in ways their sexuality does not remotely invite" aspect.

but by the same token, i feel like the nature of sexuality makes it much easier for authority figures to turn a blind eye to gay discrimination in kids that aren't inverting gender stereotypes in their clothing appearances or what not. there are likely tons and tons of teachers & principles & security guards who don't want to deal with student conflict, let alone student conflict as it pertains to something as touchy as teen sexuality, and it seems like there's nothing these kids can really do to bring attention to that aside from, you know, killing themselves.

― J0rdan S., Thursday, September 30, 2010 7:12 PM (13 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i think even when it's kids who are legible as you know, not fitting into the crazy rigid gender tyrannies that high school is so good at reproducing who are being targeted there's kind of an institutional inertia about responding to it. probably a lot of factors play into that, but it's unacceptable.

escape high school** obv

not sure i'll ever be able to escape college, period

That's whiney's argument, which I accept now, but if that's the case, why post the fucking thing in the first place?

xxxxpost

because 50 cent is an asshole who posts controversial shit on twitter 50 times a day to keep his name in the news

My point, though, is why post it when we know he's an asshole who post controversial shit on Twitter fifty times a day, especially since it's going to set me off.

i co-founded the GSA at my high school and i'm pretty sure the higher-ups didn't even realize we existed

LOOK IF HE MEANT GAY MEN HE WOULDN'T REFER TO THEM AS MEN WHO DON'T EAT PUSSY BECAUSE THAT CATEGORY IS MUCH BROADER THAN GAY MEN.

i co-founded the GSA at my high school and i'm pretty sure the higher-ups didn't even realize we existed

― william buttinski's 'the disintegration snoops' (donna rouge), Thursday, September 30, 2010 7:18 PM (46 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

also unacceptable. grrrr.

I know that, really, who cares about 50 Cent in this context but anyone thinking he was making a reference to this story or anything like it is vastly overestimating his awareness/interest in news stories like this.

Is it a coincidence? Probably. Is he a homophobe? Almost certainly. Does it have any relevance to this story? No, beyond the fact that it's (more or less) mainstream homophobia of the kind you see everywhere.

to be fair i don't think the principal or the dean of students knew anyone who wasn't on the football team and/or constantly getting detention

yeah but that's exactly the kind of blinders about the community of children for whom you're responsible that i'm talking about

yeah, it's obviously still shitty. and in retrospect i really wish we'd done more, somehow, in terms of outreach, in letting students know that they could talk to any of us any time. i was worried that after we graduated (i was a senior and so were most of the initial club members) that it would just peter out and eventually die. (luckily, it hasn't, according to my younger brother's yearbook.)

i really wish we'd done more, somehow, in terms of outreach, in letting students know that they could talk to any of us any time.

what an awesome thing you did starting it! glad to hear it's still there.

re: 50 it's like manly one-upsmanship, trying to son grown straight men who won't go down on their partners -- and in the process it uses "men" as synonymous with "straight men," which is dumb, and with good-faith people who hadn't recently joked about shooting up gay weddings you might be like "no, I understand, you meant 'straight men,' no big deal," but with people who have recently joked about shooting up gay weddings I for one am like "fuck you anyway, and btw any time you tweet about male sexual activity you had better damn well remember gay men exist and ideally take the opportunity to apologize or something"

ok. the question of how adult authority figures can get over paralyzing fear of taking any action relating to the sexuality or sexual activity of young people is a far more interesting question

i'm so sad about this story guys.

but like, god, this story and all the other suicides and even that stupid story about the indianapolis bakery that refused to make rainbow-frosted cupcakes for an LGBT fundraising group have put me in such a funk these past few days, as a gay male and as someone whose memories of high school are not that remote in his memory

ok. the question of how adult authority figures can get over paralyzing fear of taking any action relating to the sexuality or sexual activity of young people is a far more interesting question

― oɔsıqɐu (nabisco), Thursday, September 30, 2010 6:25 PM (6 seconds ago) Bookmark

i said this earlier, but i think being super diligent about use of the word fag/queer & other iterations (& gay as an insult) -- and punishing those that do not adhere to those rules -- is a good & easy first step that can be taken to humanize gay kids & instill that those words are discrimination and discrimination is not allowed, just like kids (generally speaking) know that they're not allowed to say the n-word etc etc

as for more far reaching & stable policies than that, shit...

yes, totally

teachers really set an example in terms of who they're willing to go to bat for as far as countering hate speech.

my admittedly totally unsubstantiated suspicion is that some of these administrators and teachers don't really have a problem with the casual homophobia that's totally endemic to high school culture.

i guess also fears of parents getting mad plays into it, but orienting your school practice towards fear imagined parental reprisal seems like bad practice.

also

- publicizing the existence of lgbt support groups
- actively seeking out a student or student to start one if one doesn't already exist

i see how this one could be uncomfortable for a principal, but i think it's probably not as uncomfortable as dealing w/ the parents of a gay kid that hung himself

- making sure that guidance counselors are trained & experienced in dealing w/ lgbt issues -- this is something that probably should be done on a county-wide basis in terms of training seminars and what not

I'd like to think Rutgers would have responded decently well if this guy had come to the administration about the harassment/privacy invasion. Better than a Texas public middle school anyway.

my admittedly totally unsubstantiated suspicion is that some of these administrators and teachers don't really have a problem with the casual homophobia that's totally endemic to high school culture.

― horseshoe, Thursday, September 30, 2010 6:30 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest

totally, unfortunately

yeah i have to imagine that if this kid let it play out, that it would've been handled properly

- making sure that guidance counselors are trained & experienced in dealing w/ lgbt issues -- this is something that probably should be done on a county-wide basis in terms of training seminars and what not

― J0rdan S., Thursday, September 30, 2010 7:32 PM (7 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i guess i assumed on some level that this was already happening, but i have no idea if it's true. probably there's lots of variation by state.

I'd like to think Rutgers would have responded decently well if this guy had come to the administration about the harassment/privacy invasion. Better than a Texas public middle school anyway.

― adamirl (Hurting 2), Thursday, September 30, 2010 7:33 PM (36 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yes, i think so too! i'm really only talking about high school here.

to be honest ... maybe this is a dumb-speculation thing to say, but I think increased visibility/awareness of LGBT stuff has made it temporarily more likely for assholes to fuck around with people's privacy and lives in exactly this way -- treating someone else's life/sexuality as "hilarious" or grounds for open interference instead of Serious and Shameful the way they might have in the past. I should be really clear here that I'm not saying visibility/awareness are to blame for that, visibility/awareness are terrific -- just that people's homophobia and bullshit seem to come out in much more public ways now, maybe, including treating other people's sexuality as a public joke that they should have to deal with.

xpost -- yes, definitely, taking a general stand against homophobic insults and even shitty joking/giggliness about the concept of homosexuality is a good start -- but the latter giggling discomfort is par for the course among so many authorities to begin with!

I don't disagree with what you guys recommend but I think it kinda overestimates the impact and control that principals/staff have over this kind of thing. It's not like this kid was being called FAGGOT in a classroom on a daily basis and the professors just laughed it off/ignored it, this shit happened in his dorm, which is a private residence, with no mid-level management staff monitoring social interactions. Like, I'm not really sure where an authority figure should have intervened here - at the roommate assignment stage maybe? (I can't remember if I was asked if I was cool with having a gay roommate before I was assigned a spot in my freshman dorm)

maybe this is a dumb-speculation thing to say, but I think increased visibility/awareness of LGBT stuff has made it temporarily more likely for assholes to fuck around with people's privacy and lives in exactly this way -- treating someone else's life/sexuality as "hilarious" or grounds for open interference instead of Serious and Shameful the way they might have in the past.

I don't know if I buy this -- I think it might just be more that various forms of web communication have made EVERYTHING formerly private into something to broadcast and laugh at with impunity.

also lol @ the suggestion that anybody listens to/meaningfully interacts with guidance counselors. I mean come on now

xp

i know, Shakey, i'm not saying it would make stuff like this horrible story disappear; it's kind of orthogonal to this story at all. partially i'm talking about it to distract myself, honestly. but i do think gay teens internalize all sorts of horrible shit from high school and it's a fucking shame and the adults who are charged with their education have a responsibility to them.

idk man, it's something that the school structure can do

obviously there's a huge gulf between the role a guidance counselor could play and the role actual guidance counselors play right now in many schools and many of them are horrible, but it's worth talking about how these things could be changed.

at my college we had a roommate survey prior to moving in - one of the questions was whether you would prefer having more conservative or more liberal roommates

not that this guarantees anything close to harmony - i knew a (straight) guy who was a dance major in college, and one of his roommates once called him a "faggot-ass ballerina"

Shakey, I think part of the idea is that if educators take the position from the get-go, at a young age, that homophobic insults, jokes, etc. are not right -- that other people's sexuality is not something for you to mess with -- then everyone will be in a better place when it comes to, e.g., college students being sexually active in an environment that isn't as watched-over?

Educators are not always good with policing the sexual realms of kids up toward college aged, but at the very least they could set a better tone with younger behavior they can control. The only problem is that a lot of Americans consider it a fundamental right for their kids to express and act on any opinion they happen to hold about other people's sex lives.

at my college we had a roommate survey prior to moving in - one of the questions was whether you would prefer having more conservative or more liberal roommates

yeah I remember this too - and I went to a super-liberal/PC college so it might've been on there.

xp

I hate to quote that sage Brandon Flowers but he said once, "We're still getting used to the word `gay.'"

Although there's no question it's never been easier for gays to mingle with straights without recriminations, the comfort also produces moments of discomfort in which "gay" is used flippantly because your presence is taken for granted.

Shakey, I think part of the idea is that if educators take the position from the get-go, at a young age, that homophobic insults, jokes, etc. are not right -

this reminds me of the time my dad (jr high school teacher for 35+ years) intervened during one of his classes with some kids who were calling some other kid "faggot". and my dad pointed out that this had to stop, not just because it was disruptive to class, but because it was simply wrong treat being gay as being something worthy of derision. and then he cited the common figure that 10% of any given population is gay, which would mean that out of the 30 students currently in the classroom, a certain number were likely to be gay, and that there was nothing wrong with this.

fast-forward to multiple parents complaining to the principal trying to get my dad fired, and my dad having to eat shit from the administration and apologize to various parents.

hooray enlightened US educational system

So horrible, horrific - this poor young man and the shameless bigotted voyeur roommate, just makes me feel so angry and powerless.

A few weeks ago, Dan Savage and his partner Terry started the "It Gets Better" project on YouTube, to give young gay people some hope, to maybe take the edge off the despondency and loneliness of the bullied - I can't get to it at work, and haven't watched all the videos (mostly because they are so affecting and just make you cry), but I hope it reaches people everywhere.

hah i dont think that was on any questionaire for us but i think that liberal views were kinda the assumed norm tbh

lol carleton btw

xpsots

that's really depressing to hear, shakey. especially since it sort of reinforces what he was fighting against (that 'gay' is something dirty and dare not speak its name unless you're deriding it, then it's ok)

i have to say that although i see the value in hs/ms/elementary teachers trying to police this the big thing is that shitty parents are going to trump the instilled values of an educational system every fucking time, and we if we cant get dad to stop complaining about the fags on project runway there isnt much to be done other than hope that the other kids keep things in line.

fast-forward to multiple parents complaining to the principal trying to get my dad fired, and my dad having to eat shit from the administration and apologize to various parents.

hooray enlightened US educational system

― crude interloper of a once august profession (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, September 30, 2010 7:45 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

well that just sucks :(

administrations invariably cave in the face of parental pressure in my experience. doesn't matter what the issue is, if a parent complains about something, they win. and given the amount of parents who are totally cool with their kids being homophobic little dipshits... I dunno, institutionalizing this kind of tolerance will take a long time.

oddly I have had disagreements with my dad about legalizing gay marriage (he has issues with it), it's not like he's a radical defender of gay rights or anything. but even his middle-of-the-road tolerance level was not acceptable.

this was maybe 10-15 years ago tho.

I think it might just be more that various forms of web communication have made EVERYTHING formerly private into something to broadcast and laugh at with impunity.

btw hurting I totally agree with this -- I just feel like the brunt of this falls on young women and LGBT folks who are sorta coming into their own sexuality and get particularly screwed over when it's treated as a public joke, you know? it's another of those things that's always pointed at someone who can be "singled out" in some way, not the "normal" straight guy

also plz note that it is entirely possible that the two guilty people in this story are very likely not to self-identify as biased against homosexuals. thats maybe the more insidious difficulty - getting straight young dudes to not react to homosexual acts as "weird".

that stupid story about the indianapolis bakery that refused to make rainbow-frosted cupcakes for an LGBT fundraising group have put me in such a funk these past few days, as a gay male and as someone whose memories of high school are not that remote in his memory

Not that important to the larger topic of the thread, but this one really pissed me right the fuck off, because a Christian group can pull this crap with gay groups on the basis of their sexual identity with relative impunity; but to do it the other way around, and refuse to do something for a Christian group on the basis of their religion, is grounds for a civil rights lawsuit, since religion, which you can change anytime, is a protected class; but LGBT identity, which you're born with, is not.

