It was after his high school talent contest that the despair set in.

Again.

Jonathan, then an ambitious 16-year-old with dreams of being a religious or political leader, got up from his seat in the school auditorium, walked into a secluded storage closet and locked the door behind him.

He pulled a plastic shopping bag over his head, wrapped duct tape around it to seal out the air,

and waited to die.

Six months earlier, he’d tried pills – muscle relaxants, he thinks.

Before the pills it was something else. He can’t remember. “I’m really good at blocking out painful details,” he says.

What he does recall is that he didn’t believe his own ambitions were compatible with being gay – an orientation he was increasingly aware of.

“I grew up in a Republican, conservative family, and I’d wanted to be a pastor or a statesman,” Jonathan, now 22, recollects. “But, after realizing I was gay, everything I’d built my life around came crashing down.”

At the time, Jonathan was an active member of his church. He sang with the congregation’s Praise Team and had, as president of his school’s Bible Club, boosted membership 300 percent, from 10 to 30 members. “We made it a lot more fun. We had guest speakers, pizza parties. ... I’d learn everyone’s name, and so it was just a very welcoming environment,” he reminisces.

But after he told some people at school he was gay, a school adviser asked him to resign as president of the Bible Club.

And when his pastor heard of Jonathan’s sexual orientation, he told him he couldn’t be on the Praise Team, and he couldn’t sing any solos. “We can’t have a practicing homosexual in any form of church leadership,” the pastor told the young man who had been considering following in the pastor’s footsteps.

“At that point, I wasn’t even having sex, and I told him that,” Jonathan says. “[But] he said that people in the congregation had seen me on TV at gay Pride.

“I felt betrayed. What about me had changed other than that I was being honest?”

Failing to find role models at school or church who accepted him, Jonathan ventured into Hillcrest’s GLBT community, where he hung out at what was then the Living Room Café and dated a few men in the neighborhood. But his first forays into a place he’d hoped to find belonging left him discouraged and alone. He’d hoped to find the type of love and commitment his parents had, he says. His parents’ then 26-year-old marriage was cozy and they often held hands or stole kisses in public. But “most gay men I would date were just interested in flings.”

So Jonathan went into the closet, and he taped the bag shut.

Every 16 minutes in the United States, a person commits suicide.

Disproportionately, they are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or questioning.

“We have definitive statistics that tell us that LGBTQ youth are four times as likely to attempt suicide as their heterosexual peers,” says Charles Robbins, executive director with the Trevor Project, a 24-hour, toll-free suicide prevention hotline for GLBTQ youth.

For Jonathan’s father, Ron Goetz, the statistic hit too close to home.

A mild-mannered, soft-spoken man, Goetz speaks purposefully about his son’s three suicide attempts – to school groups, other parents with GLBT kids, and (one gets the impression) possibly to anyone who will listen, about his family’s close call. Goetz is a frequent panel speaker with Parents, Families & Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), and, as is clear from the careful way he chooses his words, as is clear from his candor and from the discernment with which he articulates his emotional and intellectual response to Jonathan’s suicide attempt, his son’s suffering profoundly affected and changed him.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been homophobic. But I used to make…,” his voice trails off and he looks down at his hands before continuing. “I did make, some homophobic remarks that I deeply regret, because I know the damage I did.”

Goetz says he had just wanted to make people laugh. But he also says he now sees it doesn’t take much to impart the idea that it’s not OK to be gay.

“I know for a fact that [our] pastor did not rail against gays and lesbians, for example. He never preached a sermon specifically denouncing LGBT people or the lifestyle or the gay agenda or anything. But the problem is, is that it’s very common, even if you’re not railing, to lump these three things together: murderers, adulterers and homosexuals. And my guess is that you only have to hear that a handful of times and it registers. The pastor doesn’t even need to say it per se. The homophobic kinds of remarks and teasing that I did was pretty much done in ignorance, because I really had not been sensitized to the issues. I did not know what was at stake.”

What’s at stake when a child attempts or commits suicide is often not solely the child’s life but the survival of the family. Numerous suicide bereavement support organizations cite the shame, blame, rage, shock and depression family members may experience after a suicide or a suicide attempt – feelings that can threaten family unity. “If Jonathan had completed his suicide, there’s no way of predicting what would have happened. These sorts of tragedies break up couples,” Goetz says.

