Table Of ContentQueer Youth Suicide,
culture and identitY
Blending beautifully extant research with analyses of media representations, Rob
Cover shows us that queer youth do not seek death, but an end to the pressure
of making their sexual identities coherent, alongside shame, vulnerability,
homophobia and the cultural politics of coming out. We must have a genuine
interdisciplinary dialogue if we are ever to comprehend queer life as resilient.
Katrina Jaworski, university of South australia, australia
Informed by post-structuralism, queer theory and a transdisciplinary ethos, this
highly accessible text demonstrates the relevance of culture studies to a topic
dominated by psychological and sociological analyses. Introducing debates on
sexuality and suicidal risk while questioning the explanatory frameworks and
prevention strategies that might be applied to issues of vulnerability and queer
youth suicide this book is an important marker in the emerging field of queer youth
suicide.
Katherine Johnson, university of Brighton, uK
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Queer Youth Suicide,
culture and identity
unliveable lives?
roB cover
University of Western Australia, Australia
© rob cover 2012
all rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
rob cover has asserted his right under the copyright, designs and Patents act, 1988, to be
identified as the author of this work.
Published by
ashgate Publishing limited ashgate Publishing company
Wey court east Suite 420
union road 101 cherry Street
Farnham Burlington
Surrey, Gu9 7Pt vt 05401-4405
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www.ashgate.com
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
cover, rob.
Queer youth suicide, culture and identity : unliveable lives?.
1. Gay youth--Suicidal behaviour. 2. Gay youth--Psychology. 3. Suicide in mass media.
i. title
362.2’8’086642-dc23
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
cover, rob.
Queer youth suicide, culture and identity : unliveable lives? / by rob cover.
p. cm.
includes bibliographical references and index.
iSBn 978-1-4094-4447-3 (hbk. : alk. paper) -- iSBn 978-1-4094-4448-0 (ebook)
1. Gay youth. 2. Gay youth--Suicidal behavior. 3. Youth in mass media. 4. Suicide in
mass media. i. title.
hQ76.27.Y68c68 2011
362.28086’642--dc23
2011049790
iSBn 9781409444473 (hbk)
iSBn 9781409444480 (ebk)
V
Printed and bound in Great Britain by the
MPG Books Group, uK.
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Preface ix
Introduction: Queer Youth Suicide, Vulnerability and Unliveable Lives 1
1 Queer Suicide Representations in Popular Media 17
2 Histories and Genealogies of Suicide Research and Sexuality 37
3 It Gets Better? Online Representations of Hope, Vulnerability and
Resilience 57
4 Reconstitutions: Identity, Subjectivity and the Dominant Discourses
of Sexuality 77
5 Tensions: Suicide, Sexual Identity and Shame 97
6 Community: Homonormativity, Exclusion and Relative Misery 117
Conclusion: Towards Liveable Lives 139
Bibliography 151
Filmography 167
Index 169
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank many people across several cities and eras for their
contributions, both social and intellectual, towards the development of ideas around
youth, sexuality, suicide and subjectivity that inform this book: in Melbourne –
Elizabeth Dean, Tessa Keegel, Stephen Pritchard and Daniel Marshall; in Adelaide
– Katrina Jaworski, Rosslyn Prosser, Veronika Petroff, Mandy Treagus, Barbara
Baird and Keren Yi; in Sydney – James Duncan; in New Zealand – Shona Hill;
and in Perth – Elena Jeffreys and most importantly Jeff Williams. Thanks are also
due to Shona Hill and Sarah Moody, both of whom undertook research assistant
work for various parts of this project. At the University of Adelaide, the Fay Gale
Centre for Research on Gender provided funding that supported the writing of one
chapter; a research grant from Victoria University of Wellington helped with the
writing of another. This book is for those I know and those I have never known
who are lost, who felt their lives were unliveable and for whom we must grieve.
I hope that in some unforeseeable way this small contribution can help to make the
lives of all young people liveable.
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Preface
In late 1997, while a postgraduate student at Monash University in Melbourne,
a few friends from the student queer organisation had been out to dinner and
were later listening to music and chatting at my flat. A call came through on one
someone’s mobile, and we learned that a young student, James, had in the previous
week committed suicide. As a member of the queer group he was known to some
of us, and had occasionally come out socialising. While everyone was upset at the
news, there was a certain, unspoken feeling in the room that can only be described
as ‘resigned expectation’. No one had thought James was suicidal – he was quiet,
sometimes a little shy, but could be a lot of fun and had a good sense of humour.
There was just no distinctive indication of his feelings or intentions, and of course
that was one of the things we spoke about at length that evening. What remained
tacitly agreed among us, however, was that there was somehow no real surprise
about a young queer male killing himself. Over the following weeks and months
I thought about this ‘resigned expectation’; I worried that as a community and
even as activist queer students we were either complacent, or that the problem
of queer youth suicide was so overwhelming that we could not really imagine
queer lives untouched by suicide, or that contemporary culture had forged such
a strong link between non-heterosexuality and suicide it felt ‘natural’ to lose a
young queer friend in that way. Ultimately, I was angry that we did not react with,
indeed, greater anger and greater curiosity and inquisitiveness about the nature of
queer youth suicide. Although youth suicide was not among my primary research
interests I wrote a little about it over the few years afterwards. And over time
I stopped writing about it – perhaps out of the very complacency I had earlier
criticised, but also out of a growing sense that there seemed to be less evidence
that queer youth were as vulnerable as they had been, particularly as eradication
of inequitable same-sex age-of-consent laws in Australia (and elsewhere) was
legislated, as media representation of queer youth was increasing, especially after
the late 1990s.
In September and October 2010, a spate of sexuality-related suicides which
occurred in the United States was reported on widely and internationally, much
of the reportage focusing on the ways in which different forms of bullying had
driven young school-aged or university students to attempt suicide. The news was
predominantly about eighteen year-old Tyler Clementi, a young Rutgers University
student who jumped from the George Washington Bridge after his roommate
had remotely used a webcam to capture footage of Clementi during an intimate
encounter with another male and broadcast it live. The roommate was charged with
invasion of privacy for using the camera to view and transmit a live image. Within
