Portraits of intolerable cruelty

THE SAME weekend the must-see movie Bully was released nationwide, giving a child's-eye view into a national epidemic, another young teen committed suicide as a result of homophobic bullying. Kenneth Weishuhn of Paullina, Iowa, hanged himself in the family garage on Saturday, April 15. He was 14 years old.

Kenneth, a freshman at South O'Brien Community School, came out about a month previously to family, friends, and on Facebook. Fellow students were not receptive, shouting "Queer!" and other epithets at him as part of a relentless campaign of harassment, online and off.

One group of students started a Facebook hate group. Kenneth's sister Kayla said her brother had received as many as 20 death threats on his phone. His mother, Jeannie Chambers, told KTIV her son had told her, "Mom, you don't know how it feels to be hated."

At least one protest and one vigil have already taken place, with many carrying signs honoring Kenneth's favorite slogan, "Be buddies, not bullies," and dying their hair pink and purple in solidarity--like he wore his.

Kenneth's tragic and untimely death makes a movie like Bully that much more difficult to watch--but also important.

BULLY FOLLOWS the stories of five young victims across the U.S., two of whom were so tormented that they felt the need to take their own lives. The exasperation of parents struggling to deal with hapless school administrators is on full display, but so is a growing sense of hope among survivors and protesters.

Our attention is centered on 12-year-old Alex Libby who goes to East Middle School in Sioux City, Iowa. He's the one student we see get bullied throughout the movie. Sure, he has moments of joy and togetherness like most kids, but mostly with his family.

Right off, we are shown an example of what riding to and from school is like for this awkward pre-teen. Alex says to his seatmate on the school bus: "Hey, you're my buddy, okay?" His would-be buddy says: "I'm not your buddy. I will fucking end you and shove a broomstick up your ass. You're gonna die fucking in so much pain. I'll cut your face off and shit. I'll bring a knife tomorrow and fuck you up and shit."

Nobody wants to sit with Alex. We see him get stabbed with a pencil, have his head slammed against the seat in front of him, get punched and choked and called names like "fish face." He tells us that he's been punched in the jaw and had one kid sit on his head after shoving him beneath a school bus seat. Alex lives in fear of this kind of torture every day.

He has trouble making friends. He's spindly, shy, sweet and trusting. He's learned to see his bullies as friends, and their assaults are part of the package. "I think when he strangles me, he's messing around," he tells his mom, explaining why another boy choked him. She asks how he feels when they mess with him. "I'm starting to think I don't feel anything anymore."

He has trouble telling his parents what happens to him. He's afraid his dad will be upset he didn't fight back. (Dad is.) So he endures. Boys don't cry.

The school administrators shown in the movie are wretched. One tells Alex's parents, "Buses are notoriously bad places for lots of kids. I wish I could say I'll stop it." Moments later, she tries the opposite tack: "I've ridden [bus] 54. I've been on that route. I've been on a couple of 'em. [The kids] are just as good as gold."

Another bullied boy complains to an administrator that he's being called faggot. He's chewed his fingernails practically clean away. The administrator asks why he can't get along with his bully.

Sixteen-year-old Kelby Johnson from Tuttle, Okla., is an open and outwardly proud lesbian, but also a cutter with multiple suicide attempts. She was a champ in basketball, but was driven out of the gym by teammates who were afraid to touch her. She has a close-knit group of friends with whom she roams about town, yet fellow students once tried to run her down, striking her with a minivan.

She's a familiar figure to anyone who's followed the ongoing "It Gets Better" video campaign, which tries to explain to young people that they should find a way to get through it all because, one day, their lives will be better. Several of these budding young videographers have later taken their own lives in exasperation.

Early in the movie, Kelby says she'd decided she might "be the one in this town who could make a change." Later, after an incident where students in a new class all moved their seats away from her, she realizes she can't change things by herself: "It's gonna take multiple people. It's not just gonna take me."

How do you stand up to nine bullies by yourself? Ja'meya Jackson, 14, of Yazoo County, Miss., brought her mother's gun on the school bus to scare them off. She didn't fire the weapon and no one was hurt, but she was charged with 45 felony counts, for which police threatened literally hundreds of years in prison. There is a palpable sense of dread and injustice in her story.