(many xps) shitty parents are going to trump the instilled values of an educational system every fucking time

I don't know that this is true . . . certainly peer groups have been shown to be like a million x more influential in shaping values than parents are.

xp truth

honestly I think the administration would've been quicker to protect him if he had just framed it as a disciplinary issue, but since he went the extra step of directly insinuating that SOME OF HIS STUDENTS WERE GAY he had to take a lot of shit. Parents didn't want to hear that their children were being told that *gasp* there are queers about and that their kid might be one of them.

x-post

btw hurting I totally agree with this -- I just feel like the brunt of this falls on young women and LGBT folks who are sorta coming into their own sexuality and get particularly screwed over when it's treated as a public joke, you know? it's another of those things that's always pointed at someone who can be "singled out" in some way, not the "normal" straight guy

― oɔsıqɐu (nabisco), Thursday, September 30, 2010 7:51 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

totally. in this discussion about what educators can do, i'm thinking in particular of how powerful it could be if a male teacher or administrator who reads as straight prioritizes these issues and makes a point of arguing with a kid who uses a slur or pays attention when a kid is targeted for his sexuality.

our GSA participated in the 'day of silence' that year, where you refuse to speak for 24 hours to draw attention to how gay voices are silenced every day around the world. (it's a tactic i've gone back and forth about over the years, in terms of its actual effectiveness.) one teacher told us flat-out that he would give us bad marks if we didn't answer his questions in class on account of it. he didn't (that i know), but he still cracked jokes in an attempt to provoke us to break silence. that was maybe the most disheartening experience i had in that club, knowing that even a teacher would resort to that kind of shitty provocation.

cracked jokes at our expense, i should say

one teacher told us flat-out that he would give us bad marks if we didn't answer his questions in class on account of it. he didn't (that i know), but he still cracked jokes in an attempt to provoke us to break silence. that was maybe the most disheartening experience i had in that club, knowing that even a teacher would resort to that kind of shitty provocation.

― william buttinski's 'the disintegration snoops' (donna rouge), Thursday, September 30, 2010 7:56 PM (18 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

fuck this dude

Not even if I was paid.

it is entirely possible that the two guilty people in this story are very likely not to self-identify as biased against homosexuals

I'd also wager that there are people in comments boxes right now saying "well if he's gay, why did he care? haha I'm a straight guy, I don't care if someone sees etc.," which is exactly why that singling-out thing gets at me -- not having your sexual privacy respected has a really uneven effect depending on who you are

it is crazy to me that people don't see that

it's like the old "I don't care that you're (ethnicity), so obviously I can make constant jokes about it and treat you differently" thing, except now with sexuality

plus, plenty of my friends are gay

on topic, I sort of worry about always-more-complicated-than-that events somehow adding up to create some cliche narrative of "tragic troubled-gay-teen suicide," since there's always coverage of something like this that zooms in on that aspect. and not on the far more important "people being HORRIBLE to this person in ways their sexuality does not remotely invite" aspect.

― oɔsıqɐu (nabisco), Thursday, September 30, 2010 7:15 PM (55 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is bugging me too--the assumption that he killed himself out of shame or embarrassment seems to be sort of widespread. but it seems a lot more likely to me that he killed himself because his roommate and dormmates were bigoted, awful bullies.

Not to be dense or tautological, but the bigoted, awful bullies' action brought on his shame and embarrassment.

yeah

i think max means direct shame of being broadcast making out with a dude, which is all that was seen, if the internet postings are him, which i believe they are

yeah sorry i dont mean to say its one or the other or that theyre not directly related.

I agree there's something sociopathic about the thought processes that lead you to do something like this in the first place. But...

Calling people who do this sort of thing sociopathic or something else that's in the realm of mental illness is a cop-out because it's not like there's only a tiny segment of humanity that gets a sadistic pleasure out of humiliating people, or that people who do cruel things are these obvious monsters that are so unlike you and me.

i think being super diligent about use of the word fag/queer & other iterations (& gay as an insult) -- and punishing those that do not adhere to those rules -- is a good & easy first step that can be taken to humanize gay kids & instill that those words are discrimination and discrimination is not allowed...

― J0rdan S., Thursday, September 30, 2010 4:28 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

this absolutely this, otm. thing is, it can't start in college or high school. it has to start earlier, like in first grade. we have to insist that our schools adopt something like a "zero tolerance policy" with regard to bullying based on presumed sexual orientation. if we can do it with pictures of guns (or thoughts about pictures of guns or whatever) we can do it with active hate speech. and it doesn't have to be draconian or moronic. kids don't have to be expelled or traumatized for saying the wrong thing. but we must not accept indifference to hate speech from faculty and staff. if they see or hear this sort of thing going in, they MUST be obligated to intervene and to discipline, if necessary. it's the only way to cultivate high school & college students who don't find hideous "jokes" like this "funny".

whole thing makes me sick.

we have to insist that our schools adopt something like a "zero tolerance policy" with regard to bullying based on presumed sexual orientation.

yeah for sure. bullying is so often about race, sexuality, gender power dynamics on some level, too.

FUCK THIS HAND-WRINGING. THIS IS ABUSE. TOO MANY KIDS HAVE KILLED THEMSELVES BECAUSE OF SHIT LIKE THIS— THE PERPETRATORS ARE MONSTERS, PLAIN AND SIMPLE. AND IF YOU DON'T THINK OTHERWISE, YOU CAN GO FUCK YOURSELF.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/nyregion/01suicide.html?src=mv

max gettin scoops

“I don’t think he would intentionally harm someone,” he said. “He’s not that kind of guy. He likes to make people laugh, but not at their expense.”

yep, totally not

Calling people who do this sort of thing sociopathic or something else that's in the realm of mental illness is a cop-out because it's not like there's only a tiny segment of humanity that gets a sadistic pleasure out of humiliating people, or that people who do cruel things are these obvious monsters that are so unlike you and me.

― Cunga, Thursday, September 30, 2010 8:38 PM Bookmark

Yeah I have to agree here. Especially since what the guy did was really so easy to do -- a couple clicks to set the webcam, a couple clicks to post the video. Asshole, yes, but it doesn't take a sociopath to be an asshole.

^^yeah I wanted to comment upon that earlier. don't really agree with calling these people amoral monsters or w/e, because it implies that there's something wrong with them that might be out of their control. these two were fully functioning, rational human beings who did this out of their own volition, and need to be judged and tried as such.

I mean I think it's an argument that's not a real argument, because we're all agreeing that this was a horrible, horrific thing to do to someone. I'm just saying it doesn't take that much to be capable of this, and that's especially true in a climate where homosexuality is still something to be laughed at.

Just to pursue what was said upthread a little further, it's almost like we've come far enough in acceptance of homosexuality that someone would no longer see it as too private and shameful to broadcast, but not far enough that it's too normal to be worth broadcasting.

Just to pursue what was said upthread a little further, it's almost like we've come far enough in acceptance of homosexuality that someone would no longer see it as too private and shameful to broadcast, but not far enough that it's too normal to be worth broadcasting.

That's a really good point. If they had caught that roommate with illegal material or doing something that's actually considered sexually deviant by "everyone" then they probably wouldn't have thought to expose him like that. But in the environment of college (especially the freshmen dorms) and the context of "lol internet" they assumed that homosexuality and sex tapes aren't so shameful that it would still drive someone to suicide.

You guys are acting like I don't think most people are amoral monsters.

I think the " but it's so easy to do and ppl don't always see the consequences of their actions" argument is strong support for the idea that a large number of people are evil self-involved shits more interested in using/abusing ppl around them than being nice and/or helpful.

i don't know guys i would never, ever, in my wildest dreams do what they did and i think it's a little more than "being an asshole" when i consider how much it would deviate from my behavior or the behavior of anyone i respect.

the thing is, i don't think they'd have necessarily seen it as using or abusing anyone - this goes back to justen's point re: internet cruelty, whereby people seem to think that if they're not doing or saying something seriously, it shouldn't be taken seriously by targets or victims. "people should have thicker skin!" you'd think that in a case like this it'd be quite obvious how fucked-up that thinking is, but going by a good proportion of the responses i've seen to it, this is not so.

also, his youth is a pretty huge factor here; it's all too easy to say, from the vantage point of being a few years older and a bit more secure and sexually confident, that this wouldn't make us kill ourselves, but then i think back to how i was at 18, barely a month into university, still finding one's feet socially...christ, it would have felt like the end of the world. and then add being a seemingly shy, private person and possibly-not-fully-out gay to that...just absolutely horrible.

I don't disagree that they wouldn't have seen it as using and abusing someone; that is a large part of the problem.

Yeesh double negatives

I literally had no idea that you could control a webcam remotely. That totally freaks me out.

think the " but it's so easy to do and ppl don't always see the consequences of their actions" argument is strong support for the idea that a large number of people are evil self-involved shits more interested in using/abusing ppl around them than being nice and/or helpful.

― THE CHOMPING DUCK GETS HIS FATTY OUT FOR VADAR (HI DERE), Friday, October 1, 2010 7:50 AM Bookmark

Even as a sometimes bullied kid myself, I can think of a couple times when I and some other kids needlessly bullied a guy and one time when I really went too far (at a summer program - a counselor had to talk to me and the other 'bullies', and the kid actually wound up wanting to leave the program early). And Dan I could be wrong but I would guess you bullied some kid at some point in your life too. Because it IS really easy to bully someone, at least to an extent, when you get caught up in groupthink and when it doesn't take much effort. TBF by college or even high school there was no way I was going to do this.

You guys are acting like I don't think most people are amoral monsters.

NPR had an interview with Sue Rankin, one of the authors of this study, and she said that either 7% or 10% of colleges (I can't remember which - it was shockingly low) have some sort of institutionalized LGBT support system in place. The study also showed that students who were out in high school often went back into the closet in college out of concern that they would get stuck w/ homophobic roommates, for example (valid fear, apparently) and that professors can be real assholes. Interview here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130258246

They also did a profile on Tyler Clementi that was profoundly sad. He seemed like a cool guy and he would have found people who valued him and loved him and it's devastating that he's gone.

I literally had no idea that you could control a webcam remotely. That totally freaks me out.

― She Got the Shakes, Friday, October 1, 2010 8:43 AM (39 minutes ago) Bookmark

Oh, geez, I need to find the link to the story about the school system that was sending laptops home with students, then controlling them remotely -- including using the cameras on them -- to spy on kids' internet use at home.

Wow, it has its own wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_District

The lawsuit was filed after 15-year-old high school sophomore Blake Robbins was disciplined at school for his behavior in his home.[4][12] The school's "evidence" that triggered his discipline was a photograph that the school had secretly taken of him in his bedroom, via the webcam in his school-issued laptop. Without telling its students, the schools remotely accessed their school-issued laptops to secretly snap pictures of students in their own homes, their chat logs, and records of the websites they visited. The school then transmitted the snapshots to servers at the school, where school authorities reviewed them and shared the snapshots with others.[13] In one widely published photo, the school had photographed Robbins in his bed.

I'm almost ashamed to admit this, but my mom posted Ellen's little PSA-type thing about this on Facebook last night and it was heartbreaking.

as a straight dude who roomed with a fully-out gay dude my freshman year, I was pretty embarrassed by the jokes my friends would occasionally make about, like, our furniture having gay sex cooties or whatever on it -- and this was in the honors program dorm, ffs

(this doesn't really have to do with anything in this thread except college kids needing to grow the fuck up, I guess)

OMG at that Wikipedia article. I'd never heard of that before, but I've almost never been as infuriated as I am reading the details now. This is just SICK.

I kind of hate how much energy goes into trying to "end bullying" and how little is directed toward teaching kids how to react to getting bullied.

yea the 'how to handle bullying' message is mixed based on environment.

your peers tell you "fight back/talk back/hit back" to avoid looking weak, and often that just leads to making it worse. parents often want to talk to someone in charge and report the incident, which isn't a bad approach, but often brings 'retaliation' upon the victim and gets them labeled as a 'tattletale' (which is stupid), or a 'wuss'.

School officials of course can't condone 'fighting back' so they just tell the student to ignore the bullies, which anybody who has ever been bullied before (as I was) knows is next to impossible as they TARGET you.

