Homosexual Students: A Group Particularly Vulnerable to Suicide

By Jessica Portner

New York

When Manny was 14, he announced to his parents that he was gay. They promptly restricted his phone calls and locked him in his room, but when those actions didn’t "change" him, they threw him out of the house. For months afterward, the teenager would stand on the roof of his aunt’s five-story apartment building, curling his toes over the concrete lip and fantasizing about diving over the ledge. Julie was 15 when she barricaded herself in her bedroom and sliced open her forearms with a knife, knowing that her family would disown her if she told them she liked girls.

Mark, a shy 18-year-old, downed a near-fatal dose of penicillin and painkillers two years ago. He could no longer endure the daily routine of being harassed at school—only to go home, where his brother beat him until he bled because he was gay. "I feel so unsupported," Mark said outside the New York City alternative school that he, Julie, and Manny all attend. "There’s still some days I wish I were dead."

Homosexual youths are more than five times as likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers. The taunts of "faggot" and "queer" that reverberate in school hallways, on street corners, playgrounds, and sometimes at the dinner table all combine to drive gay adolescents to the edge, said Rea Carey, the executive director of the National Youth Advocacy...