Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 16:09:06 -0700 From: Jean Richter Subject: 6/16/99 P.E.R.S.O.N. Project news 1. PA: News story on gay teen's struggles with suicide and harassment =========================================================================== Knight Ridder, May 31, 1999 By Bob Nocek, Knight Ridder Newspapers TROY, Pa. - His parents had finally gone to sleep, and now it was time for Greg Congdon to die. It was just past midnight in a basement bedroom in a one-story house in Troy, Pa. For the second time in barely more than a month, Greg Congdon, 17 years old, wanted to end his life. He couldn't live, not here, not like this. Not in this town. So he walked the stairs to the kitchen, where his mother kept a large bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol. It was the only medication she hadn't locked away after Greg's first suicide attempt. He had considered slashing his wrists, but he couldn't bear the possibility of pain, even in dying. Tylenol would do the job. Greg had heard about people lapsing into comas and worse after taking too many. He knew that, at the least, enough pills would do serious damage to his liver. He knew he couldn't live without a liver. If he took enough of them, it had to work. Greg took the bottle back down to his bedroom. He didn't write a note. No one would wonder why Greg Congdon wanted to die. He began swallowing the Tylenol. One. Two. Three. With each, he took a drink of water. Four. Five. After the fifth one, it occurred to him that it was too late to turn back, not that he wanted to. The torment of the truth had been worse than the secret. His worst fears had been realized. Dying was his only escape. So he kept on swallowing the Extra-Strength Tylenol, one at a time, each with a drink of water. Six. Seven. Eight. He swallowed those pills until he had consumed 33, and he only stopped because the water had filled him. He couldn't take another drink. Then he turned out the lights, climbed into bed, and hoped to die. Troy is a rugged Bradford County town as close to the New York border as it is to nothing, and it is no place for a high school jock to have secrets. It was here, in Troy Community Hospital, that Greg was born the second child and only son of Neil and JoAnn Congdon, a construction-site job expediter and a registered nurse. He grew up in a working-class house about a mile from the T-shaped business district where Route 6 passes through Troy, and his childhood was as typical as a boy's can be. He hunted and fished with his father and his friends. He dreamed of becoming a police officer. He played sports - first backyard football in his younger years, then team sports. Neil Congdon had been a standout wrestler at Troy High School until his career was cut short by surgery for a bowel problem, and his son would compete, too. His dad's devotion to sports made an impact on Greg. In first grade, he joined the wrestling team. Most of his friends also played youth football, so Greg joined, too. He was in fifth grade then, and up until that time Greg never thought twice about who he was or who he would become. He was a quiet and masculine. He was a Troy kid, unassuming and sturdy, just like his friends. But in fifth grade, everything changed. One day, a new boy entered Mrs. Morgan's class. Greg noticed him right away, and was pleased to have the new best-looking boy in the class sitting right in front of him. They became close friends, even though they lived about six miles apart, which in this part of Pennsylvania is the difference between town and country. But this friendship was confusing. It stirred baffling feelings that Greg's other friendships had not. There was something stronger here, and it confounded Greg. He didn't know quite what to make of it, but he wanted it to go away. Just the opposite happened. When they were both about 13, the two began to experiment sexually. This continued, off and on, for about two years. When it ended - the friend called it off - Greg was devastated. He was further bothered when the friend started dating girls, because it was clear that they had not shared the same feelings. But on a summer afternoon, when he was 15 years old, Greg lost his virginity with a girl. The experience was "awful,'' and it only served to confirm his fears that he was attracted to boys more than girls. But his friends knew about the encounter, and he was happy for that. "I can do this,'' he thought. "I might not like it, but I can do it.'' As a high school athlete, Greg was part of a macho circle in which homophobic jokes were commonplace. He told them, too, although it turned his stomach to deceive that way. But he loved sports. And he was at least as good as his teammates. As a sophomore, he played on the junior varsity and varsity football team, and in one of his better efforts, he made four sacks. He wrestled at 119 pounds, but making that weight class was hard for him in his sophomore season. It wore him down. So did the truth, which he vowed to keep hidden forever. And in his junior year, he quit the wrestling team. Greg's father was furious, and his mother was concerned by this unexpected choice, but they knew what a strain the previous season had been. "You can take a year off, because last year was so bad,'' his mother told him. Greg was still playing football, so his parents simply figured he needed a break. They were unaware of Greg's growing dissatisfaction, but would soon find out. In December of 1997, the family bought a Gateway 2000 computer. For the first time, Greg went online. He visited gay pornographic sites. He found a chat room called Pink Triangle on the Excite web site, and made some