NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — “Things will get easier; people’s minds will change,” Ellen DeGeneres pleads in an Internet video, her voice breaking. “And you should be alive to see it.”
Just as the murder of Matthew Shepard galvanized the gay community around hate-crime legislation more than a decade ago, the suicide of a Rutgers University student whose sex life was splashed on the Internet has activists rallying around their latest cause: telling tormented gay teens they just need to hang on for a while, that they will live through it.
Bullying and harassment of young gays and lesbians, and the suicides caused, are a major topic in gay publications and among activists.
Celebrities and others have seized on Tyler Clementi’s suicide to call attention to the issue.
Prosecutors say Clementi’s roommate and another student used a webcam to broadcast on the Internet live images of the 18-year-old Rutgers freshman having an intimate encounter with another man. Clementi jumped off the George Washington Bridge three days later. His body was identified Thursday.
“To this poor kid, it’s better to be dead than to have people know he’s gay,” said Jean-Marie Navetta, a spokeswoman for Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. “Therein lies the real tragedy here.”
Clementi’s death was part of a string of suicides last month involving youngsters thought to have been victims of anti-gay bullying.
Fifteen-year-old Billy Lucas hanged himself in a barn in Greensburg, Ind. Asher Brown, 13, shot himself in the head in Houston. And 13-year-old Seth Walsh of Tehachapi, Calif., hanged himself from a tree in his backyard.
The outpouring of emotion over Clementi’s death recalls the reaction to the killing of Shepard, a gay, 21-year-old student at the University of Wyoming. He was found beaten and tied to a fence post in 1998. Two men were convicted in the slaying. Several states passed hate-crime laws in the aftermath of the crime.
