Today, I heard about a boy who committed suicide because his roommates took a video of him having sex and posted it on the internet. In that sentence alone, there are enough reasons to be angry. Asshole people who defy someone’s right to privacy and cause them to do permanent self-harm. There’s no way the intent of releasing that video could not have been malicious. But what pisses me off more?
He was gay.
How many people are going to have to be put through hell before we, as a society, realise that demonising someone for being who they are is wrong? How many people will have to kill themselves before we wake up and see that the environment we’re creating for people not so different than “the rest of us” is toxic and wrong?
How many people are going to have to go through what I went through in high school-- being called a “dyke” under their breath or worse, that look. How many people are going to go through hell? How many people are going to be physically abused and be too afraid to say something because their school bureaucracy is unkind to their sexual orientation? How many people are going to be too scared to speak up when they know something is wrong? How many people are going to have to quietly suffer?
How many people are going to be defined by simply a small part of who they are? How many people are never going to get the chance to be a person because they’re always going to be “the lesbian?”
How many more people, how many more stories, how many more fears, how many more suicides before our culture realises that this is wrong?
No comments:
Post a Comment