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In the days and weeks that followed the recent killing spree at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, news analysts, civic leaders, and politicians alike pointed fingers in every direction as they struggled to explain it. Violent movies, video games, the Internet, and alternative music all came under fire (pardon the metaphor), with the most attention paid to weapons availability and gun control (or lack thereof).
At some point, I knew, the religious right would probably try to pin at least some of the blame on homosexuality; after all, they've made gays and lesbians scapegoats for nearly every other tragedy befalling our country. Sure enough, protesters at some of the memorials for Littleton victims carried signs with slogans such as "Fags Killed Them."
Then, while standing in the checkout line at a supermarket recently, I noticed a National Enquirer headline proclaiming inside information about Klebold and Harris and "the gay secret that made them kill." Even if Klebold and Harris were gay, this one factor in their lives would hardly have been sufficient to transform them into the homicidal maniacs they became.
However, when you consider the harassment and persecution they faced daily from their peers at Columbine High School, their desperation becomes a bit more understandable. Even after their deaths, students openly — and at times proudly — dismissed Klebold and Harris as "freaks" and "faggots." One woman even described them as "pretty much disposable people."
Such persecution may well have pushed Klebold and Harris over the edge. It's the same vicious teasing and taunting that brings many gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and sometimes even straight teenagers to consider suicide. How they perceive themselves is quite often beside the point; it's how they are perceived by their classmates that matters. That simple bit of teenage reality forms the basis of peer pressure, and it's the root of all evil as soon as you set foot on high school (and most college) campuses.
Even so, diehard homophobes assert that gayness in and of itself leads young people to contemplate suicide. This seems in keeping with their notion of homosexuality as something akin to brainwashing — it's a cultish thing to do, and we've all seen the results of cultish behavior in the mass suicides of groups like Heaven's Gate.
For these reasons, urgent calls to "save our gay youth from suicide" often fall on deaf ears in the conservative community. "Save them from homosexuality first," they answer, "and then you'll save them from suicide." In cases like the Columbine killing, the conservative right wing is just as likely to link homosexuality to violent behavior, despite prevalent stereotypes of gay men as weak, cowardly, effeminate, and squeamish in the face of violence. In such equations, the harassment and persecution often gets left out of the mix.
This isn't surprising, since some of the harassment and persecution originates with the religious right, and they prefer to maintain an appearance of dignified respectability and tolerance. Their "love the sinner but hate the sin" line becomes some sort of magic mantra capable of maintaining their innocence despite well-documented violent effects of their own hate-mongering.
It would be wonderful if we could stop there and say we've found the source of the problem, but we can't and we shouldn't. To do so would amount to just so much finger-pointing on our part — the queer version of the blame-and-scapegoat game. It also tends to isolate homophobia as something "other," as something clearly and identifiably outside of ourselves.
The very notion of internalized homophobia tells us that this is not so. Most of us carry inside us at least the vestiges of homophobia. Gay youth understand this internalized homophobia quite well. It's what makes them so prone to suicidal and risky behavior. It also contributes toward making them vulnerable to the kinds of cultish tendencies we see in groups like Klebold's and Harris's Trenchcoat Mafia.
In my own activism, I've come in contact with a number of gay and lesbian young adults. Quite often, they sport multiple piercings, dye their hair, and wear what could be called non-traditional clothing. Rather than conform to the "in" crowd at their schools, they defiantly consort with the "out" crowd. Even though this crowd defines itself in contrast to the "in" crowd, it exerts similar pressures in terms of dress and behavior. The social mechanisms are the same; they've simply been directed away from the norm.
When gay youth are excluded from societally acceptable cults such as high school sports teams, church youth groups, and the Boy Scouts (one could argue that these are cults by the word's definition), they find themselves drawn toward other cults, most often those existing on the fringes and margins. Lacking these, they may create their own, complete with their own systems and codes of behavior. Not all of them are entirely harmless, however, as we can clearly see in the case of the Trenchcoat Mafia.
Organizations like Outright Vermont around the state have worked hard to provide young people with safer alternatives, despite protests of the religious right and conservative school administrators. They recognize that coming out in a school environment is an incredibly challenging thing to do, and that it leaves kids vulnerable to risky behavior such as substance abuse, crime, date rape, unwanted pregnancy, and unsafe sexual practices. These groups understand that queer youth are often struggling with their own internalized homophobia, trying to overcome those demons at the same time as they are trying to come to terms with their homosexual, bisexual, or transgendered identities.
As a community, GLBT people need to remember our own confusion and vulnerability early in our coming out processes. We need to recognize that we often made decisions that might have actually reinforced and amplified homophobia's effects on us. As adults, some of us continue to do just that without fully understanding the motivations behind our actions. Too often, we're content to blame our behavior (and the reactions it provokes) on the homophobic society at large, and we let our own actions and behavior pass without reflection.
Most of our actions and behaviors can withstand that kind of criticism, as we have seen again and again in debates with the religious right. Without such self-analysis, however, our constantly evolving community risks becoming just another trend or fad, something more like a cult and less like a culture. We risk making mistakes that could have been avoided, and miss opportunities for self-evaluation when they present themselves.
The tragedy at Columbine High School is one such opportunity. We need to be very present in the ongoing discussions of that event, even though some of the details may make us uncomfortable. We need to process our grief, register our outrage, and work toward solutions that make schools safer for all individuals, no matter how they choose to define or differentiate themselves.
This may very well mean working with groups who have not traditionally been our allies on such matters. It may also mean working with groups, perhaps even our own, who have in some way contributed toward the creation of an environment in which kids like Klebold and Harris could lose their respect for the inherent worth and dignity of all life. We need to resist the urge to assign total responsibility elsewhere, because in doing so we risk taking a quick trip down the road toward apathy.
One of the main messages that came from Columbine High School is that we must not assume that these problems don't exist within our own schools or within our own communities. We're well aware that they do. With that in mind, let's resist the urge to judge one group or another based on what has just happened in Littleton. Instead, let us consider how both we and they might be judged by our responses and subsequent actions toward preventing such tragedies in the future.
