Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [101]
Virginia Uribe, founder of the successful Project 10 in Los Angeles, wrote nearly a decade later that “cultural taboos, fear of controversy, and a deeply rooted, pervasive homophobia have kept the educational system in the United States blinded and mute on the subject of childhood and adolescent homosexuality. The paucity of literature, intervention, and understanding in this area is a national disgrace.”
Available studies are few, and are often hampered by the difficulty of obtaining scientific random samplings of a population that is highly invisible. Nonetheless, the body of research, taken cumulatively, makes a strong case that a major social problem exists. For example, a 1984 study by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) found that 45 percent of gay males and 20 percent of lesbians of a sample of two thousand had been harassed verbally or physically in high school. Twenty-eight percent of those people dropped out as a result. A 1992 survey of four hundred students in a Massachusetts high school found that 98 percent had heard homophobic remarks. Sixty percent of those students said they would feel afraid of peer reaction if it were thought they were gay.
A Hetrick-Martin study in 1990 found that 41 percent of its sample were targets of violence, nearly half of the violent incidents being related to gayness and perpetrated by family members. A later NGLTF study found that one-fourth of the gay youth surveyed had been forced to leave home because of gay-related conflicts.
On issues of suicide, Gary Remafedi, a pediatric physician and researcher at the University of Minnesota, has produced a number of studies demonstrating a disposition to suicide attempts by gay adolescents. His 1990 study of 137 young gay and bisexual males, done in collaboration with University of Washington researchers, found that one in three had attempted suicide at least once. He concluded that, despite limitations of the sample, “the unusual prevalence of serious suicide attempts remains a consistent and disturbing finding in the existing reports of young homosexual males.”
Other studies confirm those trends. But suicide statistics have become a political football, with some academics and the religious right contending that figures derived from limited, self-selected samples are being generalized to lobby for pro-gay causes. The estimate by Paul Gibson in his report for the Department of Health and Human Service’s Task Force on Youth Suicide that three out of every ten youth suicides is committed by a gay or lesbian is indeed based on available studies, but none of them drew on scientifically based samples. Yet the figure has become accepted as authoritative, a government-certified factoid cited by advocates.
The bottom line is that precise statistics may make academics more comfortable, but they are less than relevant when lodged against the empirical reality that gay youths do kill themselves and that most suicide-prevention programs—local, state, and federal—ignore them. Gibson wrote passionately and accurately of the plight of lesbian and gay adolescents, and proposed some serious and practicable remedies. But his words fell victim to the right-tilting “family values” strategy of Bush’s advisers.
The Clinton administration has quietly resumed interest in gay and lesbian youth, largely through individual efforts within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and input from a new consortium of gay and straight service organizations—the National Advocacy Coalition on Youth and Sexual Orientation.
The Advocacy Coalition took form in late 1992 and early