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In Committed
Relationships and
Their Children - GLBT Youth
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and Friends
of GLBTs - General
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GLBT Youth and Their Allies*
Some national statistics on GLBT youth ...
- 97 percent of students in public high schools report regularly hearing homophobic remarks from their peers.
- 45 percent of the gay men and 20 percent of the lesbians surveyed were victims of verbal and physical assaults in secondary schools.
- Gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender youth are two to four times more likely than their heterosexual peers to have been threatened or injured with a weapon at school.
- Twice as many gay students reported having been in physical fights.
- 34 percent of lesbian, gay and bisexual students surveyed had been the target of verbal assaults at school, or en route to or from classes.
- Two to three times as many GLBT youth said they had been forced or pressured into having sexual intercourse as their heterosexual peers.
- GLBT students are twice as likely to report bingeing on alcohol (five or more drinks at one time) at least once in the past month.
- GLBT students are twice as likely to report using marijuana in the past month.
- GLBT students are three to 10 times as likely to report having ever tried cocaine.
- GLBT students are twice as likely to report having seriously considered suicide in the past year.
- GLBT students are three to four times as likely to report having attempted suicide in the past year.
- Students who describe themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender are five times more likely to miss school because of feeling unsafe; 28 percent drop out.
- 85 percent of teachers oppose integrating lesbian, gay and bisexual themes in their curricula.
- Due to sexual-orientation discrimination, lesbians earn up to 14 percent less than their heterosexual female peers with similar jobs, education, age and residence, according to a study by the University of Maryland.
- A survey of 191 employers revealed that 18 percent would fire, 27 percent would refuse to hire and 26 percent would refuse to promote a person they perceived to be lesbian, gay or bisexual.
Information courtesy of SIGNS, a project of the Youth Enrichment Services Program of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center in New York, and the National Organization For Women
Scotty's
last moments
The murder of
a gay teen—allegedly at the hands of his best friends—has
rattled a small Alabama town.
By Jen Christensen
The
Advocate, September 28, 2004
© 2004 by LPI
Media Inc.
| A tragic ending Mother Martha and brother Lum (left) hold a picture of Scotty Joe Weaver, who was killed in rural Alabama -- perhaps because he was gay. Scotty, 18, dropped out of Baldwin County High School in the town of Bay Minette (top) due to taunts from classmates. He got a job at the local Waffle House restaurant. |
Talk to the people in rural Pine Grove, Ala., who knew Scotty Joe Weaver and they’ll tell you one thing: The 18-year-old seemed to survive anything life threw at him.
At age 10 he fought off cancer through two grueling years of chemotherapy. At 15 he lost his father. Throughout his high school years in the nearby town of Bay Minette, he weathered the taunts and teases of classmates for being gay. “He always knew how to get through,” remembers his friend Justin Toth, who is also gay. “He had fun even at the worst times in his life.”
This time, however, Weaver did not survive.
He was brutally killed outside Pine Grove, his southern Alabama hometown of less than 1,000 people near the Florida panhandle. Some officials are speculating that it was a hate crime.
On July 22 a man driving an all-terrain vehicle discovered a burned body in a remote field about eight miles from Weaver’s trailer home. The autopsy showed Weaver had been beaten, strangled, stabbed multiple times, doused with gasoline, and set afire. Investigators believe the teen was tied to a chair and killed in his home. “It took a very long and painful time for him to die,” says Baldwin County district attorney David Whetstone, who believes the injuries didn’t all happen at once and that the severity of the wounds suggests Weaver was killed because he was gay.
One of the suspects charged in the case was Weaver’s best friend since the first grade—18-year-old Nichole Bryars Kelsay. Also charged with capital murder are Christopher Ryan Gaines, 20, and Robert Holly Lofton Porter, 18. As the three sit in jail awaiting their trial, the town is struggling to understand how the life of such a tenacious teen could end so horribly. “Scotty Joe was such a good and trusting boy, but after his daddy died I think he started going with people he shouldn’t—at least I think that now,” says his uncle Ewing Weaver.
Friends and family describe Scotty Joe Weaver as a smart kid who had no choice but to drop out of high school because he faced daily harassment for being gay. He got a minimum-wage job at a Waffle House and developed a growing circle of gay friends. He gravitated to local gay clubs and performed in drag competitions.