Perhaps because Goetz was willing to examine how his, albeit covert, attitude towards homosexuality may have contributed to Jonathan’s pain, and to reflect on how religious and political beliefs in their home may have influenced their son, the Goetz family has survived and strengthened.

It hasn’t been easy. Goetz says it took him two years to admit to other parents in PFLAG that he’d occasionally made homophobic jokes. And he says it took about three months for his wife, upset because she believed Jonathan’s sexual orientation meant she would forfeit having grandchildren, to process her emotions. She also, Goetz says, had to reevaluate evangelical teachings that had taught her GLBT people choose to be gay. “Finally, Jonathan told her, ‘Mom, it’s so hard to be gay.’ And she came to understand that no one would choose something that makes you want to commit suicide.”

Looking back, Goetz says, he’d had “inklings” Jonathan was gay. And, although he was “basically OK” with that, in retrospect, he says, there were things he could have done that might have lessened the chance that Jonathan would absorb damaging messages about his sexual orientation.

For example, expressing “positive and affirming statements” about GLBT people, in the same way that he had been “very directive with my kids about racial equality” might have helped mold Jonathan’s ideas about accepting himself, Goetz says.

“Jonathan internalized in a myriad of ways the dominance of heterosexual life. Every time he saw a movie with a male/female couple, he was being indoctrinated. … Every happy ending involves couples getting together.”

But GLBT issues didn’t come up in Jonathan’s family. “That’s something I’ve heard other parents remark on – that even though they themselves didn’t harbor any animosity, that they themselves just didn’t talk about it, because there wasn’t occasion to I suppose. It wasn’t an issue for them,” Goetz says.

As for Jonathan’s thoughts about what might have helped, he says he can only say what definitely did: the measures his former high school (with the exception of the advisor who asked him to resign as president of the Bible Club) took to protect GLBT students. “They held diversity and sensitivity courses for teachers. I ask myself what I would have done if I hadn’t had that supportive environment,” he says, noting that schools in his current hometown in Buffalo, N.Y., are nowhere near as progressive. “Please try to include a big thank you to my teachers for being so supportive,” he says during interviews for this story.

Yet, even in the most supportive of environments, GLBT people sometimes commit suicide.

This month, TransYouth Family Advocates (TYFA) launched an Amethyst Ribbon Campaign, an awareness project to battle suicide among transgender youth, as part of the Ian Benson Project.

Ian was a 16-year-old affirmed male who took his own life in October. Ian’s mother is TYFA’s secretary/treasurer. Tragically, that did not save Ian.

A November article in Between the Lines News, titled “Ode to Ian” laments his loss. Its author, Jason A. Michael, writes, “As a gay man, I often feel like a second-class citizen in this country. I pay the same taxes as my heterosexual counterparts with half the benefit. But if I am the second-class citizen I claim to be, what ranking does that give boys like Ian?” [www.pridesource.com-/article.shtml?article=27776]

Nov. 17 is the 9th annual National Survivors of Suicide Day, and Nov. 20 is the 9th annual Transgender Day of Remembrance. It’s likely that now, six years after ripping off the plastic bag meant to end his life, Jonathan will take a moment to reflect on his good fortune. For today, the young man who once despaired of finding either a future or a partner makes a living flipping real estate with his companion of “one and a half years.”

He makes a point of emphasizing the duration of their relationship, counting back the months, “…September, October, November,” with evident satisfaction. Because Jonathan is building a life – the life he always dreamed of. And he is laying a foundation for the day he will “run for political office – or do anything I want to do.”

“Things always get better if you can make it through,” he says.

“The best is yet to come.”

GLBTQ youth is four times more likely to attempt suicide than heterosexual youth.

Yet, while the discrepancy between rates of suicide among GLBT and straight youth is well established and acknowledged to be accurate, there is no way to get precise data about the actual rate of suicide for GLBT youth, says Charles Robbins, executive director with the Trevor Project, a 24-hour, toll-free suicide prevention hotline aimed at GLBTQ youth.