All three messages equate to a feeling of helplessness.

In retrospect, punching bullies in the mouth would have likely landed me in detention but it would have settled the matter.

xp exactly. seems like nobody ever tries to help a kid break down what the bully is doing, what the kid is feeling, why any of it is happening, what any of it matters, and how to respond, either directly or afterward.

of course, a lot of that could be said about many other issues kids face. "Do your homework. Don't fuck up," is about it most of the time.

i dunno ime there is almost no way that being bullied doesn't make you feel like shit

Yes but that's like saying i dunno when you stand in the rain you get wet whayagonnado???

i know i know but i can't imagine anything that would've made me feel better in 6th or 7th grade

being bullied leads to a lot of repression and means you're going to carry negative feelings for years without ever remembering what caused them. I still do. at karaoke the other night it was my turn and someone cheered/applauded loudly, and I tensed up, because it reminded me of the times people mocked me in middle school (ie, clapping/cheering sarcastically), took me a moment to realize they were being genuine.

and that's just from a guy who was 'mildly' bullied in school. can only imagine what the worst cases still hang on to.

How about having one of those bullies 15 years later ask you for some change while you walk past them sitting near the pedestrian crossing?

i know i know but i can't imagine anything that would've made me feel better in 6th or 7th grade

if the cycle of birth & death returns you to 7th grade try giving alcohol and weed a shot, seems early I know but trust me it takes the edge off

I've mostly forgotten my past, but in all honestly, there's one bully that if I saw today, would probably be missing teeth afterwards for his sins 15 years ago

Everyone who bullied me got hit with a massive cosmic karma bat while we were still in school, so I don't really feel the need to still be mad at them; their lives are fucked up enough already.

ime the only way to feel better later in your life is just to get far away from the scene of the crime, do something that makes u happy, make friends, forget about it

c.a.d.: yeah it's not so much about just making the kid feel better. That's part of the problem. These parents and teachers think if they could just keep the kid in a safe happy bubble cocoon then there's nothing wrong. We've got to teach these kids how to handle this shit.

I get where you guys are going, but I also admit that it weirds me out that we are reaching this point of "bullies will be bullies so lets just make sure the victims know how to deal with it". I know its not the point you guys are making, but it depresses me to think about it that way. I was bullied all through middle school and it fucked me up for a long time. Yes I wish someone would have helped me handle it better, but I also hoped that no one would ever have to go through that pain in the first place.

right kerm but i guess i'm saying that "how to handle" is a big black box for me. i mean i was hardly in the most dire situation and eventually i saw the light at the end of the tunnel but there are going to be big swaths of time where you just feel worthless--solely because ppl are choosing to bully you.

How about having one of those bullies 15 years later ask you for some change while you walk past them sitting near the pedestrian crossing?

Wait, did this happen to you? Nice.

The worst one of the bunch I had to deal with confessed to me at the 10th high school reunion that he was just jealous of me the whole damn time. Satisfying, that.

i mean for me "feeling better" was escaping to a larger high school. it wasn't even a given that i'd make friends there.

I have probably told this story before but I spent a lot of junior high & the first couple years of high school ducking bullies. it was exhausting. there were two major ones, they weren't badass but I was an effeminate skinny junkie teen and pretty much anybody could have kicked my ass. on separate occasions, during the years after high school, I ran into both of them, who greeted me happily -- like, "hey, it's underrated aerosmith, long time no see!" and on both occasions I thought, I'm grown now, what's it gonna hurt? so I said: "hi - I have to say - the last time I saw you, you were threatening to kick my ass for, like, no reason," and on both occasions, dudes were very apologetic. and one -- the angrier & bigger of the two -- had what was, to me, a startling response. his face sort of softened, not with contrition but in a sort of introspective look, a pretty rich many-moods look, and he said: "oh, yeah. I know. sorry. I'm not an angry person any more."

I felt so bad for the guy, who looked like an adult with a complex being instead of this raging dick forcing me to leave parties lest I get my ass handed to me, and I thought, man, you didn't have any right to be a dick to me but I sort of never did the math and went, fuck, a guy being that big an asshole when he could be having fun must be walking around with an ugly black cloud inside of him.

kind of a pivotal moment for me, that. asshole behavior is still asshole behavior, right, not excusing it, but it made me think, always try to consider the bigger picture.

yeah that's a great story. i definitely don't hold anything against ppl from back then--EVERYONE is fucked up somehow in middle school and/or high school

Everyone who bullied me got hit with a massive cosmic karma bat while we were still in school

Like, all at once?

i'm nervous about bringing up this point because it might sound like i'm trying to mitigate the tragedy & horror of suicide but --

i feel that the fact that this recent 'trend' of teen lgbt suicides has at least something to do with the media coverage surrounding them. i can't cite the source but i recall a statistic that showed that when an automotive accident is reported as suicide, there would be a spike in automotive suicides in the area immediately afterwards. alternately, after one student during my time at nyu killed himself by leaping to his death in the library, there were two more suicide attempts by the same means & in the same place in the next month. and there had been no suicides in that library for years prior. just saying, suicide affects a community in unpredictable ways, and one suicide can inadvertently engender others.

it's not to say that an 'original' suicide victim is to blame; nor the media who report suicides, but it's one of the most insidious aspects of suicide -- that it's very occurrence can serve as a template and temptation for others facing a similar crisis. call it 'heathers syndrome.' or don't. i don't know.

i honestly have no idea if this poor kid was aware of other suicides occurring nationally, i don't know the timeline, so this may be a totally irrelevant point. and again, this is not to diminish any justified horror at these suicides -- in fact, i think you can see this trend as a measure of how much each of these queer kids suffered every day, and how many there are going through the same or worse.

i definitely don't hold anything against ppl from back then--EVERYONE is fucked up somehow in middle school and/or high school

I don't know, I hold it against myself. It was a bad lapse of judgment/weak character on my part. I might have really done some damage to one kid and I feel bad about it.

I kind of hate how much energy goes into trying to "end bullying" and how little is directed toward teaching kids how to react to getting bullied.

― Kerm, Friday, October 1, 2010 1:52 PM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark

i feel that the fact that this recent 'trend' of teen lgbt suicides has at least something to do with the media coverage

plus the fact that, ya know, 5 American teens kill themselves every day. So four gay teens in a month is not necessarily the "trend" or "spike" or whatever the media wants to portray is as.

also i just wanted to chime in about the difficulty about prohibiting the use of 'faggot' in highschools -- the year after i left mine (very liberal, private, Quaker school with lots of 'safe zones' and diversity awareness), there was an incident where some kids were reprimanded for taunting other kids with "die faggot die" but all the reprimand did was to turn it into code: "die faggot die" turned into "DFD" graffiti, culminating into a student club about "deep fried dough" -- all of which escaped the attention of teachers & admin, but it was well understood by all students.

wait, waht

that seems willfully ignorant on the part of the teachers/admin

your name is distracting!

all of which escaped the attention of teachers & admin, but it was well understood by all students.

yeah, what? it's this "escaped the attention of" that makes me suspicious/mad, like it is basically their job to pay attention to this stuff.

I think the sheer oddness of students wanting to start a deep fried dough club would at least make me check to see if that was code for drugs

Was the DFD club pro or contra the taunting?

i can guess.

Dan - the karma bat. What happened?

http://www.davidrothmusic.com/lyricsanotherdaymosesbrown.html

how popular is the KFC Double Down among adolescents?

so is this just gonna turn into a "shitty things that happened to me in jr high/high school" thread or what

Oh, well let's see:

- One dude was murdered by some shady shitheads he was doing drug deals with.
- One dude was pushed in front of a train and killed by some other shady shitheads he was doing drug deals with.
- One girl got pregnant and dropped out of high school.
- Another girl got pregnant and I think also dropped out.

Most of the other teasing I got was just teasing and, after an epic fight where the school administration got involved, everything had settled down and was squashed well before high school; I'm on good terms with practically all of those ppl now.

sounds VERY SUSPICIOUS Dan...

(j/k)

I've been watching too many revenge-fantasy-horror movies

i still don't understand what this means

The Times reports that demonstrators for gay rights "got into a screaming match with residents of Mr. Ravi’s dormitory, Davidson Hall, who objected to some of their language. Several students had to be physically separated."

why is that giving me the lols so bad

several siamese twins underwent separation surgery.

As opposed to mentally separated?

Contents: mechanically separated college students

like i literally have no idea what they could have possibly be arguing about.

chillwave

it's always chillwave

when I imagine HI DERE fighting someone, I for some reason imagine him shouting "HI DERE" at his opponent, punching/kicking them, and throwing out an ILX-esque zing as he dispatches each one.

so YOU'RE the one videotaping my fights

had to make some money off the Kimbo Slice phenomenon can't blame a man amirite

As the leader of the protest, Robert O'Brien, Department of Anthropology Assistant Instructor, displayed his anger about the sexual images taken of Clementi, some students fired back from the crowd.

“That isn’t what happened,” shouted residents of Davidson Hall, where Clementi had lived. The students, who wished to remain anonymous claim there was no sex tape and nothing had been posted. The students said the issue was blown out of proportion. They refused to elaborate on the issue and there are no official reports backing up the claim.

The Middlesex County Prosecutor Bruce J. Kaplan said Ravi, 18 of Plainsboro, N.J. and Wei, 18, of Princeton, N.J., have been charged with two counts each of invasion of privacy for using a camera to view and transmit a live image of Clementi. Ravi also faces more charges from an earlier incident involving Clementi.

The students expressed their disappointment with the protest before heading back to Davidson Hall.
"This was supposed to be a vigil for Tyler. Not a protest,” one of the students said. “He wouldn’t have wanted this.”

'blown out of proportion'.

yea, kid's dead, no big deal....

he just walked outside and thought it was a fine day to die (tm Bathory). seriously wtf, is everyone making up what they saw?

i mean, i'm merely guessing here. But I think maybe the arguments were dude to the disconnect of the dorm-mates who would have probably though this was just as an "entertaining" a stunt or a prank if dude was hooking up with a girl.

It's only Rahvi's twitter that added the creepy/hateful layer of "Let's out this guy"

well

the dorm-mates who posted on ravis wall saying shit like "how can you sleep in that room" added a pretty hateful layer

well that is a good point

it'd be fucking awful behaviour if clementi had been straight. his being gay and (possibly) outed adds extra hatefulness to actions that are already fucked-up, and not excusable as a "prank".

he wasnt outed by the "prank"--ravi knew he was taking guys back to their room. in fact, on both occasions he asked ravi if he could have privacy for a date or something--thats how ravi knew how to set up the camera

Ravi also faces more charges from an earlier incident involving Clementi.

wonder what this was...?

it'd be fucking awful behaviour if clementi had been straight.

yeah, the gay-bullying thing adds an extra layer of awfulness but this was a straight-up dick-move to pull regardless.

i know he was out at college, there's no information on whether he was out at home or to his parents

there really is very little info and an insane amount of speculation on EVERYTHING

gotcha lex

Like there's an entire third character of Molly Wei who's been called everything from an inhuman monster to an innocent babe in the woods. There's just so little we know. It's kind of crazy

The latest from the student newspaper.

...Targum?

Ravi faces two additional charges for attempting to watch and transmit similar footage involving Clementi on a different date.

xpost

it's like stereogum for independent contractors who fix roofs

Ravi also faces more charges from an earlier incident involving Clementi.

wonder what this was...?

The first incident was on the 19th, the second, involving the girl, was on the 21st.

Christ, those comments inferring that not enough attention is being paid to his "date" are infuriating. Like the one that says the date must have dumped him and that led to the suicide, not the whole webcast issue.

uuuuggghhhh

postscript to the DFD story if anyone cares: that song that kerm linked to is uplifting and all but it wasn't resolved so nicely -- i know that at least 2 members of the faculty left the school because they felt the admin was not doing enough to police the threatening behavior and felt that failing to punish the students was a tacit endorsement.

there really is very little info and an insane amount of speculation on EVERYTHING

― some o))) (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, October 1, 2010 9:18 AM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark

this is a good point, and reminds me of a recent case involving a man who was widely reported to have been convicted of rape simply because he lied about his ethnicity. people in the dorm didn't say that clementi's death was "blown out of proportion," but rather that images of his sexual encounters were never in fact posted to the web. which would be an interesting wrinkle...

otoh, i'm not sure that there's much difference between threatening someone with such exposure and simply exposing them. both reprehensible.

