He might be a little late to the game, but Stephen Colbert has uploaded a video message to the It Gets Better Project's YouTube channel.
Source HuffPO
The project, which was started last fall by writer Dan Savage in response to a wave of very public LGBT youth suicides, has had a bunch of comedian contributors, but it's good to see Colbert drop character for a minute and use his mass appeal to reach out to his younger fans.
Source HuffPO
So suggesting that I was saying the rates were higher for gay youths was a strawman argument, then?
No, just that (1) evidence based reasoning and argument is good, and (2) your pronouncement that LGBTQ kids are raped and murdered more than straight kids as a broad category is dubious as it stands and represents a peculiar narrow focus on two specific extreme crimes that don't appear to figure in most school bullying experiences straight or gay.
Beyond that, assessing the number of gay and straight boys raped by straight peers is problematic. Many gay males do not identify as gay at that age or even later in life. The boys have no real way to know the sexuality of assaulters for sure. "Rape" is usually thought of as bodily penetration, but there have been many cases of bullies sexual assaulting victims with objects and that is obviously sexually violent and highly traumatic. As said previously, male rape is very under reported, and even more so by straight victims.
What we started talking about was the video anyway. There was lots of possibility for something really violent and shitty to happen to those young men in Colbert's story. Maybe just because one of them was challenging dominance by getting confrontational. Maybe because they were perceived as gay, which comes under the hate crime category. The guys who are bullying them don't know they are straight, especially since one of them is declaring he isn't, so "straight privilege" isn't really relevant when talking about the potential dire physical consequences for them.
You're providing, if I recall correctly, anecdotes from your life and an anecdote you've heard reported to you from the life of one Dan Savage. Also, you mentioned studies that you left unnamed.
My preconceptions are based on my own anecdotal evidence and on the fact that trends of power and privilege indicate in general who is considered more available to abuse within a society and who is not. Behavior tends to follow privilege, in my experience and in studies I've read about things like rape statistics. I don't believe there's a biological reason why far more women are raped by men than men are raped by women, for instance. It's cultural. It's historical. It's about social power and narratives of worthiness.
My knowledge that violence follows privilege in this way combined with my own anecdotal experience convinces me that, in the case of gay men, because they are in an oppressed minority and because they're associated with "femininity," their likelihood of danger from rape is higher.
The guys who are bullying them don't know they are straight, especially since one of them is declaring he isn't, so "straight privilege" isn't really relevant when talking about the potential dire physical consequences for them.
I'm not talking about that specific moment. I'm talking about Stephen Colbert, as a man who's grown up and spent the majority of his life with straight privilege--both the social privilege and the privilege of having his feelings and desires match up with his outward performance, a privilege that someone who is gay and closeted does not have--he's speaking to kids who are in danger in a way that, barring one moment, he is not and never was imo and giving advice from his position of comparative safety.
Your statements have huge flaws in terms of social science. You are dealing with the idea of murder and rape rates far far too broadly and then extrapolating wildly from your impression of what those rates might be. In the first place, once someone is dead they can't tell you their sexual orientation and many gay youth are closeted so knowing how many murdered kids are gay is difficult. Further, many murdered and raped people aren't murdered or raped by their age mates, so even if you could tell how many gay kids had been murdered or raped in a year it wouldn't be safe to assume those murders or rapes had been performed by their school peers. A lot of people are murdered or raped by family members, family friends, dates, sexual hook ups from the internet, and life partners for example. Gay kids are way over represented among homeless youth and it is common for homeless gay youth to resort to prostitution to survive. Both the homeless and prostitutes have elevated rates of murder and rape victimization.
The video was about that specific moment, and you were talking about that specific moment when you said Colbert and his friend were acting without allegedly being at the same rape and murder risk. We don't know Colbert's friend wasn't gay. The bully couldn't know either one of them weren't gay. We don't know the bully wasn't gay and bullying to cover it up. Looked at from another view, the bully was at some risk of death himself considering that aggrieved kids who feel bullied have been known to show up with a gun and commit mass murder at school sometimes.
Colbert can't relate to having suppressed sexual feelings like that, but he was reaching out to kids about the part he CAN relate to which is what most human beings do when they are trying to offer support. He has experienced being bullied and it included homophobic behavior directed against him and friends of his, and from that and his perspective looking back on it he has some insights that may be of use to other people being bullied. He's not claiming his own experience matches theirs in every way and every level.
There's more than one sort of privilege, and sometimes people can personally relate with only part of another person's pain regardless of whether they belong to a same group.
It's good to have a wide variety of videos kids can sift through to find whatever speaks to them and whoever they want to hear from.