“He’d borrow some of my makeup sometimes,” says Scotty Joe’s brother Lum, 24, the oldest of the four Weaver boys. Lum, who is also gay, remembers his brother performing Dolly Parton numbers in the Drag-o-rama at the Emerald City bar in Pensacola, Fla. The grand prize for the amateur competition was a week’s worth of paid bookings at the club. Scotty Joe took second place. “He was really pretty good, although I did tell him a couple of things that he could work on,” Lum says, sounding like a big brother.
Martha Weaver knew that two of her sons were gay and always said, “If you love your child, it doesn’t matter.” Still, she was concerned about Scotty Joe performing his drag act in public. “His mother told me she knew about his sexual orientation and the competitions, and she warned him to be careful,” says Whetstone. “She worried someone could really hurt him.”
At the Waffle House, Weaver was a hard worker, often taking double shifts—working at the cash register, serving meals, running the grill—all to earn a little extra money to be independent, coworkers say. With his new earnings he was able to afford a place of his own. Less than a month before his death Weaver moved into a trailer home. It was small and white with green trim, near his mom’s house, and had enough room for his best friend, Kelsay, and her boyfriend, Gaines. The couple were unemployed, and Scotty Joe paid the expenses. He didn’t mind. Weaver asked Kelsay to move in so she would have a stable home for her baby. She was in a custody fight with the child’s father, so Weaver offered to take care of her child as if it were his own.
Life seemed to be looking up.
On July 18, Weaver finished the graveyard shift and then dropped off money that he owed his mom, according to police officials. When Martha Weaver didn’t hear from her son for a couple of days, she filed a missing person report. She later told investigators that the roommates now accused of Scotty Joe’s murder had stopped by to say they hadn’t seen her son and that they encouraged her to contact police.
Officials with the sheriff’s department believe Kelsay, Gaines, and Porter robbed Weaver of the remaining $80 from his Waffle House take-home pay before killing him. Investigators have not officially ruled that Weaver’s sexual orientation was a motive, but Whetstone is convinced it was. “Overkill happens in these kinds of cases because of hate,” he says.
A statement released by Rusty Pigott, an attorney for defendant Gaines, points the finger at Porter, whom Kelsay allowed to sleep on the couch when Weaver was at work. Pigott says that Porter “spoke openly of wanting to kill the guy because he was gay” and “had been known to brag about assaulting homosexuals.” He adds that Porter tried to hit Weaver just two days before he was killed. Porter’s attorney had no comment, except to say that Pigott’s statements were misleading.
Lawyers for the state of Alabama don’t have to prove motive to apply the death penalty if the three are convicted, but Whetstone says the jury needs to know there were aggravating circumstances. Alabama does not include sexual orientation in its hate-crimes statue—and lawmakers have repeatedly defeated attempts to add it.
“I want to send a message to the community that it doesn’t matter how you feel about the status of a victim—you can’t hate anyone and hurt them,” Whetstone says.
About 250 people filled the tiny, rural Crossroads Church of God for Scotty Joe Weaver’s funeral. A dark blue casket dotted with tiny doves stood in the front of the church, draped with his favorite flowers—red roses and baby’s breath—and a picture of a young, happy Scotty Joe sitting in a kayak.
Lum Weaver describes the setting as beautiful, even though antigay rhetoric seeped into the service. Hearing the Reverend Helen Stewart’s fire-and-brimstone preaching, a few gay people walked out. “She made a lot of people mad, saying basically that Scotty Joe was in hell,” Lum says. “And while most of the congregation was gay or bisexual, she told us we were all going to hell if we didn’t change our ways.”
Family and friends quietly buried Scotty Joe at the McGill Cemetery near his grandmother. Lum has moved back in with his mother to help with the bills and to help her cope with losing a son.
These days Lum hears people talking about his brother’s death. It makes him happy to hear that there’s renewed talk by lawmakers of changing the state’s law to cover hate crimes based on sexual orientation. “They think this is going to drive us away, but it only makes us stronger,” he says
Adds District Attorney Whetstone: “People at church and on the street talk to me about this case. If there is a positive that can come out of something so heinous, it’s that these small-town people are talking to me about some of their own bad feelings toward [gay people]. They admit they’ve sometimes treated [gay] people badly. They’re now saying this isn’t right. You just can’t hate people. There is no excuse for something like this to happen in Alabama.”