A quiet African American girl who excelled in academics and sports and just wanted to graduate and join the Navy, Ja'meya's frightening encounter with the legal system is a reminder of how bullying can be doubly hard on kids of color.

"Mama, I wasn't trying to hurt nobody," she says. "I just wanted to scare them." For her disproportionate attempt at resistance, she spent months in a psychiatric ward and faces an uncertain future.

HORROR AND hope lie in the stories of 17-year-old Tyler Long of Murray County, Ga., and 11-year-old Ty Field-Smalley of Oklahoma City, Okla. They are the two who didn't make it.

Tyler, who made an it-gets-better-type movie instructing other youth to "forget about them" (the bullies), hung himself after years of being tormented by classmates. Tyler's dad, David Long, described him as a loner, afraid of crowds and noise, the last chosen on sports teams, and routinely called names such as "geek" and "fag."

"We had heard that he had had his head shoved into a wall locker. Some kids had told him to hang himself, that he was worthless, and I think he got to a point where enough was enough." David's depiction of school authorities' response: "'Kids will be kids. Boys will be boys. They're just cruel at this age.'"

Tyler's mom, Tina, shows us the place where Tyler hung himself. The family had the room repainted and turned into an office where she now helps organize against bullying. Just five weeks after Tyler's death, Mom and Dad organized an emotional and well-attended town hall anti-bullying meeting. No school administrators attended.

The other boy who ended his own life, Ty, shot himself the day he was suspended from school for standing up to his bully. His dad, Kirk, tries to comfort his mom, Laura, at the funeral: "We're going to tuck him in one more time, put him to bed."

Kirk and Laura didn't give up in the wake of their son's death. They formed an organization called Stand for the Silent to organize support for bullying victims. Kirk, a small-town farmer who had never been on the Internet six weeks before, started a Facebook group to help get things going.

His response to authorities' inaction: "If a politician's kid was bullied, the law would change tomorrow. We're nobody."

Ty's best friend Tray confesses that he used to pick on more vulnerable kids, and that he even wanted to go after the boys who bullied Ty, but Ty said not to be like them. Tray's solution: "If I was the king of the United States, I'd make it to where there was no popularity, everyone was equal. That's how it should be."

BULLY PUTS you right in the victims' shoes--namely, Alex's. You're aware you're still an outsider looking in, but more like a kid or grieving parent, horrified at your own helplessness. If you think bullied kids standing up for themselves on their own is the solution, or that they just need to tough it out, you'll be cured of these afflictions by the end of the picture.

It's no surprise young people sometimes turn their frustrations on each other, mirroring the violence and scapegoating they see all around them. In particular, they seem to hear the constant drumbeat from the top that gay is not okay.

Despite some glacial progress on the same-sex marriage front, the end of official lesbian and gay exclusion from the military, and some important executive orders, we're still being served the same old toxic cocktail of official discrimination and ruinous inaction.

The religious right has invaded our schools to "keep the gay out." We just emerged from a long Republican primary season filled with barely challenged hate. On May 8, North Carolina became the 30th state to adopt a constitutional amendment defining marriage as heterosexual only (even though same-sex marriage was already outlawed in the state).

The lack of legal protections for LGBT people across the country continues to foster discrimination. And our Democratic president just refused to ban LGBT discrimination by U.S. contractors.

Despite greater support for LGBT rights across the country, this kind of sanctioned homophobia is pervasive and sends a clear message to young people that fag, no homo, gay meaning stupid, etc., are all still fair game, which makes this aspect of the bullying problem that much worse.

The bright spot in Bully is the depiction of those who are directly affected, the survivors, fighting back. A.O. Scott of the New York Times points out:

"[W]hile the film focuses on the specific struggles of five families in four states, it is also about--and part of--the emergence of a movement. It documents a shift in consciousness of the kind that occurs when isolated, oppressed individuals discover that they are not alone and begin the difficult work of altering intolerable conditions widely regarded as normal.

I think he's right. As devastating as much of Bully is, it is essential viewing, an experience you can't get from reading (although if you care to try, check out this). And there is hope.

As Tyler's dad David Long says about organizing, "One by one, two by two--eventually we have an army that can defeat anything."