That’s because coroners reports don’t disclose sexual orientation, and many families don’t acknowledge their children were gay and so don’t include the information on their death certificates. Further, some teens who commit suicide never disclose their orientation.

Compounding the difficulty is the fact that there’s a “huge gap” in research on GLBT suicide, says Ann Haas, Ph.D., research director for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP). “Mainstream suicide research and prevention has not really addressed [GLBT suicide].” After discussions with the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association (GLMA) and the Suicide Prevention Resource Center for more than a year, the AFSP this month cosponsored what it says is the first national conference to examine suicide risk in the GLBT community. The event brought together 25 experts from around the country to assess current knowledge about GLBT suicide and to develop future research, prevention and treatment initiatives.

Determining what those initiatives will be will possibly be best served by ignoring statistics on the subject, says Dr. Rob Garofalo, the GLMA’s past president. Garofalo says the gaps in research have contributed to misconceptions and misinformation regarding suicide risk for GLBT people.

For example, while the disproportion between estimated rates of suicide in GLBT and straight populations is accurate, reports that up to a third of GLBT youth attempt suicide are not necessarily so, he says. That oft’-promulgated statistic, he says, is likely the result of the aforementioned inadequate means of data collection.

Further, says Garofalo, who is also a faculty member in adolescent medicine at Northwestern University School of Medicine in Chicago, his clinical experience does not support it.

Consequently, he suggests that the scientific community stop talking about statistics and concentrate instead on a “nuanced discussion of the issue.”

Part of the discussion is about the role the social environment plays in GLBT suicide.

“Deeply-held, systemic social beliefs like internalized homophobia play a crucial role in GLBT suicidal ideation” says Michael Kimmel, LCSW a licensed psychotherapist in Kensington. “Suicidal ideation is a by-product of systemic influences, just like racism,” he says. “To say that an individual should be able to easily rise above internalized homophobia is as ridiculous as saying that an individual should be able to easily rise above racism. … Among [GLBT] young people, whose ego strengths are shaky simply due to the fact that they’re still discovering who they are and how they fit in, internalized homophobia says, ‘You don’t fit in and you never will.’ How could this not contribute to suicidal ideation?”

However, to date, studies have not conclusively linked GLBT suicide to cultural exclusion or discrimination says Haas. “Is this concept of what’s sometimes called ‘minority stress’ … a causative factor over and above what we see in the general population?” she asks. “There’s some evidence that that’s not the case. It may be that suicides in the gay community are precipitated by factors that are different from what we see in other populations. We don’t know that for a fact, but these are the critical issues that we’re going to be grappling with [at the First Conference on Suicide Risk in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community, held Nov. 8-9 in Chicago].”

Haas says that psychiatric disorder is the most common cause of suicide, which she acknowledges may, in the GLBT community, be precipitated by minority stress. She says that “several large surveys have shown that gay, lesbian and bisexual persons have higher rates of certain psychiatric disorders, particularly depression, anxiety and substance abuse, compared to heterosexuals.” However, she says that recent data suggest that higher numbers of GLBT suicide attempts can’t be explained only on the basis of numbers of a higher prevalence of psychiatric disorders, and that in the GLBT population, psychiatric disorder and suicide don’t necessarily go hand in hand. “The specific GLBT groups that have the higher rates of psychiatric disorders aren’t always the ones where we see the highest suicide rates. So there are some other factors that seem to be going on.”

Another part of the discussion is about how to improve methods of gathering data so that any correlation of sexual orientation to suicide can be more accurately studied.

Currently, only Massachusetts includes sexual orientation on coroners reports, says Robbins, and the most qualitative and quantitative research comes from Massachusetts Department of Education. California’s Department of Mental Health is also considering adding sexual orientation to morbidity reports, he says, and, via Proposition 63, the state has allocated “lots of money” for suicide prevention in California. The department is also working on a strategic plan for suicide prevention in the state, he says.

Although much of the media coverage of GLBT suicide pertains to youth, the issue is not limited to adolescents. An Oct. 9 article in The New York Times [www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/us/09aged.html?_r=1&oref=slogin] details the horrors that can befall elderly GLBT people in nursing homes and their vulnerability to suicide: “Elderly gay people …, living in nursing homes or assisted-living centers or receiving home care, increasingly report that they have been disrespected, shunned or mistreated in ways that range from hurtful to deadly, even leading some to commit suicide.