Christensen is a producer for CNN.
Preliminary Hearing in Alabama Murder of Scotty Joe Weaver Set for
Aug. 27: GLAAD.com
More GLBT Youth Stories . . .
Robbie Kirkland: Why did he have to die?
Jamie
Nabozny: His shocking and inspiring story
Research Project of Collected Stories
Resources
 |
 |
The Naming Project:
A Local Faith-Based Group Serving GLBT/Queer/Questioning Youth to
Support Them as They Learn, Grow, and Share Their Experiences.
The Naming Project is a faith-based youth group serving youth of all sexual and gender identities. The primary focus is to provide a place for youth who are gay/lesbian/bisexual/ transgender/ queer/questioning to learn, grow, and share their experiences. In this way The Naming Project is a space in which youth can comfortably discuss faith and who they understand themselves to be--whether gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender...or straight.
The Naming Project is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is a mission and outreach of Bethany Lutheran Church in the Seward neighborhood. However, The Naming Project reaches out to youth across the United States through its programs.
Programs of The Naming Project Include:
*Weekly meetings on Sunday nights from 4:00-6:00 PM in Minneapolis
*E-mail check-ins and resources for youth and parents
*Workshops and conversations for youth in schools, communities, and
churches
*Workshops for youth workers, parents, and congregations
*A five-day summer camp for youth
For more information, see the group's web site at: www.thenamingproject.org.
To contact the staff, send an e-mail to: staff@thenamingproject.org.
The School
Survival Guide (also called SIGNS) is a project of the
Youth Enrichment Services (YES) Program of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual
& Transgender Community Center. ©2001
208 West 13th Street New York, NY 10014
Phone: 212/620-7310 Fax: 212/924-2657
URL: www.gaycenter.org
This comprehensive web site was developed and is maintained group of New York student leaders working to end hate and homophobia in schools by starting Gay Straight Alliances and other student groups.
Youth Guardian Services is a youth-run, 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that provides support services on the Internet to gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, questioning, and straight supportive youth. At this time the organization operates solely on private donations from individuals.
YOUTH.ORG is a service run by volunteers, created to help self-identifying gay, lesbian, bisexual and questioning youth. YOUTH.ORG exists to provide young people with a safe space online to be themselves.
YOUTH.ORG was formed to provide for the needs of GLBT youth; the need for a rare opportunity to express themselves, to know they are not alone, and to interact with others who have already accepted their sexuality.
See the Web site for Youth.org
for many additional Web-based and other resources for GLBT youth.
Some of Youth.org's Print Resources
I
THINK I MIGHT BE GAY ... NOW WHAT DO I DO?
A Brochure for Young Men--Information for gay youth and
young men questioning their sexuality.
I
THINK I MIGHT BE A LESBIAN ... NOW WHAT DO I DO?
A Brochure for Young Women Information written by lesbian youth
for lesbian youth and young women questioning their sexuality.
MISSION
The
Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, or GLSEN,
is working to ensure safe and effective schools for all students.GLSEN
envisions a world in which every child learns to respect and accept
all people, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity/expression.
The GLSEN Web site is divided into three major areas: Students,
Educators,
and Chapters.
Welcome to GLSEN's web pages and resources specifically created with students in mind. Below and in our library, you'll find the latest tools for organizing, finding or starting a local student club (or GSA), trainings and so much more....
Christopher Ramirez
Student Organizing Director
cramirez@glsen.org
Youth
Blackboard:
Links to All Youth-Related Resources of the Safe Schools Coalition
The P.E.R.S.O.N. Project
Public Education
Regarding Sexual Orientation Nationally
An Activist Network Advocating for LGBT Inclusive Curricular Policies
 |
Reports, Studies,
and Media Coverage
Richie and Chris
listen to speakers at the Lobby Day
gathering on the steps of the State Capitol, March, 25, 2004.
