BY NOREEN FAGAN –
For Jamey Rodemeyer it didn’t get better. The 14-year-old from Buffalo, New
York, committed suicide after putting up with months of bullying from homophobic idiots.
The teenager, who was a student at Williamsville North High
School, came out to his close friends in May. On Sunday, Sept 18 he was found
dead in his home.
According to Pink News,
bullies left messages on his Formspring account (a question-and-answer social-based website) telling him he was gay and ugly and encouraging him to kill himself.
Rodemeyer suffered through the bullying by keeping a regular
blog. On Sept 9 he wrote, “I always say how bullied I am, but no one listens. What do
I have to do so people will listen to me?”
He obviously tried to be heard, but even his mother seemed to
have trouble understanding how hard it was for him. She told reporters that “he
used to cry about the taunts from his peers, but they didn’t seem to faze him
this time. Lately, he’s been blowing them off, or at least we thought he was.”
By all accounts, he did seem to be trying to blow off the
bullying. Like so many other people around the world, Rodemeyer made an It
Gets Better video, in which he attributed being alive to Lady Gaga, telling people it was okay to be gay because “you are born this way.”
I think that is
one of the saddest videos I have seen in a long time. The night before he killed himself,
Rodemeyer posted a line from a Lady Gaga song on his Facebook page: “Don’t
forget me when I come crying to heaven’s door.”
Why you can trust Xtra