friends there, terrified, all the while, that the door would open and either of his parents would walk in. Online, Greg found countless teens in the same situation: small-town kids who knew they were gay and isolated by it. Like many of them, Greg was soon spending hours online, chatting with long-distance acquaintances and distancing himself from the real world. He was living two lives - a straight life with his family and friends, and a gay life in the artificial world he could enter in the privacy of the room in the front of his parents' home where the computer was kept. His parents thought he was spending too much time online, but figured he was simply a kid with a new toy. On Jan. 25 of 1998, Greg visited a web site created by a mother whose son had committed suicide because of his homosexuality. He posted this message in the guest book: "I always feel a lot of emotion when I visit this site. I am 17 and I haven't come out of the closet yet. For a while I was in the state of denial myself but sites like this make me feel more comforted. I thank you so much for sharing your story with all of us. I am sure it helps a lot of teens out.'' Seven days later, Greg tried to kill himself. In suicide, Greg believed he had found his escape. Dying would save him from fear, from loneliness, from the truth he hoped would never be revealed. He regretted that he would miss out on the possibilities of the future, but as he saw it now, the future was forever limited by his secret. So near midnight on Feb. 1, in his basement bedroom, he swallowed 15 pills that he believed were blood pressure medication. His father was asleep; his mother was at work at the hospital in Corning, N.Y. After downing the pills, Greg went upstairs and sat at the computer, where he told an online friend in California what he had done. The friend called 911. The police and an ambulance came, and Greg was taken to the emergency room at Troy Community Hospital, where it was determined that the pills were merely diuretics and that Greg wasn't in any serious physical danger. But the emergency room doctor wanted to know the reason for Greg's suicide attempt. Greg thought about his parents, and how misguided suspicion might fall on them if he didn't have a reasonable explanation. He thought about the months leading up to this night. He thought about how his secret had worn him down. He told the truth. "I'm gay,'' Greg told the doctor, who noted it in Greg's records. Around 5 a.m., Greg was taken to The Meadows Psychiatric Center in Centre Hall, near State College. He was there for a week and hated it. It was like prison. He couldn't be alone, couldn't lock a door behind him. He had to talk about his suicide attempt. He had to prepare to tell his family. Meanwhile, unknown to Greg, his mother had gone through his room, looking for some explanation for this unexpected suicide attempt. She found it. When his parents arrived for the meeting in which he would have to tell them the truth, Greg was relieved to discover that they already knew. "It doesn't make any difference,'' his mother told him. "We still love you.'' But there was still something Greg's family didn't know. That night, after Greg returned home from The Meadows, a friend called. He had questions. Where have you been? Did you try to kill yourself? Are you gay? Greg was stunned. His secret was out. His worst fear had been realized. The friend told Greg that a football teammate had said these things. The teammate had learned them from his mother, a nurse at Troy Community Hospital, where Greg had been taken after his suicide attempt. Where he had told the truth. Greg wasn't ready for this. He couldn't face his friends, knowing that they knew. Fearing their reaction, Greg stayed home from school for a week after returning from The Meadows. When he finally returned, everything had changed. He heard whispers in the hall. Friends turned away. One of his best buddies told Greg, "I can't be your friend anymore.'' In shop class, on Greg's second day back, a teammate warned him - threatened him - not to play sports again. If Greg did, they would make life hell for him. He was asked, tauntingly, "Are you a faggot?'' To their faces, he denied it all. To his parents, he pretended nothing had changed. "How's school going?,'' his mother would ask. "Everything's fine,'' he told her. But everything wasn't fine, and once more, Greg began to think about escape. Once more, he began to think about suicide. JoAnn feared her son might try to take his life again. He had been quiet and withdrawn since returning from The Meadows, saying little more than "Everything's fine.'' She locked away everything she thought Greg might use in a second suicide attempt. But she forgot about the Tylenol. Greg found them. He swallowed 33. Then he went to sleep. When he awoke in the morning, he was angry to be alive. He had failed again, and this pained him. But he didn't feel sick, so he showered and dressed and drove to school as if it were just another day. There, in the parking lot of Troy High School, in the front seat of his mother's car, he took 10 more pills. Then he went to class. When his stomach began to hurt, he left school. "I don't feel good,'' he told his mother after returning home. He didn't tell her why, but when she realized that the Tylenol bottle had been moved, she knew, and she took Greg to Troy Community Hospital. This time, the physical danger was more serious, so he was transferred to Robert Packer Hospital in Sayre. There, Greg was forced to drink liquefied charcoal to force up the pills. He was kept in intensive care for four days, then transferred to the teen psychiatric ward at First Hospital of Wyoming