Yet another heart breaking story involving a bullied gay kid's suicide, cited by Thers at Eschaton:

http://www.truthwinsout.org/blog/2010/09/11589/

Sobering reading that.

Spent a good part of school until maybe 14-15 or so y.o. getting bullied. Big, fat, clumsy, unathletic, no social graces. The stuff I cared about wasn't worth anything to anyone else other than as a subject for further ridicule. Good grades made it worse. I wasn't gay, but maybe 90% of the stories resonate entirely with my experience. And, yes, I was told it was part of growing up, that I should toughen up and be a man. Got no support at all, none whatever. A growth spurt and a clever choice of parents made me six feet tall and less nerdy looking, and I went to a magnet school; that took care of it. Sort of. And, like most, if not all, who go through this crap, I remember a lot of it to this day with startling immediacy. I can only imagine how much worse it would have been had I been gay, and not just called a faggot because when i was a kid, that's one of the things you got called. With parents, a peer group, a church congregation, a community that would reject in horror rather than support in recognition.

An odd turn of the wheel had me meet one of the last psychiatrists in New York City who treated homosexuality as a disease, and thought he could talking cure it in the old Freudian paradigm. Psychiatry has its problems, but has moved on.

So yet again, I find myself reminded that gay rights are human rights. When a gay person comes out, he does it not only for himself but for me. Human rights are like that. When bullying becomes unacceptable, it'll help not just gays, but everybody who'd otherwise spend years in silence, and more years wondering why. When preachers of a universal God extend welcome to all, a recognition of a common humanity, as if that's a more meaningful sort of prayer than all the posturing and proscription, it'll help all, and, too, render their beliefs a little more legitimate in the eyes of the rest of us.

And maybe, just maybe, the awesome, horrific mystery of suicide won't rear its ugly head, yet again, in a situation where it loses all too much of its mystery and none of its horror.