Anti-LGBT Bullying Turns Deadly  

Growing up gay. How hard could that be?

Just ask Christopher White, the director of education and training at the National Sexuality Resource Center. Stories from his childhood lend credence to Robert Burn’s somber words—Man’s inhumanity to man. Makes countless thousands mourn! Even the most obliviously upbeat are likely to pause.

Age five: he pretends to breastfeed his doll. His grandfather catches him; yells, “that’s not what boys do”; and snatches the doll from him.

Age thirteen: at a dance, his best friend introduces him to all of her former schoolmates as, “This is Chris. He’s gay.”

Age sixteen: the interior of his car is covered with flour and soaked with cologne; outside, it’s plastered with eggs, menstrual pads, and the words “die fag” and “hope you get AIDS.”

“I moved my car from the driveway to wash it because I didn’t want my family to see,” White recalls. “But my mother came out of the house crying. I told her it was okay. I had to be strong.”

Having experienced bullying first-hand, White wasn’t shocked to learn that in separate incidences two eleven-year-olds, Jaheem Herrera and Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, committed suicide in April after being harassed in school. Though neither boy was “out” or necessarily gay, both were branded as gay.

“It was tragic and horrible, but I’m not surprised it happened,” White says.

Bullying is an epidemic at schools. According to a 2005 survey by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), 65% of teens reported they had been verbally or physically harassed or assaulted within the last year. Of these teens, 33% reported they were harassed because they are, or are perceived to be, gay or lesbian.

In general, students who are bullied have difficulty making friends and have poorer relationships with their classmates, according to a 2001 survey by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Taking that into consideration, it’s not surprising that they also are more likely to suffer from depression and low self-esteem. For gay teenagers, suicide is the number cause of death.

The deaths of Herrera and Walker-Hoover suggest to Eliza Byard, the executive director of GLSEN, that larger forces may be at play: global warming, the war, economic woes. “People are losing their jobs, their houses, their livelihoods. It’s a stressful time and it’s impossible to hide that from children.”

And when children feel increased anxiety and loss of control, bullying tends to increase.

What counts as anti-LGBT victimization and what’s simply teasing?

C.J. Pascoe, author of Dude, You’re a Fag, studied the students and culture at a California high school, where she found the word “fag” thrown out recklessly by the majority of boys. In their everyday interactions, they called or got called fag for “the slightest slipup”—or as one boy in her book described, “anything … literally anything. Like when you turn a wrench the wrong way … even if a piece of meat drops out of your sandwich.”

Pascoe believes such pervasive homophobia among teens is a trend not witnessed in previous generations. Advances toward gender and racial equality may have chipped away at the structural basis of male dominance. So while “fag” was a term used indiscriminately at the school she observed, insults based on gender and race were heard less often among the boys.

“Gains have been made for girls,” she says. “There has been this whole idea of girl power. So to say, ‘he hits like a girl’ or ‘is a girl’ is not as powerful as calling a guy a fag. Saying ‘You’re a fag’ is like saying ‘You’re nothing.’

Among friends the words may be said in a joking manner, but they also express unconscious aggression and anxiety about their masculinity, says Pascoe. They equate masculinity with being dominant, unemotional, competent, and heterosexual.

“The joking lays the groundwork for the harassment of boys who do not fit traditional gender norms.”

The line between teasing and harassment is crossed when a child is singled out and feels threatened. Caitlin Ryan, the director of Adolescent Health Initiatives at San Francisco State University’s César E. Chávez Institute, says anti-LGBT victimization better describes the pernicious activities that occur every day in schools, for example—as she described real-life situations—when kindergarten boys tell a classmate he’s “a little fag” and push him down into a puddle on the playground, or when a boy throws a bottle at another student in the bathroom and threatens to kill him.

“The term bullying glosses over what’s happening,” she says. “It can start in kindergarten and continue until the twelfth grade. That has serious long-term outcomes.”

While victims tend to be boys who are gender non-conforming, meaning they don’t adhere to masculine norms—that could mean boys who don’t like sports, prefer to play with girls, or have graceful gestures—the perpetrators aren’t so easily categorized, says Dorothy Espelage, a professor of educational psychology at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In other words, bullies can be anyone, though most are male.

Typically, there is a “ring leader” who, through exceptional social skills, convinces other students to go along with the bullying. They come from all socioeconomic backgrounds, can be popular, and are generally decent children who need to need guidance and intervention programs. The number one predictor of bullying is if a child batters his siblings, Espelage points out, “so there is an overlap between family violence and school violence.”

