By Trang Tran
In honor of LGBT students, or just people in general, who lost their lives, feeling that, that’s their only road left in life, people wore purple on October 20, 2010. Purple represents the spirit of the LGBT flag. That’s what people who support LGBT, such as Brittnay McMillen, who started this all over the internet wanted from everyday people.
Lately, LGBT had been all over Seattle in the news, whether it’s King 5 or Komo 4, and over the internet. The death of Tyler Clementi have been the most known recently. Clementi was an 18 year old student at Rutgers University. This devastating occurrence happened when Tyler’s roommate secretly recorded a video of Tyler making out with another boy and posted it on the internet and tweeted onto his twitter so people can find out.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the United States has about 35,000 people committing suicide annually. Gregg Easterbrook’s blog stated that about 150 people between the ages of 15-24, die because they were judged or weren’t accepted because of their sexual orientation. Six students including Tyler Clementi, Billy Lucas, Seth Walsh, Asher Brown, Raymond Chase, have committed suicide in September 2010 alone.
What are the causes of this? Things such as rejections from family members and close friends and bullying from other people, sometimes even strangers.
Here at Seattle Central, there’s a social club called the Triangle Club for LGBT students. Jon Morada, former president of the triangle club stated some facts about the Triangle Club such as that it have been around SCCC for more than 10 years to support LGBT students. He brought up his personal experience with LGBT suicide, although no details were given. “There was a past member of Triangle Club who committed suicide about 6 months ago,” replied Morada. He also stated how there were 2 other club members who were suicidal from last quarter. He concluded with what they all had in common; the use of the club as a support.
“My hope is to create a stronger support system in the club and reach out to more students in school. We also want to involve school staff in our efforts,” declared Morada.
On October 11, 2010, a piece of paper was stuck to a suicide prevention poster on the wall near the elevator on the first floor of Seattle Central Community College campus. It began with, “suicide is meant to kill yourself…” and ended with “attention whores!” Two hours later, someone had removed it.
Although this surprising occurrence isn’t necessarily towards the LGBT group, thoughts on these topics have been closely related.
A few people had shared their thoughts and commented on the words, “attention whores” used against suicide. Phong Hoang, a student at Seattle Central Community College answered, “The situation depends on if that person is actually trying to commit suicide. He or she doesn’t need that kind of ‘support’ from rude people like that.” Hoang was referring to the words “attention whores” when he stated that it depends, meaning that if they, as in whoever that is trying to commit suicide, were put into a situation where they felt that they had no other choices, they shouldn’t be having that negativity against them.
“I feel sorry for them. Suicide isn’t the answer to anything,” stated Deion Inthoulay, a running start student at student here at Central.
Running start student, Martin Tran replied, “I find that offensive and I’m hurt from it.”
The same three people were asked, “If you were in this position and saw this piece of paper and these words, what would you have done?”
Phong: “I would think about why it’s up there.”
Deion: “That person that posted it up cares about ‘dumb people’.”
Martin: “I would place another poster on top of it.”
The following week, the Information Center and Student Leadership had no information of the occurrence.
Although some people don’t support LGBT, other people do; and some students here at SCCC take a part of this by joining Triangle Club or just being supportive of it, even when it doesn’t show it completely.
It just seems so sad to me that we (Seattlites) live in such a diverse city where most people are open and willing to learn about and accept others, yet there are so many ignorant people who still discriminate. Someone who attempts or commits suicide is anything but an attention whore. If someone truly needs help they need to know they can reach out to others and prejudice and hate are not going to help anybody. They’re just going to hurt.