On Zachary Quinto and gay bullying

So the big LGBT news this week is that actor Zachary Quinto (aka Sylar of Heroes and Spock in the Star Trek remake) nonchalantly came out as a gay man during an interview with New York magazine. I once blogged about his on-screen make-out session over two years ago, and who would’ve thought that Zach would admit to actually being gay? Zach being one of us seems pretty funny in the light of the popular bromance between Spock and Kirk in Star Trek and which spawned an entire subgenre of fan fiction called slash fiction. And that now makes 2 prominent actors in the Star Trek universe who are gay (the first one is George Takei who played Hikaru Sulu in the original series).

Slash fiction aside, the reason Zachary came out as he stated in his blog was because a 14-year old kid from New York named Jamey Rodemeyer committed suicide last month after experiencing relentless gay bullying from his peers. His death was actually even more tragic since Jamey himself posted his own It Gets Better Project video on YouTube a few months prior to his death. It seems that an online project that was started precisely to help inspire and to prevent young men and women from committing suicide because of gay bullying was not enough to help Jamey. Unfortunately, it didn’t get better for this poor kid.

This just highlights the fact that the LGBT community still has a lot of problems. Things are definitely better than now than it was 10 years ago, but we still have a long way to go especially here in the Philippines where we are still facing discrimination, and battling our HIV epidemic and its associated stigma.