Lady Gaga Honors Gay Buffalo Teen; Funeral Draws 500

A year ago, Tyler Clementi's suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge capped months of media attention to the phenomenon of gay youths killing themselves after enduring anti-gay bullying, sometimes for years.

In the wake of Clementi's death, lawmakers in New Jersey--where Clementi has been a student at Rutgers University--adopted the nation's strictest anti-bullying legislation, and columnist Dan Savage and his male life partner launched the It Gets Better Project, a series of encouraging video messages aimed at gay youths.

One "It Gets Better" video was made by Jamey Rodemeyer, a 14-year-old gay teen from Buffalo, New York. But Rodemeyer himself was the target of anti-gay bullying, including messages online from cyber-bullies telling the young man to kill himself. Rodemeyer's blog postings talking about how he was bullied led to no relief. Finally, he killed himself.

"You weren't born that way," one message to the young Lady Gaga fan read. "You shouldn't have been born at all."

Others told Rodemeyer that he was not loved, not wanted, and his death would be greeted with gladness.

"I always say how bullied I am, but no one listens," the bullied teen blogged before his Sept. 18 suicide. "What do I have to do so people will listen to me?"

Rodemeyer's death gave fresh impetus to the mainstream media

Harvard Medical School's Dr. William Pollack, author of the book "Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood," told ABC News that gay youth are taunted an average of 26 times per day, every day, while at school. Pollack noted that the bullying and anti-gay messages--that homosexuality is a pathological condition or a moral deficiency--is the reason that gay youths are as much as five times more likely that their heterosexual peers to engage in suicidal behavior.

"Modern Family"'s Jesse Tyler Ferguson, a gay actor who portrays a happily partnered gay husband and father on the show, told ABC News that he hoped his portrayal would offer gay teens the hope that they could look forward to an adult life as part of "a loving family." Ferguson also shared with ABC News that as a youth, he was bullied so badly that he had to transfer to a different school.

Lady Gaga also responded to Rodemeyer's death, MTV.com reported on Sept. 26, tweeting to her 14 million followers that anti-gay bullying is "a hate crime." Lady Gaga dedicated a performance of the song "Hair" to the youth during a Sept. 25 performance at the iHeart Radio Music Festival, which took place in Las Vegas.

Lady Gaga spoke about how her new record, which features the instant gay anthem "Born This Way," followed the theme of "how your identity is really all you've got when you're in school ... so tonight, Jamey, I know you're up there looking at us, and you're not a victim. You're a lesson to all of us. I know it's a bit of a downer, but sometimes the right thing is more important than the music."

Gaga had said before the concert appearance that she hoped for a meeting with President Obama to discuss the issue of anti-gay bullying among teens.

Anderson Cooper also took note of the young man's suffering and death in a "Keeping Them Honest" segment aired Sept. 20 on CNN.

"Time and time again on this program we've reported on the problem of bullying in this country, and time and time again we've announced the deaths of children, children who should not be dead. Children whose loneliness and desperation, not just in the last few minutes of their life, but often in the years leading up to their deaths, is simply heartbreaking to imagine."

Cooper played Jamey's "It Gets Better" video on the segment, in which Jamey described the harassment he suffered both at school and online.

Fellow students would call him "faggot, fag, and they'd taunt me in the hallways, and then I felt like I could never escape it," Jamey said in his video. "And I made Formspring which I shouldn't have done and people would just constantly send me hate telling me that gay people go to hell."

The idea that gays are destined to burn in Hell is prevalent among Evangelical Christians, and some anti-gay activists and lawmakers object to efforts to pass anti-bullying laws, claiming that such laws would constitute a violation of free speech for religious people, Cooper noted.

The CNN anchor cited a number of anti-gay activists and politicians, including Focus on the Family's Cindy Cushman, who has said that gay "activist groups... want to promote homosexuality to kids because they realized that they can capture hearts and minds of our children at the earliest ages."

Cooper also cited the California Christian Coalition's Robert Newman, who recently told an audience at the California Republican Party convention that bullying is "part of growing up, it's a part of maturing.

"It's not something in which I engaged," Cooper added. "I grew up in a Christian home. I didn't engage in that kind of behavior. People were people. We knew they were unusual behaviors, but we went on with life."

But while Cooper implies that Christians do not engage in anti-gay bullying, others suggest that it is the duty of Christians to speak up about their anti-gay beliefs--even if they are at school or among gay peers. Cooper cited a Kentucky lawmaker, State Rep. Mike Harmon.

Harmon reassigned the roles of victim and bully in an imagined situation that involved "Someone just in conversation saying, well, you know, I think homosexuality is a sin.

"Well, we don't want that child to be bullied because they have a certain moral or religious belief," Harmon said. "And we don't want--certainly don't want them to be labeled a bully just because they have that particular belief."

Cooper was joined by writer Rosalind Wiseman, who reacted to the idea that anti-bullying efforts are actually an effort by gays to "recruit" children at school by saying, "[T]o think that we can in any way be against kids being safe for some kind of so-called agenda besides kids being safe makes absolutely no sense."

Wiseman also called for responsible adults to go "beyond the politics of this and look at our children and be able to go where they are and to be useful to them and meaningful to them so they can trust us that we can be safe for them."

Wiseman also spoke to the controversy that has grown up around the so-called "neutrality policy" that remains in effect in the Anoka-Hennepin school district on Minnesota, where a rash of student suicides over the last two years has prompted an investigation by the Justice Department, as well as two current lawsuits.

The policy purports to prevent teachers from engaging students in discussions relating to gays or gay issues in the classroom, but critics say that it also leaves teachers and administrators afraid to intervene when they see anti-gay bullying taking place in front of them.

Wiseman declared that "neutrality in the face... of an abuse of power is not neutrality. It is siding with the bully." She went on say, "[I]f you're going to believe in what's called neutrality policy, what you're really believing is a way for kids to go after other kids and do nothing about it."

Fellow guest Rachel Simmons, author of the book "Odd Girl Out," agreed, "I do think neutrality doesn't work. I find the whole thing shocking. I mean we don't send American workers to their workplaces in this country saying, just do your job and we're not going to protect you if something happens to you.

"Likewise, we can't send children to school in this country assuming that we're just going to teach you or we're not going to protect you if something happens to you."

Wiseman added that it was unacceptable for politicians to suggest that children should be given a license to harass, bully, and condemn other children due to their faith-based biases, noting that what proponents of allowing religious children to attack others were suggesting was "that they are able to be mean and cruel to other students. And that is an extraordinary thing to say.

"What you're saying is these values that we think are so important and are Christian, which I know many Christian people who don't believe this whatsoever, that those values enable children to bully other children and justify and reinforce the notion that it's to OK to bully other children," Wiseman continued.

"It is unbelievable that that would be the case coming from our leaders and from adults that our children need to be able to depend on to be safe at school."

ABC News also reported that police in the Buffalo suburb of Amherst were looking into the possibility of bringing hate crime and charges in the case. Cyber-harassment charges are also possible, as are charges of harassment, the article said.

But a lack of laws in New York State against bullying mean that the perpetrators--if they can be identified--might not face any legal repercussions if police cannot make harassment charges stick, the article noted.

Rodemeyer's death struck a chord not only with the media and Lady Gaga, but with the general public as well. More than 500 people attended the young man's funeral, which took place on Sept. 24. Many of those in attendance were "stranger," noted The New Civil Rights Movement in a Sept. 26 article.

"Dozens more drove by with signs of support," the article added.

A Sept. 25 rally in Allentown, NY, drew over 1,000 people. "We're just adamant that this has got to stop," one rally attendee told NCB affiliate WGRZ-TV. "And it's not going to be a death in vain."

The report noted that parents brought their children to the candlelight rally and march, which included youths and senior citizens alike.