Bystanders intervene just 12 percent of the time. “Kids don’t want to become the victims, so they go along with bullying,” Espelage says. “If a friend is targeted they will go against the friend because, they think, ‘Otherwise, they’ll come after me,’ so they abandon the friend.”

Espelage hopes that at the very least the deaths of Jaheem Herrera and Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover will serve as a wake-up call to parents, school administrators, and policymakers. First and foremost, Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act, which focuses on standardized testing, has increased bullying, she believes. Principals, teachers, and even counselors are compelled to spend their time and energy on examination preparation, as the psychosocial needs of students go unattended.

“Administrators and teachers no longer understand the social climate of their schools, so kids are left on their own,” she says. “Dominant students are running the schools.”

In February, a ten-year-old and two eleven-year-olds in Illinois also took their own lives in three separate incidences. Though no reports have indicated any of them were victims of harassment, their unnecessary deaths are further evidence that the problem of depression in children is growing.

“There has always been a certain percentage of children who are at risk, but in the past kids in general seemed more resilient,” Espelage says. “Maybe today students don’t have the buffers they had before, like one good friend, a teacher they could go to for help, a neighborhood. Maybe we’re just too busy and we’ve exhausted our resources.”

Bullying is a Crime

More than thirty states have anti-bullying laws. However, school policies are often weak or are not enforced. A member of the California Safe Schools Coalition, Caitlin Ryan evaluated one school in the San Francisco Bay Area where three students suffered serious anti-LGBT victimization. “Each school is like a kingdom,” she says. “Administrators have a lot of power over whether these problems are taken seriously.”

She recalls one case in which the administrator contributed to the school’s hostile environment and in essence permitted anti-LGBT bullying. “The administrator’s attitude was, ‘If the student wants to be gay, that’s what’s going to happen. There’s nothing we can do about it.’”

But schools are being held accountable. For more than a decade students have successfully sued their school districts, school boards, and administrators under the Equal Protection Clause, Due Process Clause and Title IX, which requires public schools to ensure that students aren’t sexually harassed. One of the earliest and most disturbing cases was filed by Jamie Nabozny. As a student in the Ashland Public School District in Wisconsin, Nabozny suffered abuse throughout his middle school and high school years for being gay, including being mocked raped in front of a group of students; urinated on; placed in special education; and beaten by students, which caused internal bleeding. He sued school officials and settled in 1996.

“Bullying is not just a school problem,” Espelage says. “It’s a societal problem.”

Homophobic Americans

Despite gains in LGBT rights and marriage equality, many argue that homophobia continues to plague the United States. For example, not only have a number of states voted to amend their constitutions to restrict marriage to one man and one woman, but the anti-LGBT messages that are relayed during those campaigns have caused stress and depressive symptoms among LGB individuals, according to the study by Ellen Riggle and Sharon Rostosky, published in NSRC’s academic journal, Sexuality Research and Social Policy.

“Children and teenagers hear anti-gay messages during these campaigns,” White says. “These messages coming from the religious right have a negative effect on their attitudes toward gay people.”

Moreover, anti-gay sentiments of parents undoubtedly trickle down to children. In northern California’s Alameda Unified School District, a proposal to teach elementary students tolerance, focusing specifically on LGBT people, has received a lot of support as well as some heated opposition. Are parents who vehemently oppose to the curriculum simply expressing their personal views or are they directly or indirectly contributing to society’s homophobia?

On a message board one parent wrote: "… just as it is your right to teach your kids that it is “OK” and “normal” for men to have sex with other men, it is my right to teach my kids that homosexuality is a pathological disorder that is fundamentally contrary to nature. And, by the way, most of the inhabitant of this planet agree with me …”

Another parent had this to say about the proposed curriculum: “what a total BS sales job on how great it is to be gay. There is no way they should be showing that piece of political propaganda to our elementary students.”

Such parental attitudes could be dangerous—in particular if their children happen to be gay. According to research conducted by Caitlin Ryan, surveyed teens who experienced a high level of anti-LGBT rejection from their parents related to their identity were eight times more likely to attempt suicide as young adults compared with those who experienced no or low levels of rejection related to their identity. Rejecting behaviors included blaming their child for being victimized in school, making negative comments about their child’s appearance, or forbidding their child to associate with gay peers.

Just as important as refraining from rejecting behaviors, reassuring children whom parents suspect may be gay could help alleviate unnecessary distress. Chris White remembers spending nights in bed praying he would wake up more “masculine more, more normal. In junior high, I was starting having crushes on boys. I thought there was something wrong with me. I didn’t want to be that way. When you don’t know what all that means it’s very frightening.”