Rutger's University Incident

     For those who do not know about this, over the past week at Rutger’s University two students secretly filmed another student engaging in some sort of sexual encounter and then broadcast the footage to the Internet for everyone to watch. The student was a male and was supposedly making out with another male. One of the students doing the filming was the roommate of the kid being filmed and the other student was a female friend. I suggest checking out CNN or another news broadcast if you are interested in all the details; however, what you will find is that ultimately, within a few days of this footage being broadcast on the internet and Twitter, the allegedly gay student killed himself by jumping off of the GW Bridge, leaving behind only a Facebook update from his phone reading “Jumping off the gw bridge sorry”.
 
     I am so sick and tired of hearing stories like these and others. Gay kids or kids who are perceived to be gay that are bullied to the point that they have decided that taking their own lives is their only escape. And not to speak for those who can no longer, but when I say “the only escape”, I don’t mean from the embarrassment of that one isolated situation. What I mean is the only escape from a world that will never change and never accept them. I really don’t mean to discredit an individual experience or to justify the actions of people who commit suicide. I think we can all appreciate that suicide is not the most logical or rational choice someone can make. However, why do we code these situations by focusing on the humiliation of exposing someone’s personal life on the internet? Individually, yes the experience must be excruciatingly painful. However, I am willing to bet my own sanity that the reason this student chose to kill himself had way more to do with the aggressive and hateful intentions behind the exposure of his sexuality, i.e., bullying on account of sexual orientation.
  
     Excuse me for being bitter or lacking hope for change, but I have witnessed and experienced gay bullying more times than I can count. Additionally, I am tired of it not being OK to address gay bullying at the root of the problem. Why do we have to dance around why these things happen? People have got to start being penalized for exactly what their intentions produced. In this case, these students purposefully breached another person’s trust and exposed their personal life with the intent to embarrass him because they thought he was gay. I am not at all saying they should be charged with murder. But what certainly should happen is that these students should at the very least be charged and tried for malicious sexual harassment. I am not trying to sound like one of those gays who want to make everything about someone’s sexual orientation. However, as long as people are killing themselves or even being assaulted (oh hey, UVA) because of it, I feel completely justified in making it ALL about being gay. Because, that is exactly what it is about.

Here’s a link to the story I watched and read about.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/09/29/new.jersey.student.suicide/index.html?hpt=C2