Want to Prevent Gay Teen Suicide? Legalize Marriage Equality
Steve Silberman movingly connects this month’s tragic teen suicides with the cause of marriage equality.
But as a former gay teen who thought about suicide on a regular basis through my high school years, I can tell you: If I’d known that someday I might end up with a sweet, brilliant, handsome, science-loving geek husband, I would have been a much happier and less stressed-out kid. I didn’t need a therapist. I needed visible role models who could have given me a more realistic picture of the happiness possible in committed gay relationships.
It’s exactly the argument I’ve made all along, particularly to gay friends who express ambivalence or even hostility toward legalizing gay marriage: it’s not just about whether we as gay adults can legally wed. It’s what that means for the teenager wrestling with whether or not to put a gun to his own head.
Marriage may well be a normative institution worthy of critical reassessment, but that isn’t to deny its cultural potency — and the (tragic) potency of excluding same-sex relationships from our culture’s primary way of validating romantic relationships. It’s ironic, too, of course: using the institution of marriage not as a recognition of loving commitment but as a way to bash gays, by exclusion, surely soils the sanctity marriage.
