:-(

While giving a speech recently, actor Wentworth Miller, from TV’s Prison Break, shared that the first time he tried to kill himself, he was 15.  He was a gay teenager, in the closet, and the pain of being a target, of being “test[ed] and there was a thousand ways to fail. A thousand ways to portray yourself to not live up to someone else's standards of what was accepted."

That just makes me so sad.

 

First, let’s start with the surface shit:  Dude is fiiiiiiiiiiiiine. Super. Fine.   I’m not saying it’s OK for less attractive people to commit suicide, but Mr. Miller is eye candy and to remove that face from the world would just have just been a total and utter tragedy. 

Gay or straight, fine is fine. I’m still harboring a crush on George Michael, for goodness sake.

Ok, now we can get out of the shallow end of the pool. I’m done.

The real sadness is this: He isn’t the first person with this type of story and unfortunately, he won’t be the last.  At least he survived.  The same cannot be said for Matthew Shepard or Teena Brandon and countless others that have been persecuted and killed because they are members of the LGBT community.

It doesn't sit well with me.  

It’s not OK to bully people and call them nasty names and torture them because they are gay, no more than it’s OK to do it because they are black.

All the reasons that people throw out in defense of their homophobia (religion, moral arguments, the “natural” order), they always sound like the same arguments made on the segregationist side of the civil rights movement – bullshit.

I’m not a religious person, but I don’t think that God or Allah wants us to treat people this way.  I really don’t.  I don’t think any deity appreciates the efforts of Westboro Baptist Church.  I don’t think any deity wants humanity to create an atmosphere where young people feel they don’t even deserve to live, because of feelings they were born with.

It’s completely unacceptable that people cannot be who they really are, a state of being that I personally abhor.

If your religion labels homosexuality a sin and you agree, that’s your prerogative. That’s the beauty of living in America.  But there is no need for nasty stares and harsh words.  I don’t believe in sin (it's self-inflicted nonsense), but I was raised in a Christian home and I know that one sin is no bigger than another.  

Homosexuality is on par with thinking lustful thoughts, shoplifting and smacking your little sister in the back of the head and then lying about it.

I have yet to see a whole movement to stop the practice of folks smacking the shit out of their little sisters and then lying about it.

Maybe this can be Michele Bachmann's platform for her re-election campaign...