Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [83]
Events were conspiring to bring the subject widespread public attention. The issue of youth suicide had caught the imagination of the Reagan administration. At the time it seemed both a worthwhile and noncontroversial subject. (No one had thought to include gay youth suicide as a factor.) The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) held two national meetings on the issue in 1985 and 1986. With the urging of Hank Wilson, the San Francisco activist, and others, the dilemma of gay and lesbian youths eventually got noticed. When HHS created its Task Force on Youth Suicide and asked that body to produce a report, it okayed the inclusion of a section on suicide among gay and lesbian youth.
Paul Gibson, a psychiatric social worker who worked with gay runaways in San Francisco, got the assignment. The taskforce report emerged in 1989, during the Bush administration and the era of “family values.” The general findings of the task force were shocking enough: the suicide rate of all young people (ages fifteen to twenty-four) had tripled in the previous thirty years, and suicide was currently the second leading cause of death in that age range. But Gibson’s results astonished even gay advocates. He estimated that three out of ten of those youth suicides may have involved gay and lesbian adolescents. Further, he calculated that between 20 and 35 percent of gay youth make suicide attempts, a rate three times the general youth suicide rate.
These were explosive numbers in an official government study. Gibson had cautioned that they were estimates based on the sparse research available up to that time. But the numbers immediately became widely quoted as fact and attracted the attention of gay activists, the mainstream press, and the right wing.
HHS had a hot potato on its hands. For the first time a government-commissioned study documented the scandalous history of rejection and isolation of gay teens. Gibson portrayed a woeful picture of life for gay and lesbian youth. They face the double jeopardy, he said in his report, of
surviving adolescence and developing a positive identity in what is frequently a hostile and condemning environment…. Lesbian and gay youth are the most invisible and outcast group of young people with whom you will come into contact…. With all of the conflicts they face in accepting themselves, coming out to families and peers…and confronting the haunting specter of AIDS, there is a growing danger that their lives are becoming a tragic nightmare with living only a small part of dying.
More pointedly, the Gibson report urged the government to promote several reforms. Among its suggestions: the passage of antidiscrimination laws, the legalization of gay marriage, and the creation of massive education efforts directed “especially to those who have responsibility for the care of the young, including families, clergy, teachers, and helping professionals.”
In that most sensitive of domains, the schools, Gibson urged an ambitious menu that included providing positive information about homosexuality to all students; offering family-life classes that would present being gay as a natural and healthy form of sexual expression; developing curricula that would include a variety of historical and social references; offering sensitivity training for teachers and staff; and instituting penalties for harassment or abuse of gay youth.
To a far-right congressman like William Dannemeyer, this effort to “legitimize” homosexuality was the worst form of blasphemy. In this view, advanced by Dannemeyer’s fundamentalist backers, the mere mention of homosexuality in any official way was tantamount to promoting it.
In September 1989, Dannemeyer, then a congressman from Orange County, California, wrote President Bush importuning him to “affirm traditional family values,