Jesse Dirkhising, 13, Tyler Clementi, 18, Matthew Shepard, 21

Jesse Dirkhising, 13, Tyler Clementi, 18, Matthew Shepard, 21

Every year around this time I like to commemorate the too brief life of Jesse William Dirkhising mainly because, outside of his family and friends, few remember Jesse who died at age 13. Fewer yet recall how he died, and a certain segment chooses not to remember.

Another death recently consumed the mass media as well as the blogosphere so that, by now, given that extensive local and national publicity, most people have heard of Tyler Clementi.

His abbreviated life and untimely death have been the subject of countless vigils and memorials and countless stories on every medium, stories that mourn the waste of a life and which attempt to imagine the unspeakable anguish Tyler must have felt, probably not so much at being discovered in homosexual assignations at New Jersey’s Rutgers University in late September but far more so at having been videotaped and knowing those videos were posted on the internet.

That realization drove Tyler to commit suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge.

Perhaps excessively so, after his body washed up days later in northern Manhattan and he was identified, Tyler became something of a mass media cause celebre’, an exemplar of what could happen to gays as a result of anti-homosexual bias and discrimination.

His suicide is now being widely exploited by gay websites as a figurative call to arms in protest of anti-gay bullying and mistreatment of homosexuals but, in all fairness, it should be pointed out that it was not bias and discrimination at the very progressive Rutgers U. that caused Tyler to take his own life. His own personal choices caused that tragedy.

Since he left no suicide note aside from a cryptic “Facebook” post–”Jumping off the the gw bridge sorry”–Tyler Clementi’s motivation will never be known with absolute certainty and it can only be assumed to have been mortification over the publicizing of his homosexual indiscretions that resulted in his suicide.

Tyler Clementi’s death at 18 inversely relates to the death of Jesse Dirkhising who died at age 13 on September 26, 1999. . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=2150)