By the time you’re reading this article, chances are we will have heard of yet another LGBTQ youth who has taken his/her life because of homophobic bullying.
The questions you should be asking yourself are What could I have done about it and How does it make me feel?
Those two questions are what the absent protagonist asks of the other characters in Calgarian author Suzette Mayr’s new book Monoceros. Inspired by real life events in Suzette and her partner’s life, the book tells the story of a gay youth at a catholic high school who, because of bullying, commits suicide.
The story doesn’t end with his death – that’s where it starts (literally). The death of the youth (Patrick Furey) hangs over the pages, tainting the lives and thoughts of staff and students at his high school – whether it be his closeted boyfriend Ginger, the closeted school principal and his boyfriend the equally closeted school guidance counselor, or a virginity and unicorn obsessed classmate who wishes she would have made friends with him.
Rather than concentrating on those immediately impacted by Furey’s death, the book looks at how those who were peripheral to the boy’s life are yet still touched by the tragedy. It’s a book that’s frustrating for all the right reasons – Suzette Mayr has written very believable characters you want to confront in person for the mess in their lives, and for their indifference which helped kill the boy.
Most of the characters in the book are not true mourners, but disenfranchised mourners – mourners who are forced to carry their burden alone. You have the situation with the closeted boyfriend Ginger – he as a griever isn’t recognized. You have the closeted principal Max trying not to recognize the loss, lest it lead to suicide contagion. And you have Maureen and Faraday, teacher and student respectively who represent grievers who are not recognized, yet still feel the impact of the boy’s suicide.
In Monoceros, Suzette also shows characters who aren’t necessarily going to fall into that familiar paradigm of crying and then getting over the loss. The grief is as individual as each person, she told me. "I think there’s the official way in which we mourn, and the way we’re supposed to feel about how people die. But...people have their different methods of responding, they have their different methods of coping."
Unlike the mother or the boyfriend, so many of the characters didn’t actually know Patrick, so they’re not confronted with the immediacy of his absence every minute of the day. They have their other concerns and other lives; but nevertheless, they are impacted by his death.
The particular structure of this book – the absent protagonist, disenfranchised mourners, each chapter almost like a short story focusing on a different character – was something Suzette struggled with; but the resulting novel comes together ideally. I was satisfied she also didn’t take the obvious route with two characters who, in another author’s book, might have been stock roles.
The first of the two is Petra – the girlfriend of Ginger. Petra is single-and bloody minded about what she wants. Her behavior is shocking, yet plausible for a spurned lover, a teen without a grown adult’s common sense, and also as someone who seems to be used to getting what she wants. She’s probably closest to being the antagonist in the book and yet Suzette says she’s not the only villain. All of the characters were complicit.
Petra is "...the one who’s the most explicit...the most aggressive about it, but Patrick faces all sorts of homophobia and indifference and apathy from all kinds of people who should know better. So I wasn’t interested in cultivating Patrick as the hero and she as the antagonist." Suzette also found as a character there wasn’t much to her, so she didn’t give Petra much room. Her needs are pretty simple – her man, her musical education and university. If you get in the way, like Patrick Furey did with Ginger, you’re road kill.
Petra can be forgiven and understood a bit if you step back and look at her from a distance. Suzette and I both discussed this and we both know with a lot of teenagers, to a certain degree they still haven’t learned or developed the sense of empathy, of knowing what lines not to cross. "That terrible lack of compassion...it’s partly because you just don’t have the experience to understand the consequences of some of those actions."
Another person I feared might have turned into a stock character was the drag queen Crêpe Suzette. After reading the blurb on the back of the book, I feared I would witness the appearance of the "magical" gay person.
According to author Suzette, this did happen in early drafts. Yet she realized the drag queen needed more, so she was toned down and made into the uncle of one character, and the potential love interest of another. "I really wanted her to be whole... I sure didn’t want any of the characters to fall into stereotypes of the ineffectual gay man or the asexual gay man or any of that stuff..."
That these characters are just people like you and I, is what’s best and hardest to read in Monoceros, yet it’s understandable because Suzette pulled from real life for this story. The inactivity of the school administration to aid Furey when he was alive, then the reluctance to recognize officially the boy’s death, mirrored the efforts of the real life school administration. "Just based on what my partner went through, there was a lot of inactivity. I think the adults were complicit with this - they certainly didn’t want it to end up in suicide...but...who knows?"
Therefore, we do need to discuss events like this, not hide them. Unfortunately, like the rest of us, Suzette has no easy answers. "I think the It Gets Better campaign is terrific except that what it is relying on is for some people it does get better; that when you leave (high school) everything will be fine." Yet that’s assuming these people make it better – many of the characters in the book, and many people in real life will closet themselves and shut themselves off from changing, evolving, accepting and growing.
Suzette does agree we need to change laws. Much like bullying kids for other things in their life (race, creed, disability, etc) currently results in penalties like suspension and expulsion, there needs to be some penalty for bullying based on the actual or perceived sexual orientation of the victim.
Speaking for all the victims, I do worry that the focus on students committing suicide because of bullying will eventually fade. The media and the public will find some new shiny toy and we won’t make any progress on solving this issue. Suzette doesn’t know of any easy answers either: "..kudos to Dan Savage for making a viral video phenomenon and writing a book, but the last death (Jamey Rodemeyer)...that was horrible because it was an It Gets Better kid, and those bullies sure aren’t learning anything. I don’t know...I hope it’s not just a trendy thing...but it sure would help if it was against the law."
I’m not sure even if that will help, but I can hope for the day when the Patrick Fureys, the Jamey Rodemeyers, the Tyler Clemetis, the Ryan Halligans of the world live and graduate and get a chance to try to make it better. Because there are far too many people trying to make it worse.