Yeah, it's pretty certain that Ravi sucks, but I think time will tell just exactly how bad he sucks

also, not to bring this back up; and I apologize if this is tender/painful/annoying to anyone, but 50 Cent's is on the defensive on twitter re: that comment. And just said his mom was a lesbian, no joke

hah what the hell does that have to do with anything, 50

he finds it awesome

"some of my best moms are gay!"

^ was fumbling my way towards this joke (and ecstasy)

And just said his mom was a lesbian, no joke

lol this fukkin country

RT: @50cent: Some how they turned a simple joke about oral sex into a anti gay statement. I have nothing against people who choose and alternative life

smdh

the whole thing:

The other night I made a joke about a blow job. My male followers enjoyed it. So I then went on to joke about women receiving the same.
Some how they turned a simple joke about oral sex into a anti gay statement. I have nothing against people who choose and alternative life
Style in fact iv publicly stated my mom loved women. It funny how people think negative statements are news worthy but positive statements
Are not worthy of coverage. Access holly wood for got to put laughing out loud lol that was at the end of that statement.

He should offer to play G.A.Y. by way of reparation.

"Growing up I was confused, my mama kissing a girl..."

wait, people actually thought that 50's tweet was directed at gay people? jordan's interpretation was, like, pretty obvious

I don't know what you heard about me
But my mom likes to eat the p****
Str8 men with big d*cks she won't see
Cuz she's a mothafuckin' ian, Les-b

The overwhelming feeling I remember from being bullied in junior high was mortification on an almost 24/7 basis - that the people bullying me were sitting around together dreaming up new ways to make my life miserable. I still worry sometimes that people are two-faced in ways that are detrimental to me, that any being-nice done by others is merely to get information to be used to humiliate me later or is not meant to be taken at face value. People who don't get bullied probably don't have to put up with this much internal second-guessing about others; people who do the actual bullying, if not disciplined, learn there's nothing wrong with putting others through hell for their own amusement - especially when adults' abrogation of responsibility for the children in their care comes off as tacit approval of the teasing.

That said, there is still one person from back then I dread ever seeing again, because I would want to slap her across the face while wearing coarse sandpaper gloves.

Access holly wood for got to put laughing out loud lol that was at the end of that statement.

haha is he actually complaining that he was quoted out of context because of LOL

If I had lived in the same dorm as the kids who pulled this shit I would've probably gotten some people together and beaten the shit out of them. Also threaten to kill them and make their lives hell if they didn't transfer away from the college. I lived in dorms for a few years and I can't imagine any GDI kid not wanting to fuck those turds up -- if not just for making the hall look bad.

But seriously... the kids on the floor who ostensibly this "prank"'s enjoyment was for are just as guilty IMO... a climate of intolerance and insensitivity. Sack the RA too (or put em up against the wall for all I care), where the fuck were they for all of this?

I am not in touch with anybody from jr. high/high school, as they pretty much all treated me like shit. If I ran into any of them now, I dunno, I'd probably just ignore them. they're all dead to me.

I still worry sometimes that people are two-faced in ways that are detrimental to me, that any being-nice done by others is merely to get information to be used to humiliate me later or is not meant to be taken at face value.

I do this as well -- I think this is the big reason I have a hard time opening up to people.

I used to be like that and I never even *had* bully problems! was just constantly worried that there was some 'other scene' where everyone who pretended to be nice to me got together and shared their true feelings of intense loathing/disgust/pity

also sometimes I worried that humans were actually a hyper-intelligent race with telepathic powers, of which I was a mentally-deficient and telepathy-lacking specimen that someone had decided to do an elaborate experiment on to see if they could convince me I was actually a smart person

a few years later I read Pale Fire and these lines really hit home:

There was a time in my demented youth
When somehow, I suspected that the truth
About survival after death was known
To every human being; I alone
Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy
Of books and people hid the truth from me.

neuroses, y'all!

high school was an inside job

Lol at Whiney making a reference to stereogum itt

That is all

"we traced the cyber-bullying -- it's coming from inside the house!!"

solipsism much b. snowy

quoted out of context because of LOL

omg this is my new favorite phrase of all time

in case I die unexpectedly please be advised that I want "quoted out of context because of LOL" to be the only text on the stone that marks my grave

bullies grow up into people who are either totally messed up or have totally glossed over and forgotten their own attitudes in their younger years. violent bullies are the former, casually sadistic exclusionary status reinforcing types are the latter (usually.)

omg google for 50 and find LOL

i mean this seems to be the case ime. i never caught too much shit back in the day, but my first high school was a little rougher on people than the second (which actually had a gay dude who would periodically show up to school in a character he called "pearl", complete with a white wig and a southern accent.)

and it wasn't a particularly big deal either.

If you've a strong stomach, read the comments on this story. I suspect most of these people are not trolls.

comments sections really are the worst thing

I think fox news commenters are called orcs or ogres or something, not trolls.

I've made a pact with myself to stop reading comments sections of these types of articles. Humanity's cesspool lives there.

Comment blocker on firefox is one of my favorite things.

Discus is blocked at work. Win!

White people just love their internet comment page soapboxes, there must be a gene for it...

*starts 300-post argument with u*

BTL commenters are vile everywhere. Editors of websites would be doing us all a favour if they zapped any that did not conform to 'letters to the editor'-standard rules of grammar and spelling, since just about 100 per cent of those people haven't got anything to say for themselves that I wish to read or validate by publishing.

it's worse where the comments sections are anonymous and don't force people to sign in. the level of vitriol increases tenfold when someone isn't held accountable for what they have to say. even if they are 'registration' sites, it still doesn't prevent it, of course, but I think more sites should do damage control on that stuff because there's some truly vile stuff on them.

this comment: "Wait a minute, you know that Ravi and Wei aren't white, don't you? You must be so conflicted! On the one hand, there's a gay person to hate, but on the other there's a non-white. I feel for you. You can only hate one!"

I wish I could find this seriously fucked up ad AOL used to run back in 1994/1995 or so featuring a stereotypical good ol' boy sitting in front of his computer going "They're talking about that free trade thing again" with a gleam in his eye. Cut to the daughter sitting around watching this, a gunshot off-screen is heard and she goes "Ma, Pa done shot up the computer again" or something like that. Followed by the "America Online...welcome!" stinger they always had then for those ads.

Anyway, that's always kinda what I think of whenever idiot commenters are in full tear.

I can usually tell by the handle people assign themselves whether or not they're going to post a bunch of abusive/bigoted/incoherent bullshit. And yes, before you stan for your Uncle Cletus' first amendment rights, I am perfectly comfortable with my own 'elitism' on this issue (because if you think getting from the beginning to the end of a sentence without a mistake is a snob's pursuit, then my pity is edged by hyena-like laughter).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqC829FjJNU

Ah thank you. That's the one.

around the time I had a debate with someone on an NFL board during the Iraq invasion who suggested that I was sick for believing that 100 Iraqi lives were less important than 1 american live, I decided that when I get rich I'm gonna start looking up these people's addresses and fly out and Jay and Silent Bob em

err....sick for NOT believing, that should read.

re: bullying, middle school was hellish, but only until 7th grade...in 8th grade, everyone seemed to come to terms with the fact that we were all different, awesome people. remember, too, that this was the year Columbine happened, so i think that sort of violence made people realize that maybe they shouldn't fuck with the weird kids any longer.

also, i pretty much escaped into punk rock and friends who had nothing to do with my school, so it wasn't so bad for me. especially because my best friend from 7th grade on was gay, tho he went to a different school.

high school— like elmo, i went to a quaker school where everything was supposed to be peachy, but almost NO ONE was out of the closet publicly until my senior year, when it became a literal storm of kids coming out and speaking up about things. i was always pretty content to be like, 'yeah, i like guys, but i like girls too,' and that continued until college.

tbh, most of my resentment is aimed at my parents, who scared the living shit out of me until i was 21 or 22 years old.

bleck, i ramble. sorry a lot of that doesn't make sense grammatically. i'm just really upset about all of this.

i sometimes wonder: even tho XY was a terrible softcore porn mag for 40-year-old pedophiles, it helped me realize that there were kids like me everywhere. if it was still published today, it might have the same sort of effect? just maybe. anyway.

There's no teen LGBT magazine in the mass market AFAIK... seems like something that should be corrected.

nobody reads magazines, especially teenagers

yeah but don't u think that the internet has made that sort of magazine improbable? there are lots of lgbt resources online for teens, and mass publication of a print mag would probably lead to protests & boycotts of any seller who would carry it for "promoting the gay agenda"

don't mind me, just thinking this thru

xp

you'd never get a queer teen magazine into the highschools that desperately needed it

Yeah I lived in a town once where every grocery store decided not to put an issue of Seventeen on the shelves because it had an illustration of a uterus (iirc). No Joke. So where the kid would get this magazine in my home town...I am just grateful the internet exists.

i just read a couple of articles on this, so i'm not sure, but i can't shake the feeling that there is a lot more to this story than meets the eye. the fact that ravi is a repeat offender, or the stuff on clemente's gay-personals profile, or how his partner was some sketchy older dude, or the ambiguous relationship that wei has to all of these proceedings, and whatever else. i know all about living w/ assholes first semester freshman year, and am fine with Ravi serving jail time for the crimes he committed, but i have a feeling that we are witnessing only the beginning of what's going to be an epic TMI-shitstorm/media-clusterfuck in the coming days* that will leave all of us feeling vaguely unclean and with an involuntary urge to smh @ country & species.

*I do tend to be always wrong about these things, though so...Doesn't stop me from posting, however.

every grocery store decided not to put an issue of Seventeen on the shelves because it had an illustration of a uterus

lol

tbf most women's magazines are totally pornographic (and not cuz of uterine diagrams, more for the countless "188 ways to give a satisfying blowjob!" features)

i wonder if they carried astronomy magazines that have uranus on the cover.

sorry.

ban

yet another suicide

jesus

guys, there were tons of kids who read XY as teenagers. they carried it in virtually every Borders and Barnes & Noble back when those places mattered.

also, teenagers DEFINITELY still read magazines. magazines still outperform tv in terms of teen trust-in-advertising. and magazines are the 10th-highest product that teens spend their money on, after food, music, video games, and clothing.

i mean, i'm not trying to be capt.-save-print-media here, but magazines are definitely important, and there really should be a mag for queer teens.

and magazines are the 10th-highest product that teens spend their money on, after food, music, video games, and clothing.

this is a disingenuous post, here's the complete top 10

1. clothing
2. food
3. video games
4. music
5. weed
6. booze
.
.
.
.
7. ag futures
8. nutritional supplements
9. cryonics
10. magazines

XD

i will kill you steven tyler

weed and booze are def. at the top of that list, maybe just under food and gasoline, ad execs just haven't figured out how to infiltrate those commodities yet...

(in the case of booze yet, they haven't figured out how to legally pander to the teen market through booze)

(in the case of booze yet, they haven't figured out how to legally pander to the teen market through booze)

Shit kinda sells itself to teens, imo.

right but advertising agencies cant target the teen market explicitly...

i think u guys are straying from the thread topic a bit

Really?

I think it's incredibly germane to the subject 'though I was always raised to look at all media circumspectly.

if only there was some kind of friendly, vaguely genitally-shaped cartoon character companies could use to market to teens

I was kind of hoping we could at least keep the teen suicide thread from devolving into full stop glibfest but I guess not

If there aren't any magazines, per se, are there good websites, message boards, national organizations, etc?

And by that, I mean really credible ones big enough to actually have a generational influence.

sorry

actually, there really aren't that many, especially in areas of the US that aren't...well, metropolitan. Michael, we live in the Bay Area— out here's there's LYRIC and loads of other organizations.

the other thing is that a lot of teenagers don't have their own computers. or if they do, it's shared with siblings and in a common area. you think a terribly lonely, possibly suicidal queer kid is going to be looking around gay youth empowerment sites while his/her (tho i must say that this is much more a male-bodied thing, as is suicide in general) siblings are watching Dora the Explorer reruns? i don't think so.

a magazine, on the other hand, is something that any kid with a modicum of smarts can keep hidden, at least until he/she is ready to not keep it hidden any longer.

i mean, i remember when my parents found my magazines, and it was the first in a series of knock-down, drag-out arguments that happened over the course of several years. thank god we didn't really have internet until i'd left home and had my own laptop.

I definitely made sure to erase the history when I was using the shared family computer. Still got caught anyway.

