Gay Patriot has some heart felt comments about that horrible tragedy at Rutgers where a young man was secretly taped engaging in sex and killed himself after it was posted on the web:
…These two probably just thought they were pulling a prank, but they didn’t consider consider the feelings of Clementi. He was so young and while ready to act out his feeling for men, not yet ready to have his sexuality made public. It takes time to deal with the public ramifications of our difference. Not just that, even when we are comfortable with our sexuality, our private life is just that, private life. Many of us, not just a 18-year-old just coming to terms with his difference, would be embarrassed if strangers, friends even, witnessed our sexual activity. It is the most private, the most personal of things…
It is true that the perpetrators didn’t consider the feelings of Clementi – but, then again, why should they? At what point in a young man’s life do we, as a society, instill a sense of decorum? Any sense of manners? Of good taste? College used to be a place where gentlemen went to finish their education as preparation for taking high places in the larger world. When, do you think, was the last time an American college turned out a gentleman? This comment in the news story about the tragedy says it all:
…But a friend of Ravi’s said he believes it was just a prank.
“He’s very, very open-minded,” Michael Zhuang said. “If it had been a girl in the room it wouldn’t have been any different.”…
I have no doubt that is true – that if Clementi had been having relations with a woman, no fundamentally different event would have occurred. We still would have had an 18 year old boy engaging in sexual activity in the dorm while his 18 year old room mate videotaped him, and then broadcast it for all the world to see.
This is what we have done – this whole, terrible event is the end result of decades of turning our society in to an ill-mannered, cruel and tawdry bordello. Think about it, people – what made Paris Hilton famous? That she’s an ok-looking rich girl? No; what made her famous was a sex tape of hers appearing on the internet. The only difference between this incident and the Hilton incident is that Ms. Hilton is a media-hound who didn’t care how she got in to the spotlight…Mr. Clementi, from accounts, was clearly a much more private and retiring young man.
Don’t pretend that if you drop a ton of bricks on the two young men who made the tape that you have solved the problem. Don’t even think that if they go to jail you have secured justice. You have done neither – and, in fact, you might even be compounding the problem because sending them to jail might eventually create sympathy for them…and there will be, of course the pre- and post-incarceration interviews on television. If you want to do anything about this – if you want to honor Mr. Clementi’s memory – then your task is much more direct, but far more difficult: start working to instill a renewed sense of the decent and indecent in our society.
It is indecent to broadcast sex tapes. Not just secretly taped sex acts, but any at all. It is indecent to welcome in to society those who are sexual beasts (ie, those who serially cheat on their wives, or who go through a regular slew of lovers without ever making a promise). It is indecent to allow children to be regularly exposed to all sorts of sexual imagery and suggestion in popular culture. It is indecent to have sex in a place not your own (the whole tragedy here would have been averted if they had actually gone to a private place to do a private act…the dorm room shared with others is not in any way, shape or form private…and I’m pretty sure any conviction for invasion of privacy will be voided on those grounds). A whole string of indecent things will have to be stopped – and if we do this, then we’ll have a much stronger assurance that never again will an 18 year old boy kill himself over it.
The lesson here is for us to really start thinking things over. We can’t allow the flash of the media narrative to deflect us from the truth, nor our responsibilities towards it. For far too long we have been distracted by secondary issues while the crucial needs of our society have been ignored. It is time to go back to a time of public decency, and it is my hope that in this horrible event, we’ll find the will to at least learn the truth.
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