David-Elijah Nahmod is a film critic and reporter in San Francisco. His articles appear regularly in The Bay Area Reporter and SF Weekly. You can also find him on Facebook and Twitter.
David developed Post Traumatic Syndrome Disorder (PTSD) after surviving gay conversion therapy as a child and has found that many in the LGBT community suffer from severe, often untreated emotional disorders due to the extreme anti-gay traumas they endured. This column chronicles his journey.
Since the last edition of this column, I’ve been asked if I think LGBT advocacy groups like HRC, GLAAD and The Trevor Project are lying to the public about their goals and accomplishments. Yes, I absolutely believe that they are. For several years now I’ve been trying to get those organizations to take a stand against the almost continuous bullying and slandering of LGBT people which is being perpetrated not by anti-LGBT hate groups but by gay activists and bloggers.
In various installments of this column and in other publications I’ve written about middle aged gay bloggers who participate in the bullying of suicidal LGBT kids. I’ve verified and documented instances in which LGBT people were hospitalized in a suicidal state or needed police intervention as a direct result of threats and attacks from within the LGBT sphere. Perpetrators of this conduct include an openly gay convicted sex offender, along with individuals who have strong ties to organizations like Southern Poverty Law Center, GLAAD and HRC, a therapist at Queer Life Space (an LGBT counseling and therapy clinic in San Francisco) and at least one editor of an LGBT publication. None of these incidents are hearsay. I’ve personally contacted the press liaisons and executive directors of numerous
LGBT advocacy groups and bully/suicide prevention organizations to show them actual threats that were emailed to a young lesbian suicide attempt survivor by a 47 year old gay man. I interviewed a transgender church pastor who needed to put their church under police surveillance after receiving threats of violence from within the LGBT sphere–that story included a screen grab of the threat in question.
The Trevor Project, San Francisco Suicide Prevention and The American Foundation of Suicide Prevention have all assured me they will do nothing about this, as have social media platforms like WordPress and Facebook. Numerous openly gay elected officials are also ignoring this information. On the rare occasions that I’ve gotten responses from gay activists regarding this issue, I was subjected to snarky references about mental illness, accusations of anti-gay bigotry, and no less than seven separate instances in which gay activists contacted my editors and attempted to get me fired from these publications.
By their own admission, gay activists are behaving this way because they’re gay, which they claim justifies everything they do.
Every week I hear from more and more LGBT people outside of activism’s sphere who tell me of the abuse they’ve been subjected to from the community’s largely self-appointed “leadership.” A few of them were quoted in The Buck Doesn’t Stop Anywhere Anymore, the last edition of this column. Now there’s another who’s come forward.
Frank is an openly gay artist here in San Francisco. In an inflammatory blog posting which publishes his actual home address, Frank was said to have anal warts, to be mentally ill, and to have died from AIDS–I’m not publishing Frank’s full name out of respect for his privacy. Frank still lives at the address in the posting. Frank has repeatedly flagged said posting but Google refuses to delete it–apparently posting someone’s home address without their permission isn’t a violation of community standards.
Is this how sane, rational people behave?
We need to face the truth about what the equality movement has become. Today’s gay activists don’t want equality, they want revenge. They want to hurt people, as they’ve been hurt. The lengths they’ll go to in order to achieve this are often shocking. They go after peoples relationships, they go after peoples livelihoods, they try to destroy people’s lives. They do these things to other LGBT people in the name of “gay rights”.
Hurt people hurt people, but nothing justifies the outrageous and blatant disregard for civility, truth and decency that has hijacked and poisoned the LGBT equality movement. Nothing justifies lies, hate and abuse, no matter if the perpetrator is a member of the Tea Party or a gay activist.
We need to talk about our behavior. We need to talk about mental health. We all have PTSD and its killing us.
If you are under age 18 and subjected to online libel or cyberbullying, you can file a complaint against your attacker–and against the platform your attacker uses for their abuse towards you–with the Child Protective Services office in your area. If you are over 18 but are living with any physical or mental disability covered by The Americans With Disabilities Act, you can file a complaint at ADA.gov, which is the Disability Rights Section of the US Department of Justice.