Awww, me too!

i couldn't really get onto anything. my parents still live in the dark ages. they don't understand what gmail is— and no, i'm not kidding.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgxNItGmiC4&fmt=35

i think this is a really, really good article on who, exactly, we should be blaming: http://www.salon.com/life/lgbt/?story=/mwt/broadsheet/2010/10/01/clementi_suicide_roommate_open2010

yeah— bullies are everywhere, not just in schools. people like Rekers, Dobson, and so many others are just more high-profile.

tangentially related - i found this savage post poignant

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2010/10/01/sl-letter-of-the-day-sorry-nothing-fun

I wonder who's lifting his luggage.

yeah this is pretty "poignant" in the wake of a gay dude whose public humiliation resulted in suicide

that slate article is equally otm and heartbreaking

that savage love post is so otm it hurts

yeah curt savage has some...persistent issues with tact we'll say but i thought the meat of the post was thoughtful and righteous

the savage piece is amazing. i feel like both do a great job of shifting the blame away from these two stupid kids, who aren't going to escape a single awful consequence of their awful actions, and on to the so-called leaders and structures who have done so much to creating a climate where this depressing incident could happen.

^^ yas

I just think it's incredibly stupid and counterproductive to spend an article chastising the climate that encourages alienation & public humiliation of gay ppl and then end it with a dumb joke about a gay dude who got publicly humiliated with an undertone of "oh I bet Tony Perkins is secretly gay!!"

if that's what you're taking from it............

i am so not into people chastising dan savage and other commentators for not being civil. fkn hell, this is why the left's insulting polemic game is so weak sometimes.

I guess I must be an awful person. what am I supposed take from "I wonder who's lifting his luggage"?

no, it was more "if the only thing you can take and think to comment on from the entire piece is the bitchy joke at the end....."

you know curtis i couldn't agree more really - the taste-of-yer-own-medicine reverse bullying is an awful look straight up - and savage is hardly perfect and i'm far from his biggest fan or anything (see his infamous "black homophobia" post) but the article had some very thoughful and heartfelt points which is why i posted it

it does indeed! not denying that. but the bitchy joke at the end really stuck out to me.

yeah i just wanted to let you know i was with you with that because that kind of bullshit does bug me too and i feel like it doesn't get called out enough

no bitchy jokes ever

Tasteful to announce this:

Following on the successful launch of its Twitter-inspired comedy "$#*! My Dad Says" last week, CBS has made a script deal for "Shh … Don't Tell Steve," based on a Twitter feed by the same name.

The CBS version of "Don't Tell Steve" is about man who deals with an immature roommate. Like "$#*! My Dad Says," the Twitter feed's premise is a guy who secretly Tweets the actions of somebody he lives with (in this case, his jobless, drunken roommate). The feed has drawn more than 13,000 followers.

I find it slightly ironic that people who don't always maintain what I'd call a civil discourse on ILX think Dan Savage undermines his whole argument by snarking on Tony Perkins, a public figure who uses his pulpit to a) be that public figure and b) inveigle against anyone who isn't Just Like Him. Having faith that your definition of a sinner will see Hell in the afterlife is just wishfully toxic magical thinking in its most benign manifestation - and cheerfully asserting someone else's eternal damnation because you believe they are a sinner is perverse. In my understanding of religion, using Jesus as your attack dog or concierge is, in itself, a form of blasphemy.

What has shocked the Hell out of me with these stories is hearing about 'neutral' policies from school administrators - the clever sociopaths who bully other kids in schools would only have to start calling the straight objects of their objection 'dyke' or 'fag' (which is what happens - bullying is the othering of a peer regardless of anything that peer may have 'done' and it was part of the smorgasbord that was served up to me when I was bullied) to put administrators at arm's length. Kids are endlessly inventive when it comes to dreaming up new ways to ruin a bullying victim's day, day after day, and every school that says they are 'neutral' instead of 'zero tolerance' on some forms of bullying is handing out engraved permission slips to enable a certain kind of venal kid that exists in every school whether or not the victims are straight or gay.

the new york post commemorates LGBT suicides today by...running a maggie gallagher op-ed:

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/don_blame_me_for_gay_teen_suicides_

we've all seen this, right

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax96cghOnY4

lol maggie gallagher is such a shitbag

Burns busted me up when I watched that yesterday. Was all holding back tears at my desk!

weirdly the "it gets better" line was always way more depressing to me as a prediction of some cliched destiny than any peer neg. but i have always been super abstract

"it gets better" as a buzzphrase alone gives little comfort for a depressed person who can't even think of next week, much less the future imo

what buzzphrase would you suggest

"I'm lovin' it"

haha

I'm not trying to be lol glib or anything, I just think success stories are not really comforting in themselves, especially since most of them focus on how shitty their life had been up to that point. The way to make gay teens feel better about themselves is to make this treatment unacceptable to begin with. Even if some will never ever be convinced, they'll at least recognize it as wrong the way outright racist views when expressed make whoever says them pretty much a social pariah.

what if you try to do both?

FOrks posted this article about suicidal mentality in another thread. It lines up with what corey just said, that if you're a suicidally depressed person, your thinking about linear time is distorted & you can't really think outside of the present.

For example, the time perspective of suicidal people changes in a way that makes the present moment seem interminably long; this is because, “suicidal people have an aversive or anxious awareness of the recent past (and possibly the future too), from which they seek to escape into a narrow, unemotional focus on the present moment.” In one interesting study, for example, when compared to control groups, suicidal participants significantly overestimated the passage of experimentally controlled intervals of time by a large amount. Baumeister surmises, “Thus suicidal people resemble acutely bored people: The present seems endless and vaguely unpleasant, and whenever one checks the clock, one is surprised at how little time has actually elapsed.”

Evidence also suggests that suicidal individuals have a difficult time thinking about the future—which for those who’d use the threat of hell as a deterrent, shows just why this strategy isn’t likely to be very effective.

Obama released his own it-gets-better.

I have a problem with the "It gets better" message. It's always possible to believe that the future will be your salvation, or that you'll be happier in the future, perhaps even after you die. In Rebel without a Cause, Jim Backus says something like "you'll look back at this crazy time and laugh" and James Dean just rages at the sound of that. It doesn't work to say that to a teenager.

I agree that it probably wouldn't make much difference to the suicide cases, but I think it's a positive message to send out to the kids who aren't quite that desparate but are having a hard time of it. Also, I highly doubt anyone involved in this campaign thinks it's enough and doesn't want bullying/homophobic behaviour to be seen as unacceptable.

Yeah, hopefully it helps out some kids. It's hard in high school to believe anything gets better because you haven't really lived enough life yet to see that happen firsthand.

i like the video project but a lot of the videos seem to suggest that there's an additional unspoken parenthetical - "it gets better (when you turn 18 and go to college in a different town and state)"

FWIW, this, co-authored by someone I know:

Educate students before condemning

By Pete Samet, Shane Smith & Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg

Published: Sunday, October 3, 2010

Updated: Sunday, October 3, 2010

The three of us met as Rutgers College students in Brett Hall on the College Avenue campus and in 2001 graduated together. As alumni, we wanted to reach out and express our deepest condolences to University student Tyler Clementi's friends and family. His death is a tragedy that words cannot capture.

We also want to speak out to the University community and share our thoughts about the discussion borne out of this tragedy. People are jumping too quickly — and we believe incorrectly — to the conclusion that this was a hate crime committed by two monsters.

Eighteen years old is still young. Most people are not born with a rock-solid sense of integrity, but rather meander toward one through a series of pitfalls and epiphanies. The first year of college is kind of like a repeat of middle school, and people often do incredibly stupid and insensitive things just to gain social points. College represents many people's first exposure to outward homosexuality — and even sexuality in general. In this context, we can easily see first-year School of Arts and Sciences student Dharun Ravi uploading the video sort of as a way of saying, "Wow, look at this gay person who is my roommate! Isn't that weird?" He may have just gotten carried away by the drama and attention. Of course, what Ravi did was grossly insensitive and inexcusable no matter what the motivation, but it was not necessarily hate-based. Nor is there any evidence that Ravi did this as a way of "destroying others' lives as a sport," as Garden State Equality's Steven Goldstein claimed. It should also be noted that it is very possible to imagine a thoughtless teenager doing this to his straight roommate.

This tragedy is compounded by the vilification of Ravi and Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy first-year student Molly Wei and the desire to see these two young people imprisoned. Ravi and Wei are deserving of our compassion and forgiveness. They have found themselves cast as villains in the middle of a national tragedy we are sure they never envisioned. Maybe it's easier to wrap yourself in self-righteous anger and cast them as homophobes, as hateful, as so foreign from yourself than to admit you could have been some version of them at 18. Out of this senseless death, we can have a national conversation about suicide prevention, and we can educate young people about the illegality and cruelty of humiliating another person by broadcasting their most private moments. Ravi likely thought of this as a prank — not a crime — and clearly thought nothing of the effect on his victim. This is a moment to educate the Tyler Clementis — that suicide is not their only option — and the Ravis of our community.

Pete Samet, Shane Smith and Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg are Rutgers College Class of 2001 alumni.

Also this:

http://chronicle.com/article/Rutgers-Tragedy-Is-Not-a/124868/

Rutgers U. Tragedy Is Not a License to Destroy Individuals

To the Editor:

The narrative about Tyler Clementi's suicide is so compelling that it must be true ("A Secret Moment Shown to the World, a Lonely Leap From a Bridge," The Chronicle, September 30). Many questions, however, are raised by his death: What led to it? Was it preventable? Did Rutgers University somehow fail him? There are also larger issues of youth suicide, bullying of virtual and real nature, and how to counter what is all too often a chilly climate for sexual-minority youth. Mr. Clementi's suicide is just one among a spate of gay young people who took their own lives recently.

The media attention and public outrage have been swift, with loud clamoring for the heads of the two other Rutgers students whom popular sentiment holds responsible for the freshman's death. Though the pair have already been charged with felonies, that is not good enough for some. The statewide New Jersey gay organization is demanding more serious charges and "the maximum possible sentence." Another gay group wants the two charged with manslaughter; that call is echoed by some 10,000 people on a social-networking site.

Why the rush to judgment? There hasn't even been time for a thorough investigation. We know something about what happened to Mr. Clementi, but much less about why. It's reckless to proceed without more facts. For a cautionary campus tale, the Duke University lacrosse case springs to mind.

The depth of this tragedy is not a license to destroy individuals, to scrap due process and fairness. Rutgers University ought to stand against prejudging this case or scapegoating anyone. That's the least it can teach its students, community, and the public. Others who know the dangers of vengeance should also speak out.

William Dobbs
New York
The writer is a longtime gay activist.

which, yeah, for those who plan on doing that, it's a difficult time to comprehend because there's nothing in your life up to that point that prepares you for that move, but then also, some kids also don't have that option? eg they can't afford higher education or moving expenses, they need to work to support their families, etc. which is to say that there needs to be some kind of action to happen first to effect the kind of changes that the campaign promises, rather than a passive waiting. xp to self

That "Class of 2001" letter says to me that the three writers were teenage bullies. People who participated in the behavior never think of it as a big deal.

yeah the "it gets better" meme doesn't really translate universally. like, if you are a black transgender teen who's homeless -- how much better is the passage of time gonna make it for you? i'm being wicked cynical about this but this meme -- it just seems like a gay pride version of a "hang in there!" kitten poster.

otm

That "Class of 2001" letter says to me that the three writers were teenage bullies. People who participated in the behavior never think of it as a big deal.

― I've got ten bucks. SURPRISE ME. (Laurel), Friday, October 22, 2010 11:44 AM Bookmark

Sorry, this is a fucking ridiculous and idiotic assumption to make, and from what I know of them highly unlikely.

One of them works for The Innocence Project, fwiw.

yeah, it's important to bear in mind that even though they're great cities, not all people want to move to NYC or LA or SF! the queer urban diaspora is fine and all but i think the work that needs to be undertaken now should go towards ensuring that LGBT high school kids in lubbock, tx or boyd county, ky can be out and proud without having to suffer repercussions for it

I think worrying about whether this was a hate crime or not completely misses the point, namely that this was grossly contemptible behavior that contributed directly to someone's suicide and therefore deserves harsh consequences. I am more sympathetic to her than him since as far as we can tell her biggest crime is allowing him to use her computer but they both should be receiving an ongoing lesson in how your actions have far-reaching consequences that can really, REALLY suck.

Full disclosure: A girl I knew and occasionally sang with in college (I will call her Girl A) killed herself during her senior year. She was something of a misfit and social outcast but had an amazing voice and was really nice, if kind of annoying. She befriended this girl who is one of the most toxic, poisonous personalities I've ever met (I will call her Girl B); this evil bitch got Girl A, a nerdy girl who was three years older than her, to open up and divulge a lot of her issues, including serious battles with depression and some form of mental illness that was either bipolar or schizophrenia, I can't remember now. Girl B then ran around and told these secrets to everyone around her, making fun of her alleged "best friend" all around our community of singers. This led to Girl A disconnecting from the tenuous social circle she'd spent 3.5 years building, spiralling into a deep depression, and eventually eating a bottle of pills. Girl B then ran around to these same people that she went to in order to make fun of Girl A to sob for sympathy about how her best friend was gone, never once acknowledging her own role in helping to push her over the edge.

