But first this note from my conscience

I created this blog in part so that I could tour others’ blogs in support of my novel, “Bob the Book.” And I will get to “Bob.” (I’m no fool. Marketing trumps everything.) But in creating the blog I called myself “Man Above Bridge” – that is, man living on 189^th Street in Manhattan, above the George Washington Bridge – and so I was inescapably reminded, as if need be, that two days before my book was to be published, an eighteen-year-old boy jumped off that same bridge because two classmates exposed his sexuality on YouTube.

“This wouldn’t have happened without YouTube.” Please. Lacking YouTube, those classmates would have found another way. We used to bully in person. Yes, “we.” I have been bullied and I, in turn, have bullied others weaker than I. I have been victim and perpetrator. This does not excuse me, but it is interesting: had I been bullied because I was short or disabled or had an accent, I might not have turned so fast on those who were weaker. But I was bullied over my sexuality and that terrified me. I had to defend myself immediately and vigorously, to lash out in order to survive psychically. And I did. A fat, pink, lisping rabbi’s son paid the price. But that is still not the full story. The rabbi’s son and I were also sort of friends. I liked him. Sort of. We had things in common. He was smart. But given that I had a more masculine, athletic friend from Boston, a boy I could never be like, the boy I actually was like lost out. Got pushed up against a wall. Got verbally harassed, by me, when he had done nothing to deserve it.

At any rate, YouTube, my ass.

I am also impatient with cries of “All this bullying has to stop!” Yes, it does, but the people crying out across the Web and the cable channels are mostly focusing, as they usually do, on the actual bullies that posted the actual video. One grand act of bullying does not a suicide make. It takes years – years of put-downs, years of being excluded, years of remarks by people who “didn’t mean anything by it,” years of remarks by people who did, years of ads and TV shows and movies, years of being ignored. Let’s focus on that last one. Maybe, like my parents, the dead boy’s parents were proud of having a rule: “We never, ever ask about our kids’ personal lives.” Maybe like my mother they thought that, “Anyone who did well in school was all set.” (She had not done well, a victim first of being skipped ahead twice and then of diphtheria.) But whatever the reason, dozens of adults decided dozens of times not to talk to this boy, not to get to know him, not to ask anything. It is true, this happened within the first month of school; even the most conscientious RA might not have had the hours in a day to get around to this boy, though no doubt RAs can be taught to recognize at-risk freshmen and keep an eye on them from day one. But there is a contradiction here: those who become RAs are those who are extraordinarily capable socially. They are good not just with some kinds of people, but with all kinds. (So my college dean told me when I was eliminated from being an RA in the first round. No bitterness here: I should have been eliminated; I wanted it for the wrong reasons. I wanted to be liked and looked up to and to be considered special in someone’s life; things would have gone better if I had just wanted it to put on my law school application). So does the typically mature, capable, outgoing RA personality really understand that personalities like the Rutgers suicide really, actually exist? Can they begin to identify with them? Can they ever like them? Mostly, the socially talented wish the socially untalented would just go away, the way the intelligent wish the not-so-intelligent would go away, the way the white wish the black would go away and the rich wish the poor would go away.

And the Rutgers boy did go away, just as everyone wished.