Motivation: Suicide, Biblical Studies and Social Control

Throughout 2001 I was a member of a Queer Men's Discussion Group that met regularly at Queensland University. At one of our meetings the group decided to talk about suicide. Most of the people in the group were young, in their late teens and twenties. During the course of the discussion I was appalled to hear how many had considered suicide, and actually attempted it, and the ages at which they had made their attempts. On reflection, I should not have been surprised. I could do the mental sums working out what year it was when these attempts were made and recalling how homo-sexuality might have been handled in public debate at the time. I wondered how many others had been successful in their attempts. I also realized that another reason I was so affected was that this was the only occasion I had sat down in a group of gay and bisexual men to talk about suicide. Yet suicide lurks in the background of day-to-day life, surfacing regularly in the deaths of friends who, having reached adulthood, decide that the struggle to get there wasn't worth it. Nevertheless, it is not only public controversies that might compel a person to commit suicide. We live in a society in which a paramountcy of value is assigned to the heterosexual over the homo/bi/sexual.