After watching this situation unfold, it is very hard for me to elicit any sympathy towards people who do things like this regardless of circumstances.

"College represents many people's first exposure to outward homosexuality"

^ sooooo if I never met a black person before college what am I allowed to do to them?

speaking for me personally, you are allowed to leave envelopes stuffed with money under our dorm doors

"Ravi likely thought of this as a prank — not a crime — and clearly thought nothing of the effect on his victim. This is a moment to educate the Tyler Clementis — that suicide is not their only option — and the Ravis of our community."

It's also a moment to try to put the Ravis in jail, cuz I'm pretty sure the Ravis broke the law and while whatever the Ravis thought they were doing might result in a juicy plea and lighter sentence it really doesn't change the fact that this was a "prank" that was a "crime".

loool hi dere fillin out college apps

I don't think the question is whether they should have done whatever they did so much as whether they should be publicly pilloried as gay-bashing murderers before the full facts of the situation are determined, including what exactly happened and what the factors were in his suicide.

the idea that 18 year olds don't have "rock solid ideas of integrity" will fly, maybe, if you're talking about, idk, plagiarizing, but it's a pretty weak foundation for an argument when you're talking about secretly spying on your roommate having sex in order to broadcast it to your friends -- that shit is just beyond reprehensible & indefensible and there's no two ways about it

I'm perfectly happy pillorying them based on the facts that are known. The factors that led to this kid's suicide have little to do with what Ravis ACTUALLY did which was repellent regardless of the outcome.

Sorry, no sympathy here. They didn't think it was a big deal/would hurt anyone? Maybe they SHOULD have thought about it for .2 seconds, then.

the thing is I don't care if it could also have been a "straight prank" - people who presume to invade somebody's most private spheres for lols can go fucking hang for all I care; if their lives get destroyed, they perhaps ought to have thought longer before sharing somebody's sexual behavior for laughs. it's not just queer sexuality that's intensely personal; holding someone's intimate moments up for laffs is bullshit, period.

IOW hi dere otm in his thoughtful post above

something like this sort of happened in my dorm freshman year -- all of our itunes got connected once everyone got in the dorms & you could peruse people's itunes via shared networks & what not & apparently some kid was sharing a folder of child porn, obviously inadvertently, but it was found & i don't think that anyone went directly to an RA -- instead people put up signs on his door & shit (this was a few floors down so i don't know the full story exactly) & he eventually ended up fleeing school before classes even started -- kids are not always rational at 18 esp when they're living by themselves for the first time, but there is no way at all to excuse what this kid did

"apparently some kid was sharing a folder of child porn"

Wait what?

f their lives get destroyed, they perhaps ought to have thought longer before sharing somebody's sexual behavior for laughs.

otm -- i don't advocate 'eye for an eye' or shit like that, but really

i'm happy that their names are known and they've been publicly shamed, and that they'll presumably be punished by the relevant bodies, but i'm much happier that the wider conversation has moved to how endemic homophobia is in society rather than merely singling these two morons out

fwiw i'm a worried about treating Clementi et al. as martyrs for the cause, but it's probably already far too late for that.

yeah -- like, i'm not sure why you would have porn on your itunes, let alone child porn, but its true -- the FBI came to the dorm & everything, but he was gone by then

wow amazing

It IS beyond reprehensible and I defensible, but truthfully in the context of dorm culture it's sadly really not that shocking and I can completely see how people wouldn't think it was THAT bad. Which IMO is precisely the problem here (or one of them at least)

the thing is I don't care if it could also have been a "straight prank"

it would be really great if "prank culture", both on and offline, could be interrogated, this idea that if you're doing or saying something for the lulz you're excused from any consequences and (the targeted) people shouldn't take it so seriously. kind of feel getting rid of the "it was just a prank" excuse completely would be huge step fwd.

http://www.themaneater.com/stories/2006/9/1/child-porn-files-under-investigation/

At first it was two guys, then two little boys came on the screen," Stein said. "I thought, 'Oh my God,' and ran away."

Cramer resident Just1n V0lland said he saw the suspicious videos while checking shared files on iTunes.

V0lland said he took a screenshot of the material, which was composed of six video files, then posted it online to an open forum in hopes of getting an opinion on a further course of action against the suspect.

"I just wanted to get some advice about what to do," V0lland said.

Several viewers took a serious interest and posted it on a larger, more popular forum.

One of the other residents took a screen shot of the iTunes library and posted the picture on the suspect's door. Cramer resident 4lex M4uney said he took a photograph of the picture on the door and turned the picture over to MU police

Pranks really only work if the people you're pranking understand there are no hard feeling involved

although I must admit that the Prank Wars videos on College Humor are like far and away the funniest things I've ever seen on there, so sometimes it does work

it would be really great if "prank culture", both on and offline, could be interrogated, this idea that if you're doing or saying something for the lulz you're excused from any consequences and (the targeted) people shouldn't take it so seriously. kind of feel getting rid of the "it was just a prank" excuse completely would be huge step fwd.

^^^ so otm

I just think there's a difference between "their actions deserved to be punished" and "they deserve the worst they can possibly get," and the latter seems to be motivated by a broader feeling of anger at the treatment of homosexuals in our society than by any sober analysis of what actually happened in this case. However justified that anger is, it's not a valid basis for excessive punishment of two individuals. We don't heap on extra punishment just because we're generally upset or want to make examples, or at least we shouldn't. The fact that what they did was cruel and bad does not equate it to killing someone because of their sexual orientation.

it would be really great if "prank culture", both on and offline, could be interrogated, this idea that if you're doing or saying something for the lulz you're excused from any consequences and (the targeted) people shouldn't take it so seriously. kind of feel getting rid of the "it was just a prank" excuse completely would be huge step fwd.

THIS^^^^^^^ x1000

See also "but I was being *ironic*" and all the "what, can't you take a joke?" excuses used to justify "edgy" "humour" which just reinforce all the usual homophobic (racist/sexist/other hateful shit here) tropes already existent.

Lex otm.

Truthfully if you think that these two kids were some exceptionally horrible monsters, you are sorely mistaken and missing the point; the real problem is that tons of probably otherwise nice but stupid college students/teens would do something like this w/o realizing how bad it was

idk i think the one dude is kind of an exceptionally horrible monster

Based on...

"than by any sober analysis of what actually happened in this case"

No I think it's motivated by 1) the absolutely horrendous privacy violating act they committed and 2) the fact that their victim committed suicide. I agree that they can't necessarily be blamed for the second, but the first is awful enough that I'm not going to waste much time feeling sympathy for them.

re: hate crime or not I always go back to the fact that our system that we like to believe can remain even handed and without bias does not protect all groups equally. I don't think it's wrong to set an example in that case.

I just think there's a difference between "their actions deserved to be punished" and "they deserve the worst they can possibly get," and the latter seems to be motivated by a broader feeling of anger at the treatment of homosexuals in our society than by any sober analysis of what actually happened in this case

Just so we're clear, I want an example made out of this kid because his target killed himself; it has nothing to do with the target's sexual orientation.

Many xps, and no longer on topic, but....

It Gets Better is limited in its scope, and in some ways and for some people, things may not get better. But I don't think that its limits are a good criticism of the project itself. It is a start, and during a time when a person deep teen crises, or considering suicide, a feel-good "hang in there!" message is appropriate. Even for kids that are not suicidal, it's good to hear words of encouragement. When I was in middle school and high school, I was bullied like crazy. I didn't know I was gay, but others saw that I was a sensitive, girly, brainy, weird kid, and every single day was miserable. I never tried to kill myself (I was too scared of going to hell being one reason), but I spent a lot of time wishing I was dead and I was physically sick from the stress. I remember at that time I felt completely, totally isolated. For most of my teens I had literally no friends, and I spent all of my time alone or with my parents - who were clueless at best - or at school with redneck monsters (I was too shy and scared to make friends with some of the better crowd). It never occurred to me that my life could be anything but daily misery. I wish that I had had even a stranger on a video showing me the possibility that I wasn't stuck forever. I mean, even hearing Hillary Clinton say "it gets better," would have been helpful, never mind how awesome it would have been to hear that Lady Gaga or Joel Burns (with his relatable ordinary dude Southern accent) or Cyndi Lauper (!!!). Somewhere in the world there is a kid like my younger self who is picked on and utterly miserable, and instead of being 100% isolated like me, s/he gets a chance to see other possibilities.

And as for the hypothetical black transgendered teen, how could it not get better than being in high school? It may never be easy, but once s/he is in control of his or her life and able to make some choices, there is the opportunity for improvement, and that alone is so, so much better.

Based on...

― Bobby Short, Wayne Shorter (Hurting 2), Friday, October 22, 2010 11:25 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

i'd estimate that about 95% of college students know that it's absolutely not okay to purposefully spy on your roommate having sex in order to broadcast it over the internet to your friends

my calling him an "exceptional monster" has nothing to do with the homophobia involved -- i think his homophobia is probably rather garden variety & it's a reason why i hesitate to have guys over where i live w/ three other straight guys, but i don't think my roommates would rig a webcam in my room

elmo otm way upthread in signalling the extent to which this is being conceptualised as a white, middle-class thing. i guess thats where the gay pride thing got stuck tho

Based on...

― Bobby Short, Wayne Shorter (Hurting 2), Friday, October 22, 2010 11:25 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

i'd estimate that about 95% of college students know that it's absolutely not okay to purposefully spy on your roommate having sex in order to broadcast it over the internet to your friends
--J0rdan S.

I don't think that's true at all. Youre giving way too much credit to college students imo

i'd estimate that about 95% of college students know that it's absolutely not okay to purposefully spy on your roommate having sex in order to broadcast it over the internet to your friends

...but only 75% would actually refrain from doing it...

i think 95% would be true if you put it like that, as a hypothetical, to any random sober college student on their own. add in, idk, booze + herd mentality + the shock of finding yourself actually able to do it => figure goes way down.

idk even with the uptick in macbook sales i don't think webcam spying & internet broadcasting is a rampant issue across residential college campuses

lets argues more abt imaginary statistics

lets have more ppl defend the dude who broadcast his roommate having sex over the internet

If you're in idiot college student with that kind of time on your hands, you should be spending it trying to get laid or score drugs. Not picking on a roommate.

And as for the hypothetical black transgendered teen, how could it not get better than being in high school?

if this hypothetical teen ends up arguing with geir about melodic rock than it cannot be said to have "gotten better" for him

Btw I'm totally w J0rdan on this. The 'lots of college students would do this' idea is FALSE and also NOT A DEFENSE.

If you sat them down and asked them "would you invade someones privacy" most all will say no, but when you add groupthink/peer pressure/the (wrong) notion that the spied-upon person would never know/all this other bullshit that's in a dorm then it gets easier and easier to slip into a mentality where this sort of behavior is not completely reprehensible (which it IS)

So wait, are you saying all our lives are worse than this "hypothetical black transgendered teen"? That's a stretch.

"but when you add groupthink/peer pressure/the (wrong) notion that the spied-upon person would never know/all this other bullshit that's in a dorm then it gets easier"

What the fuck kind of lame ass excusing is this?

why did everyone drop "homeless" from "black transgender teen who's homeless"

Oh and I'm no defending him; I think what he did is pretty awful. What in saying is that the REAL issue is not Dharum Ravi; the real issue is a social climate in which people would do something like this and not realize how fucking bad it is.

that may have been my fault. sorry. "homeless" changes things for sure. xp

I'm not saying if you had them take a survey, I'm saying if you straight up found out how many college students would spy.

We probably think it's much more because of websites broadcast everyone who does. Sort of like the Tea Party seems to speak for alot more of Americans than it does due to media saturation.

"What in saying is that the REAL issue is not Dharum Ravi; the real issue is a social climate in which people would do something like this and not realize how fucking bad it is."

Sure, but that doesn't mean I'm going to lose any sleep about Dharum Ravi getting locked the fuck up and generally treated like the fucking awful human being he obviously is.

I'm not "defending" the guy, I'm asking why he should be charged with more than invasion of privacy.

you make men

why did everyone drop "homeless" from "black transgender teen who's homeless"
--O'Donnell and the Brain (HI DERE)

I bought the hypothetical black transgender teen a hypothetical house

American Pie is not a documentary

And also why it's so easy to conclude that someone you don't know must be an monster based on a single incident.