… . The plight of the gay elderly has been taken up by a generation of gay men and lesbians, concerned about their own futures, who have begun a national drive to educate care providers about the social isolation, even outright discrimination, that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender clients face.”

“As [Amber Hollibaugh, a senior strategist at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the author of the first training curriculum for nursing homes] points out,” the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s research director Ann Haas, Ph.D., says, “the data on suicides among gay and lesbian elders are anecdotal, totally. And yet, what we know about suicide is that the older age groups have far higher suicide rates than young people, particularly older men. In terms of raw numbers of suicides, we have more youth, so a smaller suicide rate still translates most of the time into more suicides. If you look at the [70 and 80 year olds], the suicide rate in those groups is over 50 per 100,000. That’s much in excess of what we have in any other age group, [because] … if you look at youth you can be talking about 7 or 8 [suicides] per 100,000 that occur among adolescents,” Haas says, referring to Centers for Disease Control statistics.

The CDC statistics pertain to the general population, however, says Haas.

“When we look at older GLBT persons, we have every reason to believe that the vulnerability is going to be compounded by lots of different factors. It’s the first generation that will be approaching aging with HIV as an issue.

And physical health problems are certainly a risk factor for suicide among the elderly, as is isolation. Many, many people in this age group…are the exact cohort that lost so many in their community back in the 80s and early 90s to AIDS. AIDS has devastated whole communities of gay men in particular.

It’s important that the gay press emphasize that this whole issue of suicide is not limited to youth.”

• 16.9 percent of students, grade 9-12, seriously considered suicide in the previous 12 months (21.8 percent of females and 12.0 percent of males).

• 8.4 percent of students reported making at least one suicide attempt in the previous 12 months (10.8 percent of females and 6.0 percent of males).

• Suicide is the second leading cause of death among 25-34 year olds and the third leading cause of death among 15- and 24-year olds (Centers for Disease Control 2005).

• In 2005, 372,722 people were treated in emergency for self-inflicted injuries.

• In 2005, 154,598 people were hospitalized due to self inflicted injury (Centers for Disease Control 2005).

• There is one suicide for every 25 attempted suicides.

In July of 2000, The San Diego LGBT Center began a new, much-needed service in San Diego’s GLBT community. The Heidorn Lifeline, a suicide prevention and crisis counseling hotline, was established with a grant from Stan Thomas Todd. The Heidorn Lifeline may be accessed by dialing 858-212-LIFE (5433).

The Heidorn Lifeline was established in memory of Mitchell Heidorn to provide 24-hour suicide prevention and crisis counseling for the GLBT community. Todd noted that “Mitchell spent most of his lifetime struggling against depression and chronic feelings of hopelessness. He had access to mental health services, but still remarked that he felt isolated, like he was living behind a glass wall, watching life pass by without being a part of it.” Mitchell lost his struggle in November 1999, at age 44, when he took his own life.

Mitchell’s legacy ensures that members of the GLBT community who have difficulty dealing with feelings of depression or hopelessness, lack of self-esteem or childhood or coming out issues will have a support system available to them when they need it. The Heidorn Lifeline provides a vital link to immediate services for members of our community who are in crisis or are contemplating suicide.

The Heidorn Lifeline fulfills the need for 24-hour access to counseling services, especially the 9 p.m. to 9 a.m. period when services are not typically available. During the day, callers using the Heidorn Lifeline will be transferred to the on-duty crisis counselor at The Center. People in crisis may also call the on-duty counselor directly at 619-260-6380.

The Trevor Project Helpline is a 9-year old organization that operates the only nationwide, around-the-clock crisis and suicide prevention helpline for gay and questioning youth. The Trevor Project was founded in 1998 by the creators of the Academy Award-winning film, Trevor, about a 13-year-old boy named Trevor, who lives in the suburbs and attempts suicide when he realizes that he may be in love with his best (male) friend. The Trevor Project operates call centers in Los Angeles and New York via its confidential helpline: 866.4.u.TREVOR.