Turning Tony into Tonya
Juveniles raped in adult prison face 'death sentence'
of HIV
By Jens Soering
National Catholic Reporter
November 19, 2004
Tony was the prettiest serial killer I ever met. Sixteen years old, with long blond hair, creamy white skin and a slim, trim figure, he drove all the adult convicts wild with lust as soon as he stepped into the C-Unit dayroom. Best of all, Tony had already been “broken in” at the county jail before his trial, so he knew what to expect and even showed some enthusiasm. Good playacting at the right moment meant a steady supply of cigarettes and other gifts from his suitors -- that much he had already figured out.
By the time I met Tony five years later, he had professionalized his approach to penitentiary love and now preferred to be called Tonya. Every Thursday was commissary day, so he dolled himself up with plucked eyebrows and lipstick and “Daisy Duke” short-shorts. If you brought him two packs of menthols from the canteen, he was yours for half an hour.
He laughed at his customers, Tony told me, because they were paying him to kill them: He was HIV-positive, like so many inmates. Long ago, one of the convicts who had forced sex on him had infected him, and now he was intentionally passing that death sentence on to as many other prisoners as he could. Sweet revenge!
Not that this scheme of mass murder by virus excited him -- he was much too blasé for that by now. Killing people was simply one of several projects he undertook each day, alongside doing his laundry and acquiring a new supply of rouge and half a dozen other tasks.
By now Tony is back in your world. He finished his sentence in 2001. I called him a serial killer in the opening sentence only because that is what he became in prison. Before his arrest and incarceration, he had been a fairly average 16-year-old Army brat who, unfortunately, had stabbed another kid on high school property at a time when school shootings were a major news item. So the prosecutor tried Tony as an adult for malicious wounding -- “Tough on crime!” -- and a bunch of sex-starved convicts got a new toy for a few years. A lethal toy. A toy that is back on your streets now.
Tony’s story is far from rare in a correctional system that houses 2.1 million inmates nationally. During a hearing on the Prison Rape Reduction Act in July 2002, a former state attorney general testified that “anywhere from 250,000 to 600,000” prisoners were forced to have sex against their will each year. The result is an HIV infection rate of at least 8.5 percent in New York state’s correctional system, which tests its inmate population more rigorously than others. By comparison, the estimated infection rate for the civilian U.S. population is 0.3 percent.
Judging by my 18 years of penitentiary experience, those 250,000 to 600,000 inmate rape victims include nearly all juveniles like Tony who are sent to adult facilities. There were 14,500 such boys and girls held in adult jails and prisons in 1997, the last year for which total figures are available. Given the significant growth in the U.S. correctional population since then, that number is certainly higher today.
All 50 states currently allow at least some defendants under age 18 to be handled by the adult criminal justice system. A 16-year-old in prison is automatically a “boy” -- penitentiary slang for sex slave. And once he has been infected with HIV, he is a dead boy. So the prosecutorial decision to apply for a juvenile-to-adult court transfer in a given criminal case almost always amounts to the de facto imposition of capital punishment on the underage defendant.
What is so terribly sad is that the execution-by-inmate-rape of thousands upon thousands of juveniles in America’s adult prisons is completely unnecessary. It is simply not true that juvenile offenders cannot be rehabilitated. In the federally supervised Violent Juvenile Offender Program, for example, skilled case managers in Detroit and Boston helped youths leaving prison to find jobs and to develop positive social relationships in a “graduated reentry.” This holistic approach lowered recidivism rates consistently and significantly even for the toughest of inner city youths.
The key to all successful therapeutic and rehabilitative programs is emphasis on the youth’s social environment instead of his or her deficiencies only. If a young delinquent’s single mother is addicted to drugs and suffering from clinical depression, for instance, treatment team members ensure that the parent gets counseling and social service support and thus becomes able to provide the nurture her child needs.
Yet 60 percent of state juvenile justice spending goes to house youthful offenders in institutions while only 4 percent of funds are devoted to aftercare treatment. In fact, half of America’s juvenile prisons do not even provide those minimal correctional education services mandated by state and federal law -- never mind any kind of therapy. And for those youthful offenders sent to adult penitentiaries like Tony, the situation is even grimmer: 26 percent of them are released without so much as a ninth-grade education, and 90 percent leave prison without a high school diploma or GED.