I'm not "defending" the guy, I'm asking why he should be charged with more than invasion of privacy.

If you look upthread, you will see that I have never said he should be charged with a hate crime.

btw, there was no 'groupthink' as it pertains to this one dude -- i think the girl probably is not a monster & was just a bystander that didn't have the guts to say "the fuck are you doing?", but the dude did this completely on his own & i don't think he was actually egged on by anyone

also i think that most people understand how fucked up this action is, which is why it rarely happens -- culture of homophobia in even the top colleges is a more pressing issue than that of privacy invasion or what not

Because it's a singularly monstrous incident.

i'm not sure that he should be charged with a hate crime either -- i think invasion of privacy + non-law directed punishments is probably enough

And also why it's so easy to conclude that someone you don't know must be an monster based on a single incident.

― Bobby Short, Wayne Shorter (Hurting 2), Friday, October 22, 2010 11:44 AM (38 seconds ago) Bookmark

yeah like, this is pretty obvious -- i think an absolute gross abuse of trust and privacy is not a one time impulsive incident like you could argue theft or assault is

"I'm not "defending" the guy, I'm asking why he should be charged with more than invasion of privacy."

Uh because it was a particularly egregious invasion of privacy that resulted in someone dying? What else is he being charged with btw? I haven't been following the legal wranglings.

And as for the hypothetical black transgendered teen, how could it not get better than being in high school?

i understand that support, even in a impersonal way, is essential -- and i don't disagree that kids need to hear these sorts of messages even if they are not suicidal.

but kids drop out, are disowned by their families, become homeless. there are worse circumstances than high school for kids of this age.

similarly if you drive off the road and hit someone you are not charged like you just drove off the road. consequences are fair play in punishment afaik but I am just a message board lawyer.

Punching someone in the middle of an argument is assault, but is also something that many people can reasonably see happening if they were in the same situation.

Punching someone in the middle of an argument, then stomping on their neck, then smashing a chair over their head is also assault but way over what most reasonable people would consider to be the line.

Most of us think Ravi's actions were of the headstomping variety.

unfortunately i think what ravi did is fairly run-of-the-mill thoughtless cruelty that certain types of people dole out to others and immediately forget about and continue on their merry way through life, whereas of course the targets will never forget those sorts of actions that may seem minor and unimportant to those who have done it.

the filter between high school and college weeds out a lot of it, maybe because people just simply grow up, but it still exists.

I'm not justifying them, in just saying that it doesn't shock me that it happened. Like how awful drunk driving is and how dangerous it is to everyone else on the road, but how not-shocking it is when someone whose had a several beers but isn't shitfaced or obviously drunk is stuck at a bar/party/etc and calmly assures everyone + himself that he's fine to drive when he really isn't

run-of-the-mill thoughtless cruelty = tweeting "ugh my roommate is bringing dudes back to the room, gross"

not-quite-run-of-the-mill cruelty that requires some modicum of thought to execute = "hey guys, check this webcam vid of my roommate bangin a dude at this specific time"

idk, i side more w/"run-of-the-mill" - as i think was said earlier in this thread, it's more surprising to me that this doesn't happen more

"If you don't kill yourself first something in your environment will probably change that makes your life less awful. Good luck with that."

hmm... not bad, but kinda long. tighten it up?

"It gets better."

We have a winner!

i still think unfortunately that the latter is run-of-the-mill, too. it's not the type of bullying that involves knocking someone down or pushing their face in a puddle or w/e, it's the more common kind of status reinforcement shit taken to a slight extreme (though with the internet, i'm not sure if that's extreme anymore for these types of kids?)

Even if it is run-of-the-mill I'm still all for punishing the shit out of this kind of run-of-the-mill nastiness.

i've said it before, i managed to sneak through public high school under-the-radar as a fuckup and then went to college prep school (where it was practically a communist system, hot girls hanging with weird geeks, it was kind of awesome), and i'm just glad the internet was just shy of becoming super-prevalent when i headed to college.

most definitely xp

i dont think the two statements are in conflict. terrible things are run of the mill

Even if it is run-of-the-mill I'm still all for punishing the shit out of this kind of run-of-the-mill nastiness.

^^^^ ditto

Wringing your hands about how they should be punished if this type of thing is so run-of-the-mill should not actually get in the way of punishment.

oh absolutely --

run-of-the-mill thoughtless cruelty that certain types of people dole out to others and immediately forget about and continue on their merry way through life

preventing the thoughtless cruelty from happening completely prob isn't going to happen any time soon, but a huge part of it would be preventing those doling it out from continuing on their merry way through life

i was always pretty bemused when i was in high school about how the faculty and staff would be super-concerned about the behavior of those gloomy semi-assholes who smoked on the other side of the street from the school, but the worst of the lot w/r/t making sure others knew their place and stayed there was *always* the kids who were the supposed golden boys and girls of the future, amirite

this whole situation has made whittling down my Facebook friend list much easier.

had one douche(who I didn't really like anyway tbf) update his status to say that "anybody who kills themselves is a punk, I cannot respect that, and like it or not, I'm NOT wearing any purple today!". The dude isn't homophobic in the least, he was more or less objecting on the grounds that he thinks suicide is "weak" (a grand oversimplification of things to say the least), but still nonetheless an insensitive thing to say when a lot of the people on his friends list were emotionally impacted by the events....very ignorant as well.

Why do people have to go out of the way to brag about why they didn't participate? Not wearing purple doesn't mean you don't support the cause, but wearing it as a badge of honor? screw that.

And really my point was that the latter required effort and foreplanning to set up and execute, raising it in my mind to something above the level of "run-of-the-mill"; it's equivalent to creating a slam book about someone and passing it around the school, or (even more analogous) photocopying someone's diary and posting it all over the school. Even if it starts out as a whim, executing it still requires doing several things over a period of time that is more involved than posting a stupid/unkind statement on your Twitter account or defacing someone's poster.

public humiliation of the sort in this case is not your "heat of the moment" variety, as HI DERE has stated above. perhaps some of the co-participants may have been lured in by the 'charisma' of the leader, but as far as the ringleader...if you decide to videotape someone's private sex escapades and use it to humiliate the guy elaborately, and during the several hours elapsed never once think "boy this is a bit OTT, maybe I should stop", you can't use the "ahh geez it was just a joke that went too far" defense.

i really don't get people who are like "suicide makes me ANGRY and i have no sympathy for people who do it" - i mean, anger is a rational response, part of the five stages and all, but i don't entirely buy that you exclusively are just angry when you hear that people take their own lives, to the utter exclusion of any empathetic response

I think you're underestimating people's ability to make other things about themselves

or maybe i do buy it and you're just a dick, idk

Well suicide is one of the few deaths that manages to directly/indirectly (depending on the circumstances) implicate the survivors to some degree, so I understand people using coping mechanisms. With that being said, often times that type of reaction is a temporary one, with the survivor making peace eventually.

The hatemongers that irk me are the type that take such an unprincipled approach with no such stimulant. IE, "suicide is cowardly". I mean, I'm not going to promote suicide, but it does take a huge amount of cojones to not only decide that you want to die, but actually implement it as well. The argument maybe that it's 'cowardly' to run from the world, but considering nobody knows what the afterlife brings, I wouldn't call it that at all.

or 'suicide is selfish', which is in itself an ironically selfish statement because it focuses solely on how the suicide impacted the people left behind and doesn't take into any consideration the feelings or emotions of the actual victim. (and yes, the word 'victim' is apt, even if it is a self-inflicted act).

Half of the people talking about how weak suicide is are probably 2-3 catastrophic events away from considering it themselves at any given time, anyway.

"And really my point was that the latter required effort and foreplanning to set up and execute"

He was ALSO planning to do it again!

Yeah, this was not a one time act of foolishness. This was something that had been planned and joked about quite a bit.

I'm not "defending" the guy, I'm asking why he should be charged with more than invasion of privacy.

― Bobby Short, Wayne Shorter (Hurting 2), Friday, October 22, 2010 12:44 PM (41 minutes ago) Bookmark

I can't speak for New Jersey, but in Ohio, videotaping without their knowledge two people having sex, then broadcasting it on the internet, is probably "pandering obscenity" and arguably "sexual assault" and "voyeurism," fuck this "invasion of privacy" bullshit.

All of which are felonies btw.

Again, this shit is not run of the mill. This is someone who is disconnected from reality, who thinks what they are doing has no affect on a real person, who cares nothing about this real person's feelings, and who is basically arranging his college experience based on sensationalist stuff that happens in movies and on collegehumor.com websites.

And again, I think if you are of the opinion that many college students would actually do this, you are pretty much sharing the mindset of this sociopath.

dude wow. really?

This is someone who is disconnected from reality, who thinks what they are doing has no affect on a real person, who cares nothing about this real person's feelings.

nah this is pretty common actually, but ravi took it up a notch where most people would say "dude back off..."

i mean you just described the m.o. of common, banal bullying

And again, I think if you are of the opinion that many college students would actually do this, you are pretty much sharing the mindset of this sociopath.

I don't think that the majority would but I do think "many" would, and I think "you are pretty much sharing the mindset of this sociopath" is asinine. I'm misanthropic, not sociopathic, kthx.

yes ok, this is a particularly egregious example of orchestrated humiliation that had unintended tragic consequences -- but in my opinion, this bullshit is not new or unique.

"severely lacking in empathy" sure -- this is a pretty common trait of dudes of this age. "disconnected from reality" is something else.

"disconnected from reality" is hyperbolic to the point of silliness

throw dude in jail tho

If reality is spending your time videotaping your roommate's sex life and putting it on the reality, then I suppose he's connected to reality.

putting it on the reality = putting it on the internet

You wouldn't say that someone who photocopied someone's diary and plastered it all over the walls of the school building was "disconnected from reality"; this situation isn't really any different.

i'm sensing some sort of disconnect here, like this behavior is unique because he thoughtlessly humiliated his gay male roommate. but this sort of public humiliation and worse happens to women all the time. the only difference was the target, not the motive or the means.

like, explain to me the difference between this event and some asshole kid texting a cellphone pic of a girl giving him a bj to his entire hs senior class.

not defending this shit by any means but if this bullshit is somehow new or unprecedented to you then you, my friend, are the one who is disconnected from reality.

What about how basically his whole dorm defended him and was all NO NO YOU DONT UNDERSTAND. Is the whole building filled w sociopathic monsters disconnected from reality?

"like, explain to me the difference between this event and some asshole kid texting a cellphone pic of a girl giving him a bj to his entire hs senior class."

Uh there is no difference.

"Is the whole building filled w sociopathic monsters disconnected from reality?"

Well it is Rutgers.

xp unless the girl was aware she was being filmed... I guess that might be a minor difference.

I mean I'm speaking from the experience of having attended Rutgers from 2005-2010 and dorming my first two years so...

^^^ total sociopath.

j/k

alex my point is that there is no qualitative difference. thanks for paying attention.

This thread is basically turning into people falling over each other to take the most hardline position.

"turning into"

"alex my point is that there is no qualitative difference."

Did this hypothetical bj girlfriend commit suicide?

Also did the student take the picture planning to post it on the internet?

I give up on this thread

Do you think Ravi would have done this if he thought there was a reasonable chance that Clementi would commit suicide? I mean I don't know whether he would or wouldn't, but do you have a basis for assuming so if you think so?

I don't really care. I'm stating that at least two differences between the example above (hs bj internet post) and this one is 1) effect (which is why we are even hearing about it) and 2) the amount of premeditation (which is why Ravi is probably going to jail--although in the example above it's not impossible to believe that dude might go to jail as well.)

alex: your questions are immaterial to the point. sexual humiliation of women is completely normalized and run-of-the-mill in our culture. just because the target was a gay man in this case does not make this a new or exceptional species of human cruelty, as some posters itt would have you believe.

breaking news: people are capable of being monsters, details at 11.

"sexual humiliation of women is completely normalized and run-of-the-mill in our culture."

I don't disagree.

"just because the target was a gay man in this case does not make this a new or exceptional species of human cruelty, as some posters itt would have you believe."

Really? I must have missed that.

yep, you did.

Really I said that because the target was a gay man that this was special?

dude, you need to brush up on your reading comprehension. nowhere did i indicate that you said that. my comments were in response to adam bruneau upthread.

Ah my bad. The way you made it sound like multiple posters made me think it was a blanket indictment.

i think the secret broadcasting of someone having sex and broadcasting it in real time over the internet is fairly uncommon -- also i don't think that because the general idea of it is 'plausible' doesn't make it special -- it pretty much sounds like some fake porn scenario

it's not the same as SEXTING -- pretty much every SEXT example you could bring up involves the victim consenting to the photo being taken, either by that person or the person they are with

also

What about how basically his whole dorm defended him and was all NO NO YOU DONT UNDERSTAND. Is the whole building filled w sociopathic monsters disconnected from reality?

