Sep. 28, 2011 - Issue #832: Jennifer Castle

Queermonton

Unknown bully

Self-reflection brings a surprising discovery

I was saddened last week to hear about Jamey Rodemeyer, the latest teenager to take his own life due to anti-gay bullying. When I posted his story to Facebook one of my friends shared her experiences when her son was tormented at school during junior high. Although her son was straight, he was teased for being gay by a boy who turned out to be queer himself.

My friend is an active queer ally and accessed all the proper channels to deal with the aggressors but it still took far too long to stop the bullying. It affected her son's self-esteem and school performance and, according to my friend, it still affects him to this day. As she shared this with me, I felt a nagging feeling in my gut as I realized I'd once been the bully that my friend described.

It took getting involved with a group that did anti-homophobia education to learn that I used to be an aggressor. At our first presentation I shared the story of targeting a girl in Grade 9 that I had perceived to be a lesbian. When I shared my story it was familiar to a guy in the group, one I had become friends with. He asked me a few details afterward and that's when we discovered that he was her younger brother. I found out just how painful I had made that year for her. What had seemed a minor thing to me had her home crying and upset every night and I had absolutely no idea.

I wasn't targeting her to take the heat off myself or because I was being taunted, but simply because it was an easy attack. In junior high I didn't like girls yet, I didn't like anything yet. Our school didn't have any examples of queerness, no out students, parents or staff, and different is never something you want to be at that age. My actions were not those of a self-loathing homophobe: they were those of a vindictive teenage girl.

In all my classroom conversations around bullying and years of writing and talking about it and warning people that their words were causing deaths, not once had I ever thought that I could have been one of those people. I am not a bully. My life has been built, since childhood, around standing up for the underdog. But kids need guidance and role models and there was never anyone around to tell my smart-ass mouth to shut up.

Sometime in high school I apologized for being mean to her. I felt genuinely guilty and I knew I'd done something wrong and I did want to make amends for that. But I never acknowledged, publicly or internally, being a bully until my friend put it into words that I couldn't ignore. She said she was grateful she hadn't lost her son and I could only think how lucky I was that my words hadn't caused someone enough pain to do something irreversible.

Jamey's death comes almost exactly a year after the initial rash of gay teen suicides made media news, after Spirit Day and It Gets Better. It also comes shortly after a mistrial in the court case of Brandon McInerney, who was being tried for the execution-style murder of classmate Lawrence King.

There are rumblings of charges being laid against those who bullied Jamey. Users submitted anonymous comments to his Formspring account urging him to kill himself. McInerney's choices on the day he shot his admirer in the head in front of classmates continues to be unfathomable. But none of these actions exist in a vacuum. The teens who bullied Jamey are just as much to blame as the teachers who didn't stop the taunts, the administration who ignored them, the classmates who encouraged them, the television that fed the hostile environment and, most importantly, the parents that created it. V

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