What makes a BULLY?

Society's negative attitudes toward gay people are determining only the victims of harassment but also the perpetrators

You can't grow up without encountering a bully. And whether that bully is an older sibling, a menacing classmate, or a sand kicking beach bum, it's not a stretch to suggest that our culture is built, in part, on a culture of bullying, It's in the school yard, on the playing field, and in the workplace.

But for many of the nation's youth, this rite of passage has become a dead end. Name-calling has escalated to school shootings, and button pushing has led to suicides--leaving many people across the country to ask, "Where have we gone wrong?"

Yet despite all the soul-searching, few news reports have made a direct connection between bullying and sexual orientation--even though several of the last major school shootings were sparked, in part, by antigay taunts.

"Few are seeing the all-too-obvious pattern," says Kevin Jennings, executive director of the New York City-based Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network. "Young people are being taunted with antigay epithets and are then lashing out."

Taking it a step further, few news reports have examined how society's fixed notion of gender roles may determine more than just who is being bullied. It may also prompt gay, lesbian, or sexually confused youth who are determined to conform to those ideals to become bullies themselves.

A prime example of this may be director Larry Clark's new movie, Bully, which tells the true story of a teenage boy in Florida who was pushed to strike out at others because of his tortured and confused sexual desires.

This particular bully, 18-year-old Bobby Kent (played by Nick Stahl), visited gay bars, watched gay porn while having sex with girls, made amateur videos of gay men masturbating, and brutally forced his best friend, Marty Puccio (played by Brad Renfro), to have sex with men and strip at a gay club. The abuse against Puccio and other friends got so bad that they finally mustered up the courage to fight back, killing Kent and unceremoniously dumping his body in a rock pit near the Everglades in 1993.

As extreme an example of bullying as Kent's story is, Clark's movie nevertheless raises the important question of whether gay self-loathing may lead to abusive behavior targeted at others. "Nobody ever saw Bobby and Marty have sex with each other, but there was always that kind of speculation," says Clark, who also directed Kids in 1995. "And they pretended to be gay when they went into the clubs, so it's a very strange relationship these kids had."

But Bully does little more than raise the question--its chief focus is the victims' retribution. While gay and lesbian moviegoers may walk away with a clear connection between Kent's repressed sexuality and his bullying, it's not certain everyone else will. Nor does the film portray the violence that Kent and his friends reportedly directed against many gay men.

Yet Bully's inconclusiveness is fitting, in a way, simply because pitifully little is known about the role self-directed homophobia plays in gay bashing and other types of bullying. Not that there aren't case studies out there to examine.

Amber Boone, 26, of Martha's Vineyard, Mass., says she belittled people in high school--especially her softball coach--in an effort to mask her own attraction to women. "We'd make jokes behind [the coach's] back about her sexuality," says Boone, who grew up in central Florida, not far from where the events portrayed in Bully occurred. While the coach never heard Boone's taunts, two girls on the team who were dating each other did. "I found out that my teammates who were gay were afraid to tell people for fear of me making fun of them," she says.

Jenna Ard, a 20-year-old student at Loyola University in New Orleans, says she became a bully after she was teased in the fourth grade by someone who thought she was gay. After that, Ard says, she transformed herself from a soccer-playing tomboy into a sorority girl and self-described "hostess of homophobia": "I used words like `dykey' and `fag' to describe kids who seemed even the slightest bit [gay], and my friends laughed every time I did it."

And Ron Deutsch, 39, of Los Angeles says that when his classmates started to pick up on the fact that he might be gay, he masked his sexual orientation by bullying another boy on the school bus every day. "I really verbally abused him a lot, when I knew that I was wrestling with my own sexuality and that I was sort of attracted to him," Deutsch says. "When you are being oppressed, it is easy to become the oppressor."

Deutsch may be on to something. Discussing gay bashers with The Advocate, Harvard Medical School psychologist Arthur Ciaramicoli said that they often "take what they don't want to see and can't accept in their own self-image and project it onto someone else. Then they can hate it because they've divorced it from who they are."