― ksh ksh ksh ksh it ksh it (Stevie D(eux)), Friday, October 22, 2010 2:01 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest

like, i think plenty of us would have no problem morally with robbing a bank of america? but pretty much of all us aren't gonna rob a bank of america?

i definitely agree w/ elmo as it pertains to women, but the dude who secretly spied on erin andrews in her hotel room was vilified as the same type of monster -- i think people still react violently to this extreme invasion of privacy -- sexting and stuff just gets like "kids these days are retards" reactions i think

No my point is that in context, when everyone's buddies or "just playing around" or whatever this behavior doesn't seem nearly as horrible to the people who commit it or witness it as it actually is.

i agree w/ you, but also this dude wasn't getting 'egged on' or encouraged by his dormmates, at least not initially, and i doubt that an actual tangible culture of homophobia or lax morality towards webcam spying already existed in the specific dorm -- there was a point where this dude decided to turn his webcam on, go on twitter & have his friends watch clementi have sex, and that makes him markedly worse than the rest of the mob -- sure his friends should've been like "this is gross & awful, what is your problem?" but you can't level them w/ the dude that actually did the deed

well maybe you can -- i would say that if there were ppl who were all "oh dude tell me when this happens again" then they are in the same boat as ravi himself, but he still pretty much stands alone to me for conceiving & acting

& ppl who defended him afterward are just abject assholes, yes

People who are trapped in a closed or limited environment with the perp, aka his dorm-mates, do have a lot of social incentive to downplay the monstrousness of this guy and/or his actions. If that incentive is allowed to stay, and it softens the public response, it pushes us a fraction closer to bullying being not a big deal to more people.

Taking a negative or condemnatory viewpoint and sticking to it is strongly discouraged in groups when you have to somehow live or work together afterward. God knows why.

well in strict terms of who should be punished for this, i guess just ravi should be, but his friends should absolutely accept some responsibility - the point of widening the debate to include everyone who's contributed to what often seems to kids like this as the default homophobia of society is that tragedies like this shouldn't just be pinned on one asshole who's comfortably othered from the rest of us, it's about the people enabling him and magnifying his actions

^lex otm on this...sounds to me by the way they're defending Ravi, that Clementi was the hall freak and the butt of the eentire dorm's joke...

http://gawker.com/#!5784461/tyler-clementis-parents-dont-want-his-bullies-punished-harshly

Damn, this was only 6 months ago?

fucking lose it when I see that kid's face. poor smiling kid so full of promise. made it to a good college, who knows what might have lay ahead. stupid old world full of dark horrible things imo

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13148786

Dharun Ravi indicted!

good

fucking lose it when I see that kid's face. poor smiling kid so full of promise.

seeing his photo just made me tear up again. damn this.

my admittedly totally unsubstantiated suspicion is that some of these administrators and teachers don't really have a problem with the casual homophobia that's totally endemic to high school culture.

― horseshoe, Thursday, September 30, 2010 7:30 PM (6 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

now that i've been student teaching for a while this suspicion is wholly substantiated

When the lawsuits start to pile up some more they'll start having a problem.

now that i've been student teaching for a while in high school this suspicion is wholly substantiated

haha i know, but i think it's even worse than i realized when i was in high school. in a way. more kids are out, but i actually hear the things their teachers say about them now. it's a good news/bad news thing.

:) at you but :( at the whole reality of this situation-aspect.

i still have this thread bookmarked and seeing it pop up just causes that horrid pit-of-my-stomach feeling all over again :/

i was thinking about this recently— even at my liberal Quaker high school (thanks grandma for footing that bill), there were hardly any kids out. with me and a few others, it was open secret territory. only when i was a senior did someone in my class come out, finally. apparently now, it's all gravy, but it was weird going there.

haha i know, but i think it's even worse than i realized when i was in high school. in a way. more kids are out, but i actually hear the things their teachers say about them now. it's a good news/bad news thing.

Not a surprise. Can you post a few remarks you've heard? At the university where I work, the professors are of course more liberal than the administrative staff (of which I'm a member too).

in my college town in rural Ohio, the only out and out homophobes were people driving through town. hard to be a homophobe in a town with the biggest drag ball in the midwest.

Where, tabes? My bro in law grew up in Stow.

Oberlin. i think that my progression of Quaker high school --->Oberlin--->art school in San Francisco explains why i'm such a hard left queer wingnut, tbh.

Oh, right, you've mentioned it. Oberlin was my dream school and first choice, but I got offered negligible financial aid.

i would say there are a lot of casual "gay jokes" thrown around. at my current placement it's actually weirder, because it's a middle school. none of the kids are out as far as i know (not sure how likely it is that a 12 year old would know he or she was gay anyway) and the culture of the school is pretty conservative. the teachers will joke about which kids they think are going to turn out to be gay in a pretty derogatory way. always boys they're joking about, and they are of course boys who like to draw or speak softly or somehow transgress the bounds of acceptable masculinity. they will also think it's hilarious when the kids throw the word "faggot" around rather than reprimanding them/asking them to consider their language. (i have heard one teacher, white dude, use the word "faggot" in earnest behind closed doors.) by the way i hear "faggot" all the time at a suburban, predominantly white middle school, same as i did in an urban, predominantly black and Latino high school. at the high school, kids were out, though, and the culture of the teachers was maybe marginally more progressive? i live in a pretty reactionary area of the country, though. the out gay and lesbian kids didn't seem socially isolated, which was great, but i was actually told by a teacher not to bother making an issue of kids' (usually young boys) use of "faggot" or other homophobic jokes, which i tended to do. she claimed it was a "cultural difference" between me and the kids, which i found hilarious. i wanted to be like, lady, i went to high school once too, and this is how boys talked at my high school and they were white and their parents had money so i don't know what you think "other cultures" are like wrt this problem.

oh man sorry that was long and unfiltered. i have a lot more i could say, but it would involve a level of detail that i'm a little paranoid about going into on the internet. one of the nice things at my first placement, the high school one, is that i heard straight kids (all girls) voicing the idea that there was nothing wrong with being gay (in the context of a class discussion on Things Fall Apart). on one occasion the girl speaking up was clearly doing it to preemptively stick up for another girl in the class who was a lesbian. feel like that wouldn't have happened at my high school, if anyone was out in the first place. in a lot of ways i felt like the students at that school were more liberal than their teachers...but then there were the teenage boys who were obsessed with calling each other gay and using the f word and sometimes said nasty things about the most socially prominent out gay boy.

reading this thread always makes me so god damn mad

that's pretty rad that you're trying to make an issue of it, but let me tell you: there are plenty of 12 year olds who know they're gay. i certainly did.

you're right. i guess it would have been more accurate for me to say that any twelve-year-olds at that school who know they're gay are probably not about to out themselves in that climate. and who could blame them?

exactly.

I'm as guilty as anyone when it comes to snide jokes. I can't resist a one-liner, and this semester I've got a too-vulnerable target: the boyfriend of our incoming editor in chief (a girl) is obviously gay but doesn't know it yet. On a half dozen occasions or more I've been unable to resist remarking to the chief's (straight) colleagues on his reluctance to come out, fully aware that he needs time, if he ever will. I had the Rutgers incident in mind a few days ago.

Just a reminder that those of us who've passed through the fire can be as merciless.

where i grew up was kind of a nest of backwards-glancing thinking w/r/t gender and sex and race and i'm pretty glad that i got the hell out of there and experienced other worlds firsthand. i think a lot of people just stay stuck in this way and the tragedy is that i believe most people who would act like this or say such things (maybe not an overwhelming 99% "most" but way past 50%) with exposure to other cultures and such will actually become more open-minded, and if they just stay stuck in an environment that doesn't encourage other cultures or POVs they'll grow into a nasty old bigot and the world will have passed them by.

i mean, i have definitely make comments like that, too— but mostly aimed at this one kid from college, who was a vegan, very religious jew who was also a total gym-rat and obviously a total homo, but terrified of his family, which by a certain point..i don't know, if you can't say FUCK YOU to your parents, then maybe you have deeper issues.

what you and Alfred are talking about seems like a slightly different thing to me. the "gay" kids are the butt of these teachers' jokes not because they're in denial, but because being gay is less-than.

that's pretty rad that you're trying to make an issue of it, but let me tell you: there are plenty of 12 year olds who know they're gay. i certainly did.

and plenty who don't, i didn't (at least not y'know in those terms)

my first high school was 98% white and really any and all minority students, "troublesome" kids, "losers", or people from low-income families were actively ignored or worse by *everyone* and a lot of the faculty seemed p eager to be down w/the cool kids and i can't think of one who seemed to be willing to step up to the plate for the outcasts and back then i sorta sensed that a few guys i knew were gay but i understand why they'd never want to come out at that time, no authority figures would have helped them out imo and in fact may have been sympathetic to other "views."

i think i may have read a few too many BTL internet comments on hip-hop and sports sites of late, but i'm really not that optimistic right now about things heading in the right direction w/r/t widespread social acceptance

a lot of the faculty seemed p eager to be down w/the cool kids

yeah, this dynamic is a problem i have noticed.

a lot of the faculty seemed p eager to be down w/the cool kids and i can't think of one who seemed to be willing to step up to the plate for the outcasts

this appears to be regrettably commonplace for most high schools, i'd wager

lol xp

it's kind of pathetic tbh. i don't know if this is something anyone else has seen either but there were definitely teachers who only wanted to be a geometry teacher or counselor so they would be able to have a job that would allow them to be one of the 15 coaches the football team had. pretty sure we had more staff than the bears.

I should add: I'm open with the student staff (all straight) about my sexuality, and close (as I will reasonably allow) to a couple of them -- close enough to discuss men. If gay men can poke fun at the fear of a younger gay man who's clearly in a pupal stage in front of younger, straight colleagues, then I suppose there's been some evolution.

ugh. we didn't even have a football team lol.

i once went to our dean of students to tell him that a group of kids were picking on me in the locker room - not merely name calling but also just inappropriately touching me and shit like that - and he did exactly NOTHING. these were kids that i would see him talk to in the hallway from time to time. two years later when i was a peer leader and leading a group of freshman on a tour of the school he asked me how i was adjusting to the HS - he thought i was in 9th grade.

to say nothing of the principal who most kids in the school didn't even see, let alone interact with

i once went to our dean of students to tell him that a group of kids were picking on me in the locker room - not merely name calling but also just inappropriately touching me and shit like that - and he did exactly NOTHING.

ugh. that is fucking horrible and also kind of incomprehensible to me. i would like to think it wouldn't go down like that at the schools i student-taught at this year, but i am not confident.

Election's portrait of fucktard high school administrators in short-sleeved shirts acting like they oversee a fiefdom remains dead-on. It's like Devo's "Through With Cool" made flesh.

yeah our principal was inaccessible too. and the dean of students predictably was more concerned with kids wearing overkill shirts and dudes who smoked than what is actually the shit that makes high school kind of awful (which tends to overlap with the shit that high schools celebrate as part of their tradition of "pride" and whatever.) my dad was prez of the school board during my time in HS and he was disheartened by the direction that the school district was taking and the referendums for school expansion that were knocked down (because who wants to pay taxes for improved education, right?) and basically told me after my last year there "you should just go somewhere else, we'll send you there too." i took him up on that offer before he could finish the sentence.

i wavered on saying anything to anyone because i was afraid of seeming like a snitch

which i'm sure holds a lot of other kids back too. he could've disciplined them but i still would have a locker next to theirs.

yeah, especially at the high school i worked at i doubt a kid in that position would have even said anything because there was such a strong anti-snitch culture at the school, and such oppositional relations between faculty and students to begin with. (predominantly white faculty, predominantly students of color, lots of fucked-up-edness in the way the school was run.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/CRIME/05/06/new.jersey.rutgers.suicide/index.html?hpt=T2

This seems right to me.

yes but:

"...counseling associated with cyberbullying and alternate and cultural lifestyles."

I think I ignored that because it doesn't appear to be well-formed English

like, what is a non-cultural lifestyle?

2left
In the movie "M*A*S*H", Hawkeye and the gang planted a mic near Frank Burns and Hot Lips Houlihan's bed. The audience thought it was hilarious. Something similar happened with the internet in "American Pie". It's a sophomoric prank that has been played out for decades. the difference here is if they did this specifically to make fun of the fact he was gay.

What's everyones take on this being a hate-crime?

Twilight Moms xp

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/08/rutgers_suicide_new_details_re.html