First, the president spoke, and Dan Savage reacted:
I have to agree with Savage: the president is good at making speeches, and like Savage, I'm grateful that he made the effort in this case -- but he is the person in this country uniquely equipped to do a lot more than talk, and he hasn't done it. In fact, the message from the White House undercuts the video more than a little. It's quite clear that the administration doesn't think we're worth fighting for.
Strangely enough, in the dark recesses of my mind, that ties in with this post from Box Turtle Bulletin (quoting from this interview):
On October 21st, Ritch Savin-Williams, professor of developmental psychology at Cornell University, was interviewed by NPR’s Robert Siegel about LGBT youth suicide and the significant attention the issue has received over the past several weeks. In the interview, Savin-Williams claims there is no “epidemic” of LGBT teen suicide and that attention to the issue may be stigmatizing the majority of LGBT youth who are, in fact, just as happy and healthy as their straight peers.
SIEGEL And what, if anything, is harmful about all this attention?
Prof. WILLIAMS: For me, first off, scientifically it’s not true. That is that, as a developmental psychologist, when we look at the wide population of youth who identify as gay or who have same-sex attractions, it appears to me when I look at the data that they’re actually just as healthy, and just as resilient, and just as positive about their life as are straight youth.
So from a scientific perspective, there is certainly no gay suicide epidemic. But the more problematic aspect for me is that I worry a great deal about the image that we are giving gay-identified youth.
I left a comment that started off:
Savin-Williams’ critique strikes me as roughly analogous to saying “Well, Katrina wasn’t so bad — most of the country wasn’t flooded.”
First off, now that I've thought about Williams' statements a little more, he's flat wrong on some things. Yes, there is an epidemic of gay suicide. There has been for years. It seems more prevalent now because it's finally getting some media attention, and of course, nothing's real until it's on the news. But the point remains that gay youth are more likely to attempt to kill themselves.
At one point, Williams makes this statement:
Indeed, if you look at the attitudes of this cohort of young people, there's never been a better time to grow up gay and young. And I feel like that's the message that we ought to give, rather than the image of, oh, gay youth are fragile. They are so delicate that they can't defend themselves.
It's a laudable attitude, but the difficulty here is that we're talking about gay youth who are more fragile, perhaps -- certainly more desperate and more alone. So what happens when we start delivering the message that gay youth are strong and resilient to kids who don't see themselves that way at all? I figure chances are better than even that they're going to feel worse about themselves because in their own minds, they're not like that.
And that's today's lesson in Missing the Point.
2 comments:
It is so tiresome to read comments from outsiders who assume that "gay" is some monolithic variety of human being. He may have science on his side, but in terms of the social consequences of paying attention to gay teens' suicides resulting from bullying and harassment, he does us all a disservice. The fact that we aren't all killing ourselves shouldn't influence him or anyone to think that we're all "resilient" or "strong". Some of us didn't kill ourselves as bullied teenagers because we were afraid of the pain. Some survived in spite of attempts. Some didn't have the imagination to try. And on and on. When I think back to my own childhood, I can see that there were a couple of times when I was so discouraged, fearful, and unhappy that I was on the brink. But I had never heard of suicide -- it simply wasn't something that the people in my life ever mentioned, that I can recall. So I struggled on. Of course, I'm glad now that I did, but at the time it was simply the desperation of a man dying of thirst who nevertheless keeps crawling toward the illusory oasis.
Actually, gay youth seems to be his specialization, so I'm not sure we can call him an "outsider." That said, he missed the boat big-time on this.
Williams admits that he picked his studies, which makes his comments agenda-driven and so, suspect. To say that "the differences [in numbers of suicide attempts] diminish" when you get a larger sample is missing the point -- if three to four times as many gay teenagers as straight teenagers attempt suicide, you've got a problem, and you can't solve it by saying "gay teens are just like everyone else."
I still hold that if you start touting this idea that gay teens are strong and resilient, it's a nice image to project for those who are, but it's going to have a negative effect on those who don't perceive themselves that way.
This is going to make Tony Perkins really happy. Maybe he'll do another OpEd for WaPo.
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