The same might be said of many school-yard bullies, Jennings says. "When we teach young people that it's OK to hate gay people, we shouldn't be surprised that some of them turn that message on each other or on themselves," he says.

Of course, it's obvious to most gay people that gay and lesbian youth are more often the victims of bullying than they are the perpetrators, even if the culture of homophobia is the cause in both situations. In fact, a recent GLSEN report showed that 58% of the gay students surveyed felt unsafe in school, over 90% heard homophobic remarks there, and 28% had been physically harassed. And a recent study by the Massachusetts department of education found that 24% of gay and lesbian students were threatened or injured with a weapon at school in the previous year (compared with 8% of other students) and 19% stayed home from school in the past month because they felt unsafe (as opposed to 6% of other students).

"Considering our culture and its built-in prejudice [regarding] sexual orientation, it's likely to be quite common for kids to be targeted for being perceived as different or not within the cultural norm," says Tonja Nansel of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, who authored a report on bullying in April. "[Gay and lesbian youth] are the ones who are usually the most powerless to stop [the bullying]. They often don't get support, from other students or teachers."

As the GLSEN and Massachusetts studies suggest, gay- and lesbian-targeted harassment often goes beyond name-calling and playground pranks. In Reno, Nev., for example, two high school classmates of Derek Henkle threw a lasso around his neck and threatened to drag him from a pickup truck. When Henkle went to school administrators for help, he said the principal warned him against "acting like a fag." Henkle has since filed a federal lawsuit against the school district, charging that school officials denied him equal protection because of their distaste for his sexual orientation and denied him free speech rights by urging him to hide his sexual orientation.

And in Boston last year, a 16-year-old girl was sexually assaulted on a subway car by three other teenage girls because, according to news reports, they saw her holding another girl's hand--something common in her native country of Morocco. They allegedly yelled lesbian slurs at her, groped her, ripped her clothes, and pointed at their own genitals while shouting, "Do you like this? Do you like this? Is this what you like?" The girls accused in the attack have since been sentenced to sensitivity training and community service.

This type of antigay harassment among adolescents has become so common that the group Human Rights Watch declared in a May 31 report that it is an international human rights violation.

"Gay youth spend an inordinate amount of energy plotting how to get safely to raid from school," reads the report, titled "Hatred in the Hallways." "How to avoid the hallway [to] avoid slurs and shoves, how to cut gym class to escape being beaten up--in short, how to become invisible so they will not be verbally and physically attacked. Too often, students have little energy left to learn."

Youth advocates are beginning to make headway in combating the violence, however. Laws in California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Wisconsin currently protect students from discrimination based on sexual orientation. And at press time, legislatures in Michigan and Washington were considering anti-bullying bills. In addition, GLSEN sent a letter on May 31, signed by the heads of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, urging secretary of Education Rod Paige to use federal authority to make schools safer for gay and lesbian youth.

But as Jennings points out, passing laws--or even enforcing existing ones--is just the beginning. Real battles remain in providing youth with constructive ways to deal with the issue of sexual orientation. "Young people don't have the language or understanding about how to talk about [gay issues]," he says. "They are simply not equipped to deal with their own sexual issues or those of their peers."

Which brings us back to the institution of bullying. If, as Clark's movie and the gay bullies' stories suggest, some youths are motivated to harass others by their attempts to live up to unrealistic ideals about masculinity and femininity, the biggest battles may lie in tearing down those ideals. And according to Ian Rivers, a developmental psychologist at the College of Ripon and York, St. John, in England, those are battles that aren't likely to be won any time soon.

"There are ideals of what it is to be male and what it is to be female," Rivers says, adding that these are the ideals that are paramount in many young people's lives. But for many who look like they are trying to be the jock, he says, when it comes down to it, "they're just trying hot to be the victim."

Fighting back

Derek Henkle stands by as Lambda Legal Defense and Education attorney Jon Davidson discusses his suit against Reno, Nev., schools,

Kirby also writes for The New York Times.

Additional reporting by Lee Condon