It’s a story about a guy who was raised by two women, and isn’t any different from us.. Click on the title to watch please…

JUSTICE FOR JAMEY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

pansexualpride:

The September 18th suicide of 14-year-old gay teenager Jamey Rodemeyer hit the community hard. It even attracted the attention of his idol,Lady Gaga, who began a crusade in his memory to curb bullying through stricter federal legislation, labeling it “a hate crime.”

A few weeks later, Jamey’s computer and cellphone were sent to Forensics by the Amherst, New York police, to determine if any of Jamey’s tormenters could be prosecuted. Yesterday, police in Amherst announced that it had been determined that these offesive comments couldn’t be considered criminal, and therefore no charges could be filed in this case.

Detectives on the case also interviewed Jamey’s family, friends, and peers, via which they uncovered five “bullying episodes” Jamey had endured during his short time as a freshman at Williamsville North High School. For the record, Williamsville North High School began classes on September 6th. Taking weekends into account, this means Jamey Rodemeyer endured five “bullying episodes” IN NINE DAYS OF SCHOOL. It’s unsurprising the teenager, who’d recorded an upbeat “It Gets Better” video earlier that year, wasn’t too optimistic about his future.

Three students were identified as “targeting” Jamey in school (one of whom hired a lawyer after Jamey died) but they weren’t the same kids leaving hateful messages on formspring or tumblr.

Police Chief John Askey told the press that Jamey “was exposed to stresses in every facet of his life that were beyond what should be experienced by a 14-year-old boy.” Askey expressed disappointment that no prosecutable offenses had turned up, and said part of the problem was that “the victim is dead and unable to help prove harassment or other charges that might have been filed.”

“I would like to have seen something we could have done from a prosecution standpoint,” Askey told reporters. “The fact that it can’t be prosecuted shouldn’t be the measuring stick here. I think people know that it’s inappropriate, know that it’s unacceptable. … I think a message has been sent.”

Jamey’s father: “We’re not satisfied, but we somewhat expected this outcome. That’s why we’ve taken on a mission trying to get laws passed that will make people accountable.” Askey confirmed that the bullies “know who they are” and know that their behavior is “completely unacceptable in the eyes of this community.”

Jamey lived just outside of Buffalo, where activists have begun gathering to take a stand against bullying. The local NBC affiliate assembled a panel to discuss the issue, including “people from all sorts of different groups that have exposure to bullies; from students, to parents, to teachers, counselors, administrators, and even the legal world.” You can see the videos from that panel on their website, which also contains links to heaps of stories about Jamey, cyberbullying, and anti-gay bullying. On October 25th, Jamey’s school held a Parent Forum on teen depression and suicide awareness.

It’s difficult to quantify what kind of impact community acceptance might make. After Jamey’s death, his bullies continued bullying him on his facebook page. Historically, teenagers have a pretty consistent record of categorically NOT doing what parents and teachers tell them to do.

Some are pushing for the introduction of “Jamey’s Law” and encourage you to sign the petition here to make bullying a criminal offense. But is legislation really the answer? I’ve always thought so. It couldn’t hurt, after all. It would send a message.

But lately I’ve been questioning that idea. Is this where we need to put our time and energy, or is it just a band-aid to make everyone FEEL like things are getting better? Is this is being handled how everything is handled in America — make it illegal, hold an assembly, and then if something goes wrong somebody can sue somebody? I’m especially concerned the crime of “bullying,” with its relatively abstract definition, could become yet another area of school discipline in which racial bias will lead to some kids “getting away with it” while others are excessively and enthusiastically prosecuted.

Although educators and administrators absolutely need extensive training and awareness programs about LGBTQI students and gay bullying in particular, many studies have shown these initiatives to be largely ineffective where kids are concerned. Most schools already have some kind of anti-bullying policy. I agree that discrimination against people based on sexual orientation or gender identity needs to be a part of every single one of those policies.

But federal bullying laws tend to address personal/political characteristics of the situation rather than specific behavior — and laws already exist to cover many of the bullying behaviors, such as harassment, sexual assault, physical assault, stalking, extortion, intimidation and sexual harassment.

I guess what’s frustrating to me — and I say this as a person who has been reading stories about gay kids getting bullied almost every day for two years — is that this is one area in which progress is stagnated.Rates of bullying haven’t gone down even as gay people have made progress in other areas. Teenagers are a difficult bunch, and it doesn’t help that the US Education system is a colossal disaster.

