A Personal Story About GLBT Suicide

This article was forwarded to me by one of my MySpace friends, Straight Ally, with this comment:

The main reasons I work in PFLAG is because of my son. In high school he tried to kill himself several times. I want families with LGBT family members to have the support they need to keep other kids from getting that depressed.

This link will take you to an article on LGBT teen suicide. The article features my son's story. http://www. gaylesbiantimes. com/?id=10953

He's almost 23 years old--he survived and he's doing great! God bless.

Ron Goetz
Proud PFLAG Dad

I'm thankful that Ron's story has a happy ending. Many similar ones do not. God bless Ron for working to change that, but first he had to change some of his attitudes. This excerpt from the story address that.

It was after his high school talent contest that the despair set in.

Again.

Jonathan, then an ambitious 16-year-old with dreams of being a religious or political leader, got up from his seat in the school auditorium, walked into a secluded storage closet and locked the door behind him.

He pulled a plastic shopping bag over his head, wrapped duct tape around it to seal out the air,
and waited to die.

Six months earlier, he’d tried pills – muscle relaxants, he thinks.

Before the pills it was something else. He can’t remember. “I’m really good at blocking out painful details,” he says.

What he does recall is that he didn’t believe his own ambitions were compatible with being gay – an orientation he was increasingly aware of.

“I grew up in a Republican, conservative family, and I’d wanted to be a pastor or a statesman,” Jonathan, now 22, recollects. “But, after realizing I was gay, everything I’d built my life around came crashing down.”

At the time, Jonathan was an active member of his church. He sang with the congregation’s Praise Team and had, as president of his school’s Bible Club, boosted membership 300 percent, from 10 to 30 members. “We made it a lot more fun. We had guest speakers, pizza parties. ... I’d learn everyone’s name, and so it was just a very welcoming environment,” he reminisces.

But after he told some people at school he was gay, a school adviser asked him to resign as president of the Bible Club.

And when his pastor heard of Jonathan’s sexual orientation, he told him he couldn’t be on the Praise Team, and he couldn’t sing any solos. “We can’t have a practicing homosexual in any form of church leadership,” the pastor told the young man who had been considering following in the pastor’s footsteps.

“At that point, I wasn’t even having sex, and I told him that,” Jonathan says. “[But] he said that people in the congregation had seen me on TV at gay Pride.

“I felt betrayed. What about me had changed other than that I was being honest?”

Failing to find role models at school or church who accepted him, Jonathan ventured into Hillcrest’s GLBT community, where he hung out at what was then the Living Room Café and dated a few men in the neighborhood. But his first forays into a place he’d hoped to find belonging left him discouraged and alone. He’d hoped to find the type of love and commitment his parents had, he says. His parents’ then 26-year-old marriage was cozy and they often held hands or stole kisses in public. But “most gay men I would date were just interested in flings.”

So Jonathan went into the closet, and he taped the bag shut.

Every 16 minutes in the United States, a person commits suicide.

Disproportionately, they are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or questioning.

“We have definitive statistics that tell us that LGBTQ youth are four times as likely to attempt suicide as their heterosexual peers,” says Charles Robbins, executive director with the Trevor Project, a 24-hour, toll-free suicide prevention hotline for GLBTQ youth.

For Jonathan’s father, Ron Goetz, the statistic hit too close to home.

A mild-mannered, soft-spoken man, Goetz speaks purposefully about his son’s three suicide attempts – to school groups, other parents with GLBT kids, and (one gets the impression) possibly to anyone who will listen, about his family’s close call. Goetz is a frequent panel speaker with Parents, Families & Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), and, as is clear from the careful way he chooses his words, as is clear from his candor and from the discernment with which he articulates his emotional and intellectual response to Jonathan’s suicide attempt, his son’s suffering profoundly affected and changed him.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been homophobic. But I used to make…,” his voice trails off and he looks down at his hands before continuing. “I did make, some homophobic remarks that I deeply regret, because I know the damage I did.”

Goetz says he had just wanted to make people laugh. But he also says he now sees it doesn’t take much to impart the idea that it’s not OK to be gay.

“I know for a fact that [our] pastor did not rail against gays and lesbians, for example. He never preached a sermon specifically denouncing LGBT people or the lifestyle or the gay agenda or anything. But the problem is, is that it’s very common, even if you’re not railing, to lump these three things together: murderers, adulterers and homosexuals. And my guess is that you only have to hear that a handful of times and it registers. The pastor doesn’t even need to say it per se. The homophobic kinds of remarks and teasing that I did was pretty much done in ignorance, because I really had not been sensitized to the issues. I did not know what was at stake.”

What’s at stake when a child attempts or commits suicide is often not solely the child’s life but the survival of the family. Numerous suicide bereavement support organizations cite the shame, blame, rage, shock and depression family members may experience after a suicide or a suicide attempt – feelings that can threaten family unity. “If Jonathan had completed his suicide, there’s no way of predicting what would have happened. These sorts of tragedies break up couples,” Goetz says.

Perhaps because Goetz was willing to examine how his, albeit covert, attitude towards homosexuality may have contributed to Jonathan’s pain, and to reflect on how religious and political beliefs in their home may have influenced their son, the Goetz family has survived and strengthened.

There is much more in the story about the issue of suicide among GLBT teens, and I strongly encourage you to click on the link above and read it in its entirety.

Thanks to Ron Goetz for sharing this story with me and giving me permission to print his e-mail.