There is little to soften the ugliness of this story. Assuming that the allegations are true, what we have is a case of two college students having so little regard for the privacy of a third student that they essentially laid a trap in the hopes of catching him on videotape that could be posted to the Internet.
That the victim apparently committed suicide following the release of the video once again speaks to the stigma that gays and lesbians are still forced to deal with every day.
The facts are these:
Two recent graduates of West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional High School have been charged with secretly recording video of another person having sex and transmitting the video over the Internet. The victim, apparently one of the accused’s roommates, has committed suicide since the videos were made public.
Dharun Ravi, 18, of Plainsboro and Molly W. Wei, also 18, of West Windsor, were charged Tuesday with two counts each of invasion of privacy. The two are students at Rutgers University’s Piscataway campus and are graduates of West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional High School North.
Mr. Ravi and Ms. Wei are accused of secretly placing a video camera in another student’s room in a dormitory and transmitting the video online, according to an announcement from Middlesex County Prosecutor Bruce J. Kaplan and Rutgers University Police Chief Rhonda Harris. The prosecutor’s office said the pair transmitted “a live image” of an 18-year-old student.
Another Rutgers student, Tyler Clementi of Ridgewood, committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge on Sept. 22, Mr. Clementi’s family confirmed through their attorney, Paul Mainardi of Brown & Connery in Woodbury.
Mr. Mainardi’s office refused to confirm quotes attributed to him in other publications stating Mr. Clementi and Mr. Ravi were roommates. But the statement he released did say the family’s “representatives are cooperating fully with the ongoing criminal investigations of two Rutgers University students.”
A body had not been discovered Wednesday afternoon.
The story is difficult to digest. What could have been going through the minds of the two students who have been charged? And why would something like this drive a gay student to suicide?
I’m going to posit something: When you systematically and publicly deny equal citizenship to a class of people — in this case, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered — and a significant portion of your political culture believes it is OK to publicly denigrate that class, you create a situation in which that class can be targeted, in which the privacy of the class members is of no consequence.
The gay community has been denied the right to legally marry in most states. LGBTs are prohibited from serving their country in the military. And they continue to be looked upon with derision, as freaks or worse.
Our unwillingness to grant LGBTs full rights is a societal/cultural admission that we think of them as less worthy than the rest of us. It allows the stigma to remain in place and allows the hate to continue to flow.
- Send me an e-mail.
- Read poetry at The Subterranean.
- Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. it can be ordered here.
- Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Hank Kalet 
thumbs up:)
Hank, are you seriously asking \”And why would something like this drive a gay student to suicide?\”While it is easy to link Tyler's suicide to a large cultural issue, the reality is that this he was (a) an 18-year-old adolescent away from home for the first time; (b) not clearly \”out\” to his family or the Rutgers community; (c) already ridiculed and humiliated by his tormentors in a previous attempt to video him; and (d) reportedly having his request to Rutgers housing officials to have his dorm room changed denied. Your analysis of the cultural issues are spot on but sorely lacking with regard to the effects of homophobic bullying, personal humiliation and feeling unprotected by university personnel on an 18-year-old.
It was a rhetorical question — the why has a built-in answer, part of which I hit, part of which you hit. The unfortunate fact is that our society still allows open bigotry and hatred toward a few groups — Muslims, LGBTs, South Asians to a degree. We don't just tolerate it, but our cultural products often endorse it through stereotyping and the damning language used by politicians. (This doesn't mean that there is no bigotry or hatred toward blacks, Jews, Latinos — it is just less acceptible publicly).
Despite the bulk of information online we often fail to get the specific information which is needed this post is good & contains relevant information that I was in quest of .I appreciate your efforts in preparing this post.Free dissertation titles