Furthermore, here are actual ways that are almost guaranteed to make things better for gay kids, but a lot of them are going to take a lot more time and energy to put into practice and it’s going to require more than just the legislature to get involved. These things aren’t just about criminalizing bullies but making persecuted students feel better about themselves. Sebastian spoke about this at length during Spirit Week — “How can students feel safe – or even BE safe – at school when parts of their identities are ignored and even denied 8 hours a day, for 13-14 years?”

Lasting change, I think, would be proactive rather than punitive. It would involve recognizing LGBTQI people in the curriculum, in the manner ofCalifornia’s FAIR act. It involves more GSAs, which have been historically proven to improve the social environment for students. It involves stopping the censorship of gay materials in libraries and online. It involves making prom and homecoming open to same-sex couples. It involves fostering environments where teachers feel comfortable being “out.”

There are bigger things, too, systemic issues that damage more than just LGBTQ students. These issues will only get worse as government makes more education cuts rather than raising taxes on the 1% — cuts which always disproportionately affect the students in the most need of help. Teachers need smaller class sizes so that they can develop stronger relationships with their students. Schools need more funding for the arts — in many schools, Drama Club was always an unofficial GSA. We need to do everything we can to ensure our good teachers aren’t so exhausted and bitter by the end of the day that they’re just out of fucks to give. We need more counselors —- people these kids can go to for support, especially if they don’t have any at home.

What if Jamey had seen a picture of Harvey Milk on the wall in his History classroom? What if he’d had one gay teacher? What if his straight teachers had been trained to understand the unique social needs of LGBTQ students? What if he’d connected with an older student who encouraged him to join the GSA? Would he still be with us? Would he still be with us if bullying was illegal?

Will we ever stop asking these questions. Will we ever have an answer.

pansexualpride:

In this Sunday’s New York Times, author and Bard professor Daniel Mendelsohn talks about that thing we don’t really want to talk about — and me, personally, I would have to say that I also do not want to talk about it — how big of a role homophobia could’ve played in the cover-up at Penn State.

I personally don’t want to bring it up because the conversation around homosexuality and pedophilia is LOADED, to say the least. I wrote about this at length last week when a radio host decided to use the Penn State case as a launching pad into discussing the controversy around LGBT people adopting children. Psychologists hold that that pedophiles do not actually possess adult sexuality at all, so the gender of their victims has no link to “gay” or “straight.” Regardless, a group of conservative commentators are already blaming the incident on homosexuality — but I’ll get there in a minute.

First, this column from The New York Times, which acknowledges the national confusion regarding Mike McQueary in the locker room, wondering, as Mendelsohn does:

“How could a grown man have left the scene without taking the child with him? Mr. McQueary wants us to imagine that his brain was racing during those “30 to 45 seconds,” that he “had to make tough impacting quick decisions.” But it seems clear he wasn’t thinking at all — and it’s hard not to wonder why.”

Mendelsohn goes on to suggest that it was partially discomfort about homosexuality, a discomfort which is pervasive throughout professional sports and particularly in football, that stopped McQueary from acting. He also says that most people believe that if a “burly graduate student” had walked in on a “58-year-old man raping a naked little girl in the shower,” he would’ve called the police, tried to rescue the girl, or at least gotten more appropriate advice from his father, who he called immediately after escaping the scene:

Mr. McQueary’s refusal to process the scene he described — his coach having sex with another male — was reflected in the reaction of the university itself, which can only be called denial. You see this in the squeamish treatment of the assaults as a series of inscrutable peccadilloes best discussed — and indulged — behind closed doors. (Penn State’s athletic director subsequently characterized Mr. Sandusky’s alleged act as “horsing around,” a term you suspect he would not have used to describe the rape of a 10-year-old girl.) Denial is there in the treatment of the victims as somehow untouchable, so fully tainted they couldn’t, or shouldn’t, be rescued. For Penn State officials, disgust at the perceived gay element seems to have outweighed the horror of the crimes themselves. 

If we all agree that the reaction may have been gender-specific, do we then have to agree that it was sexuality-specific? There’s really no compelling evidence that Sandusky was gay. But maybe to McQueary or the other guys at Penn State, it seemed that way. It was 2002, which in gay-years is a really long time ago, especially for McQueary’s father, who helped Mike make the call to keep what he saw on the DL.

