Damn it.

by: Rosi Efthim

Wed Sep 21, 2011 at 11:23:18 AM EDT

This is the It Gets Better home video made by 14-year-old Jamey Rodemeyer, posted just 4 months before he, apparently, took his own life outside his house this weekend.

Seems to me this kid had so much in his favor. Supportive parents. Wisdom to hook into the It Gets Better movement created by Dan Savage so older people could help pull young people through with a better picture of what their grown-up lives could be, if they can just slog through adolescence. In Jamey's own It Gets Better video, he said he regretted creating a Formspring, a Q & A social media site that permits anonymous comments. Jamey's account sounds like a battleground; hateful anonymous posts about his being gay, alongside signed posts from friends encouraging him not to listen to "the cowards" abusing him. Friends reported his abuse to counselors at his middle school. He was seeing a social worker, a therapist. He was even hip enough to be blogging about bullying, reminding people a couple weeks ago about Suicide Prevention Week. But he's gone anyway.

This all happened in New York, not here.

But here in New Jersey, when school started days ago, the Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights Act became a reality for schools all over the state. To be sure, schools are grappling with unfamiliar procedures, and regulations are still being honed. But hateful threats that gay people go to Hell goes on and on and on. Know what I did the night the NJ Senate voted down marriage equality? I was on my way to a Garden State Equality reception. But I got stopped by a young man with his best friend, a girl, who'd poured out volunteer labor for GSE. I apologized that we couldn't do better for him. He told me he'd just called his mother to tell her the vote, looking for sympathy. His mother replied that he was unnatural and going to Hell.

Jamey's suicide was New York, not here. But NY is New Jersey's beacon right now, the equality state right next door. And one of the reasons ME is important is that it tells young gay kids in a way nothing else does that there's a future for their fragile, new love lives. We lose kids for so damned many reasons - poverty, illness, malnutrition, violence. And we lose kids because they can't imagine a future they can fit in.

In one of his last acts, Jamey thanked Lady Gaga for her music's message of self-acceptance. In March, Gaga stood on a stage in Buffalo near where Jamey lived, and asked her audience to call state senator Mark Grisanti and tell him to reverse his opposition to marriage equality. They did. And a facebook campaign followed. Grisanti did in fact flip, and was one of the key votes that got ME passed in New York. And Grisanti was Jamey's local state senator, a Republican. That's something we can't even get Democrats in New Jersey to do. So far.

I didn't really write this for you guys. This readership gets it. I wrote this for your neighbors, the guy in the cubicle next to you, the kid that delivers your Sunday paper. It never hurts to be on the lookout for simple acts of meanness that may be some teenager's last.

RIP, kid.

Disclosure: I'm on the board at Garden State Equality, but I'd write this anyway.