What they do take with them when they return to society is a history of horrific abuse by adult inmates and, almost certainly, a fatal illness: HIV. If there is any way of further increasing their chances of re-offending, I cannot imagine what that might be. But the gut-level satisfaction of trying juveniles as adults must be worth this price. It must be -- or why else would we continue to allow our nation’s court and prison systems to turn thousands of Tonys into Tonyas each year?
Jens Soering is a prisoner in the Virginia Department of Corrections. He has served 18 years of two life sentences for murder. Soering is the author of An Expensive Way to Make Bad People Worse: An Essay on Prison Reform from an Insider’s Perspective.
National Catholic Reporter, November 19, 2004
Copyright © The National Catholic Reporter Publishing Company,
115 E. Armour Blvd., Kansas City, MO 64111 All rights reserved.
TEL: 816-531-0538 FAX: 1-816-968-2280 Send comments about this Web
site to: webkeeper@natcath.org
RESEARCH AND PRACTICE
Experiences of Harassment, Discrimination,
and Physical Violence
Among Young Gay and Bisexual Men
David M. Huebner, PhD, MPH, Gregory M. Rebchook, PhD and Susan M. Kegeles, PhD
American Journal of Public Health, July 2004, Vol 94, No. 7
The authors are with the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies, AIDS Research Institute, Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco.
Correspondence: Requests for reprints
should be sent to David M. Huebner, PhD, MPH, Center for AIDS Prevention
Studies, 74 New Montgomery, Suite 600, San Francisco, CA 94105 (e-mail:
dhuebner@psg.ucsf.edu).
© 2004 American Public Health Association
(The following message has been distributed as a free informational service for the expressed interest of non-profit research and educational purposes only. [CSS-NYS Email List. Subscribe at saratogany@aol.com.])
(San Francisco, California) Younger gay men are more likely to experience anti-gay violence and discrimination than their older peers a new study shows.
Researchers from the University of California San Francisco examined the lives of 1,248 gay and bisexual men aged 18 to 27 from the three southwestern cities; Phoenix, Austin, and Albuquerque, over a six-month period.
More than a third of the group reported experiencing anti-gay harassment, 5 percent reported anti-gay violence and 11 percent reported anti-gay discrimination.
But when the researchers looked at the statistics for only those aged 21 or younger the numbers were staggering.
Ten percent of those aged 21 or younger had experienced anti-gay violence, while half had experienced anti-gay harassment.
In addition, the UCSF scientists found that one out of four HIV-positive participants experienced anti-gay discrimination, while 14 percent of younger participants reported discrimination.
"We were distressed to find that those who were already most vulnerable because they were younger or HIV-positive were also most likely to experience discrimination, harassment, or violence. Overall our findings illustrate the need for empowerment and community-building programs to help young men create safe social settings and find support in the face of frequent mistreatment," said the study's lead author, David M. Huebner, PhD, MPH, psychologist at UCSF's Center for AIDS Prevention Studies (CAPS).
The data also suggest that anti-gay policy initiatives could have serious negative mental health effects on gay men.
"One of the most alarming aspects of our findings is that those who experience violence and harassment reported lower self esteem and were twice as likely to report having thought seriously about suicide," Huebner said.
The study is also one of the first to use a large multi-ethnic sample. Sixty percent were white, 30 percent Latino, and 18 percent were aged 21 or younger.
The results of the study appear in the July issue of the American Journal of Public Health.
CLINICAL REPORT
Sexual
Orientation and Adolescents**
Barbara L. Frankowski, MD, MPH
American Academy of Pediatrics
The Committee on Adolescence
PEDIATRICS, Vol. 113, No. 6, June 2004, pp. 1827-1832.
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* About the Photo (top of page): Taken, in St. Paul, at the corner of Western and Selby, of the statue of Linus in rainbow colors, entitled Teasing Hurts, by artist April J. Lagarde, sponsored by the MN Association for Children's Mental Health. This statue was one of more than 100 various incarnations of Linus that comprised the 2003 exhibit, entitled Linus Blankets St. Paul: St. Paul's Tribute to Charles M. Schulz.
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