I, probably like you and like Mendelsohn, do believe that McQueary wouldn’t have so easily fled the scene had Sandusky been raping a little girl. Many argue that this is because we see girls as victims but we don’t see boys that way.

But honestly it’s also surprising to me how quickly, and without hesitation, journalists and other human beings have stated this as fact — that a man would absolutely intervene if it’d been a girl there rather than a boy. Because the thing is that since the beginning of time, men have literally stood idly by as women were raped . They’ve watched it happen. Earlier this year in Texas, 18 boys allegedly took turns raping an eleven-year-old girl in an abandoned trailer and, due to many reasons including the horribly racist history of law enforcement in that area, many are both blaming the girl for “dressing provocatively” and supporting the suspects as wrongly accused. In July 2000 at a parade in New York City, not one of the million attendees did anything to stop or report a group of drunk men from stripping and groping 60 women. Date rape often occurs when others are close by and do nothing to stop it. Female victims of rape have never exactly been a class vigorously protected by all who witness their violation.

Anyhow — was the cover-up at least partially motivated by an unease around homosexuality, because “…in a culture that increasingly accepts gay life, organized athletics, from middle school to the professional leagues, is the last redoubt of unapologetic anti-gay sentiment”?

In football, after all, it is gay behavior that gets you called “fag,” not actually being gay. Mendelson says that Sean Avery’s decision to make a pro-gay-marriage PSA earlier this year has made him a subject of ridicule on the New York Rangers.

But Mendelson’s wrong that nobody’s talking about homosexuality, because the other side is. They’re not really concerned about the cover-up and how that happened, or how if a cover-up hadn’t happened then unspeakable violence could have been avoided; their primary focus is using this as an opportunity to spread lies.

Bryan Fischer, spokesperson for the American Family Association:

“I think the main takeaway from this, and this is what people do not want to focus on, this is what the media does not want any attention drawn to, is that what this illustrates is the truth, it’s a simple stubborn fact, that homosexuals molest children at much higher rates than the heterosexual population. And this is a fact of life that the gay lobby does not want us to know but this illustrates it.”

Joseph Farah of WorldNewsDaily appeared on FoxNews to share these ideas, and also published them on his website which gets over 1.5 million page views a month:

“But now that being accused of homophobia is considered an offense, while practicing homosexuality is considered a virtue, should it really surprise anyone that such behavior would go unreported or unchallenged for so long?

In an age when government schools are actually teaching children how to perform homosexual acts and that there is nothing wrong with them, it would seem that an environment conducive for predators of children is being created under the watchful eye of the state and the media.

Remember also that Penn State is a public university. There is probably no institution more conscious of the new “sin” of homophobia than the American college campus. There are few imaginable offenses more grievous than homophobia in that environment. One pays a price for exhibiting any symptoms of this dread disease – especially in academia.”

What’s fascinating is the two radically different portraits each side paints of college football culture. On the one hand, Mendelson says the school covered it up because they didn’t want to be seen as homosexual, meanwhile the conservatives say the school covered it up because they didn’t want to be seen as homophobic. The latter opinion could be quickly deconstructed by any number of logical methods, but at the end of the day, this remains the world we live in. The world where all of these things happened, and all of these things were said.

If we can agree on the basic fact that pedophilia is an entirely different occurrence than homosexuality, it seems that we can also agree that regardless of whether we think homosexuality is a “sin” or a “virtue” or just “a completely normal thing that a statistically significant number of consenting adults identify as in terms of their relationships with other consenting adults,” the equation of pedophilia with homosexuality isn’t helping. It turns the conversation into one about what we are and aren’t comfortable with when it comes to adult sexuality, and how we feel when confronted with consensual sex choices that are different than our own — and it turns the conversation away from protecting children from violence and persistently, repeatedly violent people. If we believe Mendelson, the preoccupation with homosexuality literally turned McQueary away from a chance to rescue a child who didn’t have anyone else to rely on. Homosexuality has to do with how consenting adults live their lives; pedophilia is a nonconsensal, violent act against children that they have no control over. Are we really so hung up about the former that we’re going to let the latter go on in silence? Or are we ready to finally recognize and respond to pedophilia for what it is — for the sake of the children?