Valley in Wilkes-Barre. And there, for the first time, Greg began to feel comfortable in his own skin. The doctors brought him papers like Philadelphia Gay News and magazines like XY, a monthly for gay teens that frequently deals with coming-out issues. Reading these helped him feel less isolated. He saw kids with problems far more troubling then his. And when he returned home, he was finally feeling good about himself. But when Greg returned to school after his second suicide attempt, the abuse continued. He feared pushing back, afraid of the violence that might result. He even thought about a third suicide attempt. Only the fear of failing caused him to push those thoughts aside. He began skipping school. Some days, he slept in his car in the school parking lot. One day, he parked by a local creek. Another, he drove to a cemetery. He and his parents decided that Greg should leave school, and he finished the last two months of his junior year at home, with a tutor provided by Troy High School. Greg was relieved to be out of school, but he missed the life he once knew as a popular kid with many friends. Although he had grown comfortable with his homosexuality, he was angry for what he had lost. He felt that those who betrayed his secret had stolen something. And he wanted it back. He consulted a Towanda lawyer, Jeffrey P. Osmond, about his circumstances - how he had told the doctor he was gay, how he returned home to find out his secret had been revealed. Osmond thought the case was strong - if everyone told the truth. In April of last year, Greg and his parents filed a $100,000 lawsuit for invasion of privacy against Troy Community Hospital and nurse Cindy Smith, the woman whose son had been a football teammate of Greg's. To this day, the hospital and Smith deny the charges. The lawsuit was a bold step on Greg's part. But the most public step was yet to come. Greg tried to move forward with his life. In June, he went to an under-21 night at a Scranton gay bar, where he met up with a number of friends he had made online. Soon he was dating, bringing boyfriends home to meet his parents. Meanwhile, Greg had written to XY, one of the magazines he had been given in the psychiatric hospital. He sent them his football picture, and wrote a letter telling his story - the suicide attempts, being outed. When it appeared in the magazine, Greg received letters and phone calls from other gay teens. The ABC newsmagazine "20/20'' called; they were considering telling Greg's story, which surprised him. Then came a call that astonished him. ESPN was preparing a series on gay athletes, and the producers had seen Greg's letter in XY. Could they come to Troy and interview Greg about his ordeal? He was ecstatic. To Greg, this was a pleasing bit of revenge. His teammates dreamed of playing college football and appearing on ESPN; now "the straightest network,'' as he saw it, was coming to talk to him about homophobia. For three days, host Bob Ley asked questions about Greg's ordeal, about locker rooms, about athletes' fears. The five-minute segment aired in December. The response was immediate and unexpected, at least to Greg. He received letters from across the country. He received dozens of telephone calls, too. Dave Kopay, an openly gay former National Football League player, called. So did the Christian Coalition, asking Greg to be repentant. Most of the responses were from gay athletes who said hearing Greg's story had been reassuring. He was moved by this. Until then, he hadn't really considered that he could help other teens in similar circumstances. He was overwhelmed. It is May, 1999. Greg's lawsuit has not yet been resolved. On April 28, judge Jeffrey A. Smith denied the preliminary objections by Troy Community Hospital and Cindy Smith, which means the case can proceed. Greg rarely leaves his house alone, because he fears for his life. He didn't used to, not even when kids stopped their cars in front of the house and shouted. It's a small town, he figured. Nothing will happen here. Then last October, gay college student Matthew Shepard was tied to a fence and left to die in Laramie, Wyo., and Greg realized that it could happen to him, too. He has seen the hatred, he doesn't want to die at its hand. He finished his senior year of high school at home, and in April earned a GED diploma. In July, he starts school at Central Pennsylvania College, a two-year school just outside Harrisburg. He is majoring in criminal justice. He still dreams of becoming a police officer. He is ready to leave Troy. "I'm excited to be moving out, moving on to different possibilities,'' he says. He doesn't spend as much time online as he used to, but you can still find him, occasionally, in a gay chat room or exchanging instant messages with friends. And if you look in the right place, you can find another message from Greg Congdon, written a few months after his post to the suicide site. In this one, he is upbeat. He talks not of hiding and denial. His words are reassuring. "To all jock gay teens you are not alone ... I am writing this because I always felt that I didn't belong on the team because of me being gay... TO ALL TEENS, you must find someone you can talk to. Help is everywhere nowadays ... Remember this, being gay does make you different, but that is what makes you more special. Your friend, Greg Congdon.'' ================================================================================= Jean Richter -- richter@eecs.berkeley.edu The P.E.R.S.O.N. Project (Public Education Regarding Sexual Orientation Nationally) These messages are archived by state on our information-loaded free web site: http://www.youth.org/loco/PERSONProject/