Here's another missing person you're not likely to see getting hourly updates on CNN, or being featured in reports by Nancy Grace or Greta Van Susteren. Two months after coming out to his mother, a black gay teenager has gone missing in New York.
[Aleia Newsome] last saw [her son] Eddie [Tillmon] on August 10 when she dropped him off at a school on Manhattan's Lower East Side where he was to take a test that would determine if he could advance to the eighth grade.
"I dropped him off in the morning," Newsome said. "I gave him some money to get some breakfast, I watched him go into school."
Two months earlier Eddie had come out to her. That had not caused any problems in the Marcy Houses apartment in Bushwick that Eddie shared with his mother and his three sisters.
"I accepted him," Newsome said. "He told me two months before that he was having feelings for men. I accepted him. I told him I still loved him... There wasn't no argument or anything before he left."
...Beginning in June, Eddie had been coming home increasingly late and he started having problems in school. As Newsome began looking for her son, she learned some things that disturbed her. Eddie may have had a boyfriend who was 18 and, until his computer broke down in July, he was talking to men who were older than that online.
Of course, the first thing I thought when i heard this was Rashawn Brazzell's story. Eddie, 14 years old, has been missing for almost three months at this point, and his mother is concerned that authorities aren't doing enough to look for him. Keith has a point suggesting that maybe we aren't doing enough in our communities to protect young urban gays like Eddie.
So where do urban gay youth go to fit in? They often don't fit in at their schools or in their local social settings, so in places like New York, they travel relatively long distances to find safe haven. ...
Yes, for all our progress, things are still not that easy for our youth. And for all the public concern about protecting young people, we still seem oblivious or unconcerned about the plight of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered youth.
There are probably any number of reasons. Sometimes it's difficult if not impossible to protect our children from everything and everyone out there that might hurt them. I just posted today about the challenges of protecting children from pedophiles preying on kids online, so it especially hurt me to read of the possibility that this young man may have been abducted by an adult he met online.
But there's another reason that efforts to protect gay youth may fall short in our communities. There's no easy way to talk about, though it's connected to the same thing I posted about before. The reality is that there is still a pretty strong stereotype that gays are child predators, and adult gays who show an interest in young people (read, minors) are to some degree seen as suspect even if our intentions are purely platonic. It's one of the reasons I believe I've seen adult gays time and time again run away from issues related to gay and lesbian youth.
I have to admit that I'm drawing a line here, if iI haven't made it clear before. And that is that in my book sexual relations between adults and children, regardless of the gender or sexual orientation involved, is not OK and shouldn't happen. I'm probably going to get in trouble with at least a few people for putting that out there, but there it is.
From my perspective, there's no way child can consent to sex with an adult, even if he or she says "yes," because in our culture/soceity there is such a clear imbalance of power in an adult/child relationship that it's impossible to completely remove the possibility of coercion on the part of the adult. I won't even go into differences in levels of maturity, understanding and judgement. There's just no matching up in any of those areas, including responsibility. To me, the adult is supposed to be further ahead in all those areas, so even if a kid completely throws himself/herself at an adult, it's the adult's responsibility to say "no," and mean it.
So, until we find a way of discussing the above, and resolving those issues in our own communities, I think to some degree we're going to continue to fall short in efforts to help gay and lesbian youth, because those efforts -- however well-intended -- will fall under some degree of suspicion. I think people know that, and fear it (being falsely accused of seducing a child is one of the worse things that can happen to anyone, gay or straight), and that's why so many of us stay away from youth-related issues in droves.
In Eddie Tillmon's, we still don't know just what happened to him. At most, we can continue to draw attention to his story, as happened with Rashawn's story, and hope that it helps speed up resolution in the case and his safe return home.
Crossposted from The Republic of T.
