In one of the last updates he posted on his Facebook page, Joseph Jefferson sounded like yet another young gay person succumbing to overwhelming social rejection, if not outright bullying. “I could not bear the burden of living as a gay man of color in a world grown cold and hateful towards those of us who live and love differently than the so-called mainstream,” wrote Mr. Jefferson, 26, who killed himself last month. A few days later, the organization where he had once worked, Gay Men of African Descent, staged “A Protest to Stop Gay Bullying and Suicides” and posted a large black-and-white photograph of Mr. Jefferson on its Web site alongside the listing for the event.
Bullying and suicide — an awareness of how closely those two can be linked in the lives of gay people has never been stronger than of late. But the facts of Mr. Jefferson’s life fit no clean narrative of fragile disempowerment.
He attended Harvey Milk High School, a haven for young people of all kinds who might experience bullying elsewhere. He went on to do outreach among young gay men, working to educate them about H.I.V. He developed close mentors everywhere he went: Two successful gay black men for whom he worked came to consider him a son, offering him help, their ear or money when he needed it.
The Facebook message, then, left many of Mr. Jefferson’s friends bewildered. “He didn’t speak about being oppressed,” said Symba Soler, 22, who briefly worked with Mr. Jefferson at Gay Men of African Descent. “Bullying has nothing to do with this, and that’s what I want the world to know. Joseph has never been bullied.”
Asked about Mr. Jefferson’s state of mind, several friends and relatives spoke of seemingly routine trials: a new relationship, a new job, bills piling up. There were setbacks that left the young man, a big dreamer who longed for the glamorous life, feeling humiliated: Having run out of money for a rental car on a recent trip to Florida, he and his boyfriend ended up walking nine long miles along a highway to get to the beach and then back.
“It was a fiasco,” said Tony Shelton, one of Mr. Jefferson’s mentors, who ended up wiring him money so he could come back to New York.
BUT most people do not commit suicide because of one painful trip, or a foundering relationship, although both can surely contribute. Experts say that two main risk factors for suicide are depression and a prior suicide attempt, both of which were in Mr. Jefferson’s past, although few of his friends or family knew of that earlier close call. (In 2008, he attempted an overdose with pills, according to Michael Roberson, a gay activist who considered Mr. Jefferson his godson.) Mr. Jefferson was especially prone to bouts of depression in the fall, the time of year when his mother had unexpectedly died in 2001, a loss from which he never fully recovered, according to friends.
Mr. Roberson said that for any gay black man, homophobia is “never not part of the conversation.”
“The message that we get from the black church is that we are an abomination,” Mr. Roberson said. “I know he felt that.” And that message, he believed, made Mr. Jefferson more vulnerable to a feeling of worthlessness.
Mr. Jefferson’s stepmother, Renee Brown-Worrell, said that Mr. Jefferson’s father “never fully accepted that part” of his son’s life. Mr. Jefferson was an H.I.V. outreach worker who kept his own H.I.V.-positive status a secret from his own father and stepmother; a youth advocate who educated others about health services, but did not, so far as his loved ones know, avail himself of the services he needed when he suffered from depression.
Mr. Jefferson, like so many people, was a whole made up of contradictions: alternatively joyful and distraught; a man living in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, “who could look like a thug with his do-rag,” by one friend’s account, but who loved Beyoncé and Britney; someone who encouraged others to seek help but was too proud — or too closed off — to do so himself.
“You know that person in class who asks a question and everybody thinks it’s a stupid question — but then nobody knows the answer? He was that guy,” Mr. Soler said.
Why, exactly, did Mr. Jefferson decide to end his life? What was at the bottom of his sense of despair? What services might have reached him?
In death, as in life, he was complicated, and he left no clear answers.
-end-
No comments:
Post a Comment