A New American Dream: A post in the memory of Seth Walsh and Tyler Clementi

I have posted several times since I’ve started this blog that I am pro-LGBT.  I believe that everyone should be able to be who they are.  No one else should be able to tell you who you are.  That is up to you and what you identify as.  That is your business and anyone who disagrees can mind their own business.  However, our society it is enforcing this idea that these brave people who are willing to stand up for who they are…are less than the rest of us.  They can’t fight for our country openly, they can’t get married and they are seen as ‘immoral’ and ‘abominations’ by the religious right and a lot of politicians.  Sometimes, these people who are just trying to be who they are end up losing their lives due to the pressure they are under to be what society wants them to be.

This month…we have two people have made the news due to suicides because of this kind of mindset.  Two people who were just trying to live like everyone else bullied and treated poorly for who they are and now they are no longer with us.  Seth Walsh, a 13-year-old boy from California and 18-year-old Tyler Clementi, a freshmen at Rutgers.

Seth Walsh was just a boy who happened to be gay.  Seth being gay should have been regarded as anything else about a person like having brown hair or blue eyes or a birth mark.  It should have been just another descriptive thing about a person with no bearing on how that person should be treated.  However, the taunting reached a point where on September 19^th this 13-year-old took a rope and hung himself.  He was in a coma until Tuesday when he died.  A person of the age of 13 who has sorted out a part of who they are and was willing to be open about it should have been something that was supported and appreciated.  How many people live most of their lives trying to sort that out?  And yet now he is no longer with us.

Tyler Clementi was a victim of two people’s intolerance that directly lead to his suicide.  A freshman living with Dharun Ravi, he asked his roommate if he could have the bedroom to himself so that he could have some privacy.  Dharun agreed like any good roommate would, but instead of giving him his privacy he and Molly Wei first recorded him having sex and posted about it on Twitter as if it was a joke.  He then tweeted two days later “Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12.  Yes it’s happening again.”  This breach of privacy and public outing of his roommate led to his suicide and I very much hope he gets the highest penalty the court can give him.

And now a school chimes in on this act.  A transgender teen, Oakleigh "Oak" Reed, has been stripped of his homecoming king title even though he was legitimately voted it by his classmates.  Comparatively, it is not as big a deal as two people dying, but the issue is still the same.  A school deciding that because he was registered a girl, he is still a girl.  HE is whatever HE wishes to be.

When the idea to post about this came about, a good friend of mine brought up that the movie The Virginity Hit has come out and since then a girl was secretly taped having sex (I could not find that article) and now this Rutger student has been killed because he could not handle being outed in a world that does not welcome who he is.  The fact that a movie that by a lot of accounts was not good has brought about these happenings shows how people don’t think about what they are doing to one another.  These people who do these things don’t care about consent, privacy or another person’s right to have sex without an audience.  However, what hurts me the most is that someone lost their life because of this.

When I read about this, my mind automatically went to a zine a friend of mine posted on facebook yesterday.  I read it and it resonated with me because it’s true.  Our society that is hostile towards LGBT is the gear that starts this turning.  It is the reason why these two people are dead and it’s sickening.

You only need to go to queersecrets and read about people who are trapped in a society that does not accept them.  There are positive messages there and on the inside I cheer for them.  Not because I am queer, but because I want everyone to be happy with who they are damn it.  That should be the American dream.  Not this man/wife/1.2 kids/white picket fence bullshit.  It should be being happy with who you are regardless of what that means as long as you are not getting in the way of someone else who should be busy trying to do the same thing.