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Pain of bias-based bullying
lingers
...
Jamey Rodemeyer's story brings up memories
for gay adults
When Michael Mangus left his day planner behind in a classroom, someone wrote in it a disturbingly graphic death threat -- replete with a drawing of a hangman.
Seth Girod's tormentors walked behind him in the school hallway, kicking his rolling bookbag until it broke and taunting him to the point that he sometimes came home in tears.
A male classmate grabbed Jason Yalowich by the neck, told him that he'd like to slit his throat and punctuated the warning with a gay slur.
The men were bullied in middle or high school because of how they dressed or acted, because they were too small or not athletic -- or because someone thought they were gay.
All three men, now openly gay, have been out of high school for years. They have moved on to successful careers and rewarding relationships, but the painful memories from their teenage years linger.
"I'm going to be 64 years old this coming Monday. I have bitter, bitter memories of being bullied as a kid," said Bruce Kogan, an Allentown resident and vice president of the local Stonewall Democrats. Kogan recalls being beaten up and thrown down a flight of stairs while growing up in Brooklyn.
These men see themselves in Jamey Rodemeyer, the high school freshman from Williamsville who was harassed relentlessly before killing himself last weekend.
Jamey, 14, struggled with his sexual identity before coming to identify himself as bisexual. He was seeing a school social worker and a therapist, and had talked of suicide before he killed himself last Sunday.
Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youths -- or those who are perceived to be gay -- are bullied at a higher rate in school and in social media and on blogs, experts say.
"Children and adolescents who are engaging in behaviors that fall outside this strict, confining norm of what it means to be masculine, or feminine, they're the ones who are targeted more frequently," said Paul Poteat, an assistant professor of counseling and developmental psychology at Boston College who studies homophobic bullying.
Jamey's death is drawing heightened national attention to the problem of bias-based bullying and prompting others who suffered harassment to share their own stories.
"When I heard what had happened, and it's still going on in the same schools I went to, it made me really upset," said Yalowich, now 30, who lives in Amherst. Like Jamey, he attended Heim Middle School and Williamsville North High School.
People who care about the issue say teachers, school counselors and administrators, parents and children and teenagers themselves all have a role in curbing the behavior.
"We really need to get a message to adults that they can have a significant part in changing the culture of bullying," said Marvin Henchbarger, executive director of Gay & Lesbian Youth Services of Western New York.
Nearly nine out of 10 lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students reported being harassed at school, according to a 2009 survey of more than 7,000 middle and high school students by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.
The study also found that nearly two-thirds of surveyed students felt unsafe because of their sexual orientation, and about 30 percent reported skipping at least one day of school in the previous month because of safety concerns.
Prime targets
Some of the bullying is rooted in homophobia, even though the victims might not have formed a sexual identity yet.
They may be harassed because the way they act, or dress, doesn't fit the accepted standard for boys and girls.
"I'd get looks. I would get, 'Why are you wearing that? Are you a girl?'" said Mark Gordon, who wore skinny green jeans, tight black T-shirts and, later, scarves while attending City Honors School. Gordon, who came out as gay in high school and now identifies himself as transsexual, is a sophomore at the University at Buffalo and vice president of UB's Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Alliance.
Bullies target people who don't fit in for many reasons.
"When you're different and stand out as a young man, what you generally get called is 'faggot,'" Henchbarger said. "Whether you're gay or not gay, it's the worst thing you can call a young man, and it puts everybody at risk."
Girod didn't tell anyone he was gay until later in high school, but the bullies found other reasons to pick on him.
"I was smaller and kind of nerdy, geeky. Kept my head down, hunched shoulders," said Girod, 23, a counselor on the men's health team for AIDS Community Services of Western New York. "I got a lot of stuff behind teacher's backs, or going through the hallways."
His grades suffered, so when his family moved from the Poughkeepsie school district to nearby Hyde Park before his sophomore year, he took it as a chance for a fresh start.
There, he became involved in musicals, choir and the orchestra.
"It helped me find a group of friends I could count on," said Girod, a UB graduate.
Yalowich didn't fit in because he was short and not masculine, because he was more interested in the art scene than in sports, and because all of his friends were girls.
He remembers one tormenter pinning his arms behind his back and tripping him while they ran laps in gym class.
It got worse during high school, he said, when several groups of students, about 20 in total, harassed him regularly.
"You feel like being gay is wrong because you're being told this on a daily basis," said Yalowich. "You get to this point where [you say], 'I guess this is my life.'"
Do school districts do enough to help bullied students?
Rhonda J. Mangus says no.
Mangus' son, Michael, came out in middle school, but the bullying got worse when he started at North Tonawanda High School in fall 2005.
He wore a pink button-down dress shirt on his first day of school. His mother said someone came up behind her son, whacked him on the back and said, "Nice pink shirt, faggot."
"They were trying to get him to conform to the social norm," Rhonda Mangus said.
Rhonda Mangus said school officials didn't take the death threat written in Michael's planner seriously, so she pulled her son out of school that October. She was cited for subjecting him to educational neglect, a case that took years to wind its way through the courts, but she said she's convinced she did the right thing.
Michael Mangus received his GED in 2009.
"He's come into his own," Rhonda Mangus said.
Inescapable torment
The problem of bullying is getting worse with the rise of social networking and blogging.
Disputes that previously were confined to handwritten notes, phone conversations and face-to-face confrontations now carry over to the online world.
"I think the issue with cyberbullying is that kids aren't able to get away from it," said Kathy Gust, local program director for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
Experts say a comprehensive approach is needed to tackle the bullying problem.
Young people need diversity training; teachers and other school staffers need to be taught how to handle cases of bullying; and parents need to learn how to talk to their children about these issues, some experts say.
Groups such as the Pride Center of Western New York need to be invited into schools to conduct diversity training, with an emphasis on gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues, according to Damian Martinez, a program coordinator.
"Schools need to be made safe, for everyone," said Martinez. "Students need to know there's someone they can talk to."
Gay & Lesbian Youth Services offers numerous resources to schools, ranging from fiction books for the school libraries to referrals for counseling staff, Henchbarger said.
But few schools reach out to the organization, she said.
The organization helps "only when asked," she said, "and, I'll be honest, we're not generally asked."
For some gay men, it's painful that even after strides have been made in the fight for gay rights -- gays and lesbians can serve openly in the military, and gay and lesbian couples can marry in New York and a half dozen other states -- bullying in school continues.
A national campaign, "It Gets Better," encourages bullied gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender young people not to give up hope no matter how bleak their lives seem.
The program's intentions are noble, but some said it's not right to expect children or teens to bear this harassment now, even with the promise of a happier life in the years ahead.
"They also need it to get better now," UB's Gordon said.
Stephen T. Watson
25 September 2011
