Requiem for Strings

Not since the murder of Matthew Shepard more than a decade ago has the death of a young gay person attracted so much attention as last week’s suicide of Tyler Clementi. In the methods that motivated the boy’s public ‘shaming,’ the tragedy is uniquely one of our times: the video-feed intrusion into the boy’s private sex life by his college roommate; the boy’s discovery of this betrayal, and his roommate’s second attempt to peep into Tyler’s activities; Tyler’s written ruminations on a computer gay-chat site; and the boy’s final decision to jump to his death off the George Washington Bridge.

The ultimate agony belongs to Tyler Clementi’s parents who, with remarkable forbearance and dignity, issued a statement that read in part: “Our hope is that our family’s personal tragedy will serve as a call for compassion, empathy and human dignity.” They issued their remarks amid a media frenzy and outraged calls for increased legal penalties against the roommate, Dharun Rhavi, and his accomplice—perhaps unwitting—Molly Wei. To a great many people, the simple charge of invasion of privacy seemed inadequate to the horrible consequences that had been set in motion by what may have seemed to the perpetrator(s) nothing more than a prank via video-feed.

In the wake of Tyler Clementi’s suicide, we have learned of some six recent cases of cyber-bullying against gay youth, one as young as thirteen, that also resulted in suicides, thus placing the story in a horrible national context. To my mind, this reveals less the evils of cyberspace and more the moral vacuity of our entire media culture, where nearly everyone feels obligated to broadcast every kernel of his and her existence, and nearly no one thinks this is, to use a nineteenth-century word, unseemly.

To be sure, we discuss many things publicly that no one even fifty years ago would think seemly, and that includes homosexuality. Indeed, one of the more remarkable features of the broadcast coverage of this terrible and sad story was how little was made of Tyler’s being gay, in the sense that although it was the fulcrum of the tragedy that ensued, no television reporter I saw misunderstood the horror the boy felt at being ‘outed’ against his will.

As reported here in New York City, the story I saw was always, and properly, about the terrible betrayal a musically talented and shy teenage boy felt at having his private life invaded, and no one questioned why he would, of course, not wish to have one of his sexual encounters with another man broadcast for all to see. The possibilities, though never enunciated, seemed endless: Perhaps these were his first tentative forays into his sexuality. Perhaps he was not yet out to his parents or relatives. Perhaps, as seems to be the case, he was not out to most living in his college dorm and wasn’t ready for that disclosure. He was, by all accounts, a particularly shy young person, a sensitive and talented violinist, and had not yet established a strong social network in the first week’s of his freshman year at college.

He did have the presence of mind to report this virtual home invasion to Rutgers University where he was in attendance as a freshman, although the exact nature of the college’s response is unclear. And he was self-identified enough as a gay youth to know which gay-chat site to use in order to vent his frustrations and perhaps get some useful feedback.

But it would seem he was too young, too untested and untried in life’s vicissitudes, to have the full register of perspective and fortitude to simply ‘gut out’ what must have felt like the most awful shaming to which he had ever been subjected. No one has been named or come forward as the man with whom he was intimate during that first video entrapment, and for that young man’s sake, we can only hope he will not be forced into the brutal glare of media attention simply to slake our age’s unquenchable thirst for every dirty detail.

If this story shocks the conscience of America, so much the better, but some of us are not so much astonished as deeply dismayed and aggrieved. LGBT youth suicide has long been known to be unacceptably high, and the incidence of bullying at all educational stages has only in the last few years finally been understood to have moved beyond the schoolyard into our children’s homes. I am all for youngsters in grade school having cell phones close to hand in case of emergencies, but I am equally fixed in my belief that both etiquette and the law must keep up with the misuse possible with cell phone cameras and related digital communications. Etiquette is too weak a word for what I mean; if children don’t learn ethics as they relate to private and public behavior, then we are risking the rise of a generation whose moral anomie will pervert our sense of common citizenry.

LGBT youth are and have always been all our children. We must hold the feet to the fire of those politicians who believe they can drape themselves in the flag and make excuses for the inequalities enshrined in law—“don’t ask, don’t tell” (DADT) a prime example, but then so many others come to mind. Young people internalize the hate messages they hear in the public square; they need to know that others, straight and gay, find them unacceptable. If it were only the outrages of a Fred Phelps with his sick demonstrations at the funerals of American soldiers, it would be bad enough. That demented devil is so over the top as to seem as hysterical as Father Coughlin was toward the Jews in the 1930s. Alas, worse are the not so subtle betrayals of our LGBT youth by "respectable" public figures like Senator John McCain, for whom DADT is merely a political football to be played to whatever goal line works best for the Republican Party.

But let us not lose sight of Tyler Clementi, a boy whose loneliness in those last hours must have felt inconsolable. Yes, we have anti-bullying media campaigns under way, like Dan Savage’s which presents queer celebs and achievers tell in a series of short videos how they were once bullied but have been able to move past it—how their adult life has gotten better and they are doing what they were always meant to do. I don’t mean to dismiss these out of hand, but ironically, they enforce the fake intimacy our young people mistake for the real thing. I wonder how effective these will be. It seems to me that in the absence of real personal support with adult authorities both gay and straight, and in the absence of institutions assuming the responsibility of in loco parentis, and in the absence of serious penalties for bullying of all kinds, lonely queer kids under extraordinary peer pressure will continue to have their self-esteem steamrolled, crushed, replaced by an overwhelming sense of shame. Their emotions will be pulled taut as a string. A violin string. And tightened just ever so much too much—they snap.