A Philadelphia gathering remembers gay teen suicides

As members of the gay community celebrated National Coming Out Day on Sunday with music and laughter on Center City streets, some gathered inside a community center for a vigil in memory of Rutgers University freshman Tyler Clementi, who killed himself last month, and six other gay teen suicides.

They roundly refused to classify those deaths as suicides, calling for tougher anti-bullying and discrimination policies nationwide and better enforcement of such policies by the Philadelphia School District.

"I would say they were slaughtered by societal homophobia," said Malcolm Lazin, executive director of the Equality Forum, one of the organizers of the event at the William Way Community Center on Spruce Street.

"Murders" is how the center's executive director, Chris Bartlett, characterized the deaths.

Clementi, 18, from the Bergen County town of Ridgewood, N.J., jumped off the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River last month after his roommate and a friend secretly recorded his sexual encounter with a man and streamed it on the Web, prosecutors allege.

Dharun Ravi of Plainsboro, N.J., and Molly W. Wei of Princeton, both 18, were each charged with two counts of invasion of privacy for their alleged actions involving Clementi on Sept. 19. Ravi was also charged with two more counts of invasion of privacy for allegedly trying to view and transmit another encounter involving Clementi on Sept. 21.

His death renewed a long-running national discussion on cyberbullying and the invasiveness of the Internet.

In Philadelphia on Sunday, more than 120 men and women took a break from Outfest activities at 4 p.m. to gather in the ballroom of the community center for the somber remembrance of Clementi, an accomplished violinist, and young men and women from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Texas, California, and Indiana whose personal anguish, like his, had grown unbearable.

Bartlett told the audience it had a "responsibility . . . to create that vision of lives that are worth living" for gay youth.

The Philadelphia School District could play a more effective role in furthering that, Lazin asserted, by better enforcing its policies on harassment and discrimination.

"Gay pejoratives are used daily in Philadelphia public schools without any disciplinary action," Lazin said before the vigil.

For two years the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender advisory committee of the school board has asked for and not received a meeting with Schools Superintendent Arlene Ackerman.

District spokesman Fernando Gallard said Sunday that because it was a holiday weekend, he would not be able to track down whether the district had acted on such a meeting request, but he added: "We would welcome a meeting."

Gallard said the district had, for the first time, implemented an antiharassment policy that took effect in September.

That policy would cover "someone who is harassing someone else by saying something or by some sort of gesture," Gallard said. Those found in violation of the policy could face suspension or expulsion, Gallard said.

Also for the first time, the school district last week started implementing an anti-bullying, antiharassment curriculum for staff of its elementary, middle, and high schools, Gallard said.

At Sunday's vigil, Lazin, a former federal prosecutor, called on prosecutors in the Clementi case to indict for reckless manslaughter the two accused of exposing his intimate conduct with another man on the Internet.

"If you use a cyberweapon in this way, this is what the consequences should be," he said.

Meanwhile, Lazin said Pennsylvania was one of 13 states without an anti-bullying and cyberbullying law, and said he hoped the next governor would lead the call for such a measure.

On the federal level, Lazin said gay-rights advocates needed to push for passage of two bills pending in Congress: an amendment to the Safe Schools Act, and a Student Nondiscrimination Act. Both would address the challenges of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender youth, he said.

That all would be too late for Clementi and the others remembered Sunday had Julia Moon in tears as she addressed the mourners.

Moon, 22, of Philadelphia, graduated from Rutgers in May, three months before Clementi joined the student body. Moon was copresident of the school's Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian Alliance and helped save many distraught students' lives, she said.

In an emotional message to Clementi, whom she never met, Moon said Sunday: "Tyler, I have to apologize I wasn't there to get to you before you got to you. Thank you for serving as a wake-